Normally each week this article contains some information about how our opponents did that week. But I honestly hated writing that article. I'm a stats guy and I don't want to read game recaps, I want to look at the stats. And also, I found out AJC does the same thing I was doing :/. So read that if you want to know how GT's opponents did last week. What I am more interested in is how are Georgia Tech's opponents shaping up in regards to their season performance. How are our performances each week stacking up to theirs. I think I have found a way to answer some of my own questions. I'm hi-jacking my own column, hope you guys like it.
Weekly F/+ Ratings
F/+ ratings are a combination of play by play metrics developed by Bill C. of Football Study Hall and by drive metrics developed by Brian Fremeau of his own awesome site. A higher F/+ ranking is better and I've done my best to color code it and label it. Here is a graph of our opponent's weekly F/+ rating. This still includes preseason projections and half of it only includes FBS games so GT only has 1 game of performance in the FEI data. And remember the weeks are the F/+ ratings GOING IN TO that week.
Honestly if you had told me we were ranked higher than Clemson in a ranking system I would have told you the system had some serious flaws. And I think this will right itself, I don't think anyone here actually thinks Georgia Tech is a better overall team than Clemson. What is more interesting to me is the VT - BYU - Miami - GT flip flop that has happened in three weeks. I don't see how BYU is ranked so high, they lost to Virginia, like, not not-played-well, they straight up lost. And then beat an underwhelming Texas team. Personally I could stare at this all day, but what are yall's observations.
Opponent Performance
Something else I am curious in is our opponent performance by game, and how that relates to common opponents. A great measure of game performance is Points Per Drive. This is simply the number of points you scored in a week divided by the total number of drives you had during the game. The great website fbsdrivestats takes this even further by removing drives that end in a Kneel Down (like the one right before halftime of the Duke game) and garbage time drives (essentially when a game is clearly out of hand). This gives us a great measure of your offensive and defensive performance in a given game. Here is a table showing our opponent's so far, and upcoming opponent's, Points per drive performance in their games between FBS opponents.
Points Scored Per Drive | ||
GT | Duke | UNC |
3.88 - Duke | 2.33 - Memphis | 3.40 - MTSU |
0.88 - GT | 1.43 - USC | |
Points Allowed Per Drive | ||
GT | Duke | UNC |
0.88 - Duke | 3.88 - GT | 3.38 - USC |
0.58 - Memphis | 0.00 - MTSU |
I'll keep updating this table each week. This is the basis of opponent adjustments; how well you performed against your opponents relative to how everyone else performed. As we get more common opponents we can start putting our performance against Duke in context.
ACC Rankings
Finally I want to track how each ACC team is doing against other ACC teams. How can we do this? I will be taking the Points Per Drive margin from each game and putting it in context against all ACC opponents. So Georgia Tech scored 3.88 Points per Drive in non garbage time and excluding kneel downs against Duke, while allowing .88 points per drive. That gives us a net margin of 3.00 for the Duke game. That is pretty good. Here is how that performance will look against all other ACC games.
GT | Duke | UNC | VT | Miami | Pitt | UVA | CU | SU | NCST | Wake | FSU | BC | Average | |
GT | 3 | 3 | ||||||||||||
Duke | -3 | -3 | ||||||||||||
UNC | 0 | |||||||||||||
VT | 0 | |||||||||||||
Miami | 0 | |||||||||||||
Pitt | -3.23 | -3.23 | ||||||||||||
UVA | 0 | |||||||||||||
Clemson | 0 | |||||||||||||
Syracuse | 0 | |||||||||||||
NCST | 0 | |||||||||||||
Wake | -1.23 | -1.23 | ||||||||||||
Syracue | 0 | |||||||||||||
FSU | 3.23 | 3.23 | ||||||||||||
BC | 1.23 | 1.23 |
Obviously right now there have only been 3 ACC games, but this chart will get more and more insightful. Again, this chart will get updated with more information as each week passes. I think by the end of the year all of this information will be really cool to have. What do you guys think? Any other information you want on our opponents?