GT's Offense Compared to the Rest of the ACC

           My last post dealt with how Georgia Tech's offense fared against the quality of the defense it was facing. In short we played a very tough schedule and fared very well against most teams, and the only times we underperformed as an offense our defense was not able to carry our team to victory. In this post I want to determine how our offense preformed compared to the rest of the ACC. Again I will use the yards per play stat, a simple and effective way to measure the success of an offense. I will also only use conference game statistics in this comparison just to try to weed out any variance. And all my stats are from cfbstats.com. A quick look at the overall stats shows that Georgia Tech's offense was 3rd overall with 6.1 yards/play, behind only FSU and surprisingly Virginia Tech. Although, looking further into the stats I would rank our offense 2nd in conference. Neither Georgia Tech nor FSU had the opportunity to pad their stats by facing their own bad defense (GTwill also noticed this), while Virginia Tech did not have to play arguably the ACC's best defense, their own. Beyond a general comparison I also wanted to look at each team and how other ACC team's offenses fared while facing this team, so I compiled the chart below.

           This chart is organized by the team we faced and the yards per play they allowed to other ACC teams. This shows a couple of interesting things. First off is that we only had one game where we did not perform better than the average ACC offense, Miami. That game was just as bad in the stats as it was to watch. Second is that our offense showed up to play both times against Clemson. We posted the 2nd and 3rd best performance against Clemson and in both games we needed every yard we gained. Finally I can not get over just how awful FSU's defense was, 4 teams gained more than 7 yards/play against them, which is considered to be an elite level of offense. Also their 2nd BEST defensive performance, 5.6 yards/play allowed against Maryland, was equal to Virginia Tech's WORST defensive performance, 5.6 yards/play allowed against Duke. One other thing I wanted to do was compare how well Georgia Tech's offense preformed against the SEC.

             Some quick observations; The 3 SEC defenses we faced would have ranked the 3rd, 5th, and 6th worst ACC defenses we faced, respectively. We also fared below average in only one game, and I think we all know which game that was. While we clearly were not playing the top defenses in the SEC we did very well against the teams we did play, more than a yard per play better than the average SEC team vs. Miss St. and more than a yard and a half better vs. Vanderbilt. I think this validates what all of us GT fans know, our offense works and it works at an elite level. The last thing that I take out of these charts is just how consistent our offense preformed. A simple scan of the charts puts Georgia Tech at or near the top of most every list. I can not wait to see how much more our offense improves in year three with Nesbitt at the helm.

              Thanks for all the comments in the last post, they were extremely helpful and insightful. Please continue to post any comments our questions. My next post will look at the explosiveness of our offense and whether or not this year was a "quick-strike" offense.