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.