ACC Fantasy Football Focus: Tight End Defense
by BirdGT on Nov 30, 2010 8:00 AM EST
in Georgia Tech Football
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Zach Pianalto was easily the cream of the crop until he broke his fibula 6 games into the season. He led ACC tight ends with around 51 yards per game before going down. Andre Smith of Virginia Tech emerged as a go to receiver and caught 5 touchdown passes from Tyrod before the regular season ended. Speaking of touchdowns, here's how many TD passes to the tight end each ACC team allowed (in ACC play):
FSU has the worst rate per game but they only allowed three tight end touchdowns in 8 games. That's not horrible. Considering no ACC tight end was ranked above 17th in yards, touchdowns, or receptions in ACC play, this leads me to believe that the ACC's 2010 crop of tight ends didn't produce as well as hoped offensively. In fact, only three ACC tight ends had 2 touchdowns in ACC play: Cooper Helfert, George Bryan, and Colter Phillips.
Keep in mind that in all of these charts I have negated one game from every team's schedule that faced Georgia Tech. We don't implement tight ends so teams shouldn't benefit statistically from that fact.
The next factor that's important for tight ends is yards per catch. Are tight ends gashing certain defenses in the ACC? Whose linebackers are stopping the underneath routes?
As if UVA didn't already know their transition to the 4-3 was bad... It was so bad that the Wahoos are giving up about 20% more yards per catch than the second-worst team (Duke). I wasn't surprised to see Miami as the #1 tight end stopper considering they're also the ACC's #1 pass defense. And the oddest outlier is the Clemson defense. They allowed the 3rd fewest passing yards in conference games but allowed tight ends to gash them for 44 yards per game.
Any interesting topics you would like to see discussed in build up to bowl season? Do you have any thoughts on the tight end defense post above?
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Outliers
Look at Wake. So many passing yards allowed but so few from tight ends. Did they have a really great group of linebackers this year?
Also, clearly VT is right about where you’d want to be on that chart, in my opinion.
For next year, I’d be happy if GT ended up about where UNC is on that chart. If we can get there on D and quit fumbling on O then we’ll see more W’s.
I think of TE
plays in college football as moreso trick plays. So teams never needed the TE to beat Wake. They just ran the ball on them or ran conventional passing plays.
I write stuff From the Rumble Seat.
Offensive efficiency
I think it’d be interesting to see how Tech stacks up in terms of offensive efficiency, however you like to define offensive efficiency. Considering all the fumbles, all of which seem to come in the red zone, you’d have to figure that Tech rack’s up a lot of yardage and time of possession that gets ‘wasted’ because the offense turned the ball over before scoring.
My favorite pet toy for offensive efficiency is to take the 10% of a team’s total yardage in a game, subtract 10, and compare the difference to the the actual points scored. The higher the actual score is compared to the toy score, the more efficient the offense was. The lower, the less efficient. For example, Tech rolled up a shade over 500 yd against Georgia and scored 34 points. So the comparison would be 34 points scored versus (10%*512-10)=41.2. So I conclude that the offense wasn’t as efficient as it could have been. Having watched the game, I know I can blame fumbles for most, if not all, of the inefficiency. Similarly, I know that Georiga’s apparent efficiency on offense (42 points versus 32.5) was due in part to fumbles, though considering that Murray went 15/19 on passing with 18 yd per completion, the pass defense has to take some blame. Even if you allow for the fact that the last TD was purposely allowed, Georgia’s offense still looks good.
by Dive Keep and Pitch on Nov 30, 2010 12:59 PM EST reply actions
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