Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets Football Offensive Drive Efficiency In 2010

by Winfield Featherston on Jan 28, 2011 8:30 AM EST in Georgia Tech Football

On Tuesday we looked at the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets defense and how efficient it was at stopping the opponent. We saw that Tech was either good and stopped teams early (Virginia) or bad and allowed the opponent to run all over them no matter where they started on the field (Miami).

Today, let's switch sides of the ball and look at how well we moved the ball. First up, offensive efficiency of the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.

2010_offensive_efficiency_yards_medium

I think if we all look back over these games, these numbers make sense and can be very telling. Truly, we were inconsistent in moving the ball, but how productive where we when we made these drives?

Offensiveefficiencypoints_medium

Our offensive efficiency numbers reflect the same results as our defensive efficiency numbers from earlier this week. When Georgia Tech was on, it was on. Our highest percentage games were also the game where we had the most points per drive, a direct relationship. An interesting note is that Georgia Tech had 77 offensive drives during non-garbage time while our opponents had 81 offensive drives. However, the Yellow Jackets outgained the opposition by 11 yards overall in moving the ball. This indicates that our opponents marched down the field very well in tight games and pulled ahead quickly. So quickly in fact that our offensive drives were whittled to a smaller number (numbers-wise) because our defense could not make a consistent stop.

What can we gather from this information? Nothing new really. We clearly need to improve in a variety of areas. On Monday we will look at Al Groh's defense of 2010 and compare it to Tony Wommack's defense of 2009 and see how we changed in the course of a year.

Any thoughts on this? Any surprises?

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Available yards

An observation: All else equal, if you are playing a team with a punter and place kicker who can’t kick the ball very far, you will have fewer total available yards because your starting position is closer to the end zone. Conversely, if the opposing teams kickers can kick the ball a mile, you will have more available yards because you are starting futher away from the end zone. The relevancy here is that you would expect a lower efficiency when you have more yards to go as you are less likely to get to the end zone before being stopped. Not that it applied to Tech last year as the available yards, with a couple of exceptions, was around 700 yd each game while the efficiency was all over the place.

I took available yards and divided it by the number of drives to see about how far the offense had to go each time. It looks like this:

Team Avail yd/drive
UNC 71
NCSU 73
WFU 68
UVA 71
Clemson 77
VT 74
Miami 116
Duke 64

Everything look reasonable except for Miami where the reason GT lost become readily apparent. How is it the offense had to travel an average of 116 yards per drive? I must be misunderstanding the methodology because I went back and looked at some other games and I can’t get the yardages to match up. GT had 409 yd of offense against Miami, yet you show 311 yd. In the garbage time, are you excluding the yardage and points for both teams? Against Duke GT had 410 yd, yet you show 356 and I don’t think there was any garbage time. Against UNC you show 556 yards, which is cute since the box score only shows 448. What am I missing?

by Dive Keep and Pitch on Jan 28, 2011 9:47 AM EST reply actions