Some GT Football Stats

by millsGT49 on Feb 16, 2010 4:21 PM EST

Now that football season is over it is time for some review of the great season Tech enjoyed this year. I am going to focus on the offense at first because anyone who watched a game this year saw how our defense preformed, we really don't need numbers to tell us. What I was interested in was comparing how well our offense preformed in comparison to the strength of the defense we faced. I measured the success of our offense by the success we had on each play. Besides scoring the most points possible an offense's main goal is to maximize it's plays. The best stat to measure this is simply yards-per-play. I used ESPN's game logs to take out kneel downs and when our starters weren't in. I also wanted to compare how our offense fared against the strength of the defense we faced. This year Georgia Tech faced 5 defenses ranked in the top 25 according to the S&P+ defensive metric. An explanation of this metric can be found here. Basically S&P+ determines the success of each and every play in a game. This provides a great way to determine a team's success on a play-by-play basis to eliminate factors such as number of possessions and bad starting field position. Once I had all the data I plotted them on this chart.

This graph simply shows what a lot of fans already knew. Our 3 worst offensive games were all games we lost, which is no surprise. We took care of business when facing truly awful defenses (Vandy, FSU, and Duke). To give you some perspective 5.5 yards a play is a good offense while 7 yards a play is a truly elite offense. In 4 games this year Tech's offense was elite. In only 2 games this year was our offense bad, of course in the Orange Bowl it was awful and I think this graph shows just how great that Iowa defense was. Our average yards-per-play was 6.22, a very good number. That ties us for 17th nationally and 2nd in the conference, only behind FSU. (stats from cfbstats.com) This graph also shows that our offense does its job nearly every time and it struggles only when playing an elite level defense. This shows just how much our offense carried this team. Whenever our offense struggled our defense was not able to pick up the slack. Hopefully Al Groh will be able to fix this and provide a safety net for our offense.

Please post any thoughts or comments. My next post will be how our offense preformed in comparison to the rest of the ACC.

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Awesome. Can't wait to see the rest.

Note our defense was 77th in S&P+ so only Duke and FSU had worse defenses of the teams we played by this metric. Too bad our offense didn’t get to play against our defense (FSU’s dichotomy is even more extreme).

by GTwill on Feb 16, 2010 8:02 PM EST reply actions

FSU was certainly extreme

FSU’s fan-site, tomahawknation.com, find out that this year FSU had the ACC’s best offense in the last 4 years without having the benefit of playing the ACC’s worst defense in 4 years, their own! It was remarkable just how much better FSU’s offense was compared to their defense.

by millsGT49 on Feb 17, 2010 12:10 AM EST up reply actions

which brings up the point

Does a high scoring offense hurt your defense? They score quickly instead of dictating pace and tempo of the game. They get the opposing offense back on the field (like a turnover) quickly. They also motivate the opposing offense to score a lot and be more aggressive. Seems like the ACC never really has high powered offenses and high powered defenses paired up (minus FSU in the 90’s). It’s always one or the other.

I spun around... and there I was, face-to-face with a six-year old kid. Well, I just threw my guns down and walked away. Little bastard shot me in the ass.

by BirdGT on Feb 17, 2010 9:19 AM EST up reply actions

This confirms my gut reaction

which is that even in the Iowa game Tech could have won had there not been so much pressure on the offense to perform perfectly. If Iowa’s offense had had to deal with multiple three and outs Tech’s offense would have had more time to solve the riddle of Iowa’s defense. Or at the very least gotten some of those breaks that often decide important games.

by Atlanta's original team on Feb 16, 2010 8:34 PM EST reply actions

Brings up an interesting point

It would be interesting to see if our offense does in fact improve as the game goes on and Paul Johnson gets more chances to work his magic. I will certainly look into it once I get some other posts I have been working on out of the way.

by millsGT49 on Feb 17, 2010 12:06 AM EST up reply actions

I would love to see that

I may be wrong but I sense that in those games where Tech’s offense stalled early they tended to improve “with practice” against the defense. At least if they were not under time pressure to catch up. It was while watching the Tech – Georgia game in 2008 that I thought I noticed Tech’s offense getting better even when they were down two touchdowns.

by Atlanta's original team on Feb 18, 2010 5:59 PM EST up reply actions