I don't want to defend Sunseri because I think he's a terrible DC. But this intrigued me so I looked up the numbers. Alabama A&M gave up an average of 21.3 ppg in 1997, the year before Sunseri got there, 21.6 ppg in 1998, 20.9 ppg in 1999 and 18.9 ppg in 2000, the year after he left. What interested me was if you remove Tennessee State, which throttled AAMU both years Sunseri was there, that scoring average drops to 17.9 ppg.
Sunseri actually spent a year as Illinois State's DC in 1994. ISU gave up 17.4 ppg that season, compared to 19.9 ppg the season before and 17.5 ppg the following season.
Anyway, this shouldn't stand in the way of the fact that Sunseri should've been fired about three weeks ago. One of Neyland's maxims should have been that if you give up a school-record 700+ yards to Troy, you're fired immediately. (Actually, I'm pretty sure that if a UT team had given up 700+ yards to anyone while Neyland was the AD, the entire staff would've been fired immediately.
)
Edit: The better question is why I'm sitting on the toilet at 3:30 a.m. crunching numbers in the midst of a season in which I've already stated that I've entered DGAS mode.