In my experience, there's no such thing as luck...

I dont think that you can call our “punt” last year a trick play. Was it a senseless decision that had a terrible reprecussion? Absolutely. In my mind, a trick play is something that is “offensively minded”.

He hasn’t had a losing record in one possession games since his second year at Navy. Six years in a row of 0.500 or better in one possession games isn’t luck. That’s called a trend. Check out the chart:

BAM!

Here’s to hoping every play Clemson runs against us in 2010 is a trick play with that kind of record. Those guys must really hate us, they can’t pull off a trick play on us, our kicker becomes a kicking god against them, they lose to us in the Championship game, it will be an interesting crowd at the tail gate this season I’m sure.

While I agree that looking soley at winning one-possesion games as an indicator of luck is short-sighted and doesn’t show the entire picture, I also agree with the overall point that GT was extremely lucky to walk away with 11 wins last year. Realistically, we were probably closer to our 9-4 record of the year before than we were of being an 11-3 team. Following are some things that I look at when considering if the team should be marked as “lucky”, in no particular order.

Turnovers & Turnover Margin: In 2009 we only lost 18 TO’s, good for T-9th in the country, down from 27 in ‘08. The previous two years were 24 in ’07 and 22 in ’06. We took extermely good care of the ball last year partly because the team focused on it after ’08 and partly because there is definitely some luck involved with coralling those loose balls. Our TO Margin in ’09 was +8, up from +2 in ’08. It was -4 and +3 in ’07 and ’06 respectively. That’s a fairly large jump in our rolling average that I would say definately involves some amount of luck. Can we be safe in assuming that the average over the last two CPJ years is our new baseline? I’m not sure we have a large enough sample size to definitively say either way, but I’m leaning towards that not being the norm.

YPP Differential: In 2009 GT averaged 6.2ypp offensively, good for T-10th best in the nation, but we allowed 6.1ypp defensively which was T-11th worst in the nation. That’s a YPP Diff of only +0.1. In 2008 our YPP Diff was +1.2 (6ypp/4.8yppa), ‘07 was +0.5 (5.5ypp/5yppa), and ’06 was +0.6 (5.2ypp/4.6yppa). If our defense had been one tick worst we would have lost more than a few of those games last year. In that sense, we were extremely lucky to achieve what we did last year. But if our defense can get close to 2008’s 4.8yppa and our offense stays even or gets better, we may be in for one heck of an awesome season.

Now, these things are by no means definitive but they are good indicators of where a team may have encountered a little bit of luck when compared to their final record, or bad luck if the team lost a few games. And there’s always the gut check. How many games did you walk away from wiping your brow and thinking to yourself how close that was to going the other way? Clemson, Wake, FSU, ACCCG, all could have gone the other way if not for some timely stops and I think we would all agree that getting a timely stop with last years defense might have been more the product of luck than anything else.