If you are interested in how each opponent did this week then please read the AJC's recap.
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. And remember the weeks are the F/+ ratings GOING IN TO that week.
Here are some of my observations:
- Remember that the changes in each week are a combination of multiple things. The ratings adjust for how you played against your opponent that week, how your past opponents played against their opponents, and the decline of weight on preseason projections.
- I don't know what's going on with Miami. They just killed Savannah State but so what. I think the "win" over Florida will continue to boost them in the ratings, because they haven't played that well overall.
- Virginia Tech appears to be a much tougher opponent than UNC, even though we are favored by about the same amount. In the S&P+ version VT is actually ranked higher than GT, I think preseason weight has a lot to do with this still, and the fact that VT's defense is killing it this year.
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 | VT |
3.88 - Duke | 2.69 - Pitt | 3.40 - MTSU | 1.50 - Marshall |
3.11 - UNC | 2.33 - Memphis | 2.33 - GT | 1.27 - ECU |
0.88 - GT | 1.43 - USC | 0.83 - Bama | |
Points Allowed Per Drive | |||
GT | Duke | UNC | VT |
2.33 - UNC | 3.88 - GT | 3.38 - USC | 1.56 - Bama |
0.88 - Duke | 3.47 - Pitt | 3.11 - GT | 1.50 - Marshall |
0.58 - Memphis | 0.00 - MTSU | 0.91 - ECU |
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 performances in context. Look at how great VT's defense has done this year compared to our other opponents. In addition Pitt did almost as well as we did against Duke's defense, which is kind of troublesome depending on how you view Pitt's offense.
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 | 0.78 | 1.89 | |||||||||||
Duke | -3 | -0.78 | -1.89 | |||||||||||
UNC | -0.78 | -0.78 | ||||||||||||
VT | 0 | |||||||||||||
Miami | 0 | |||||||||||||
Pitt | 0.78 | -3.23 | -1.225 | |||||||||||
UVA | 0 | |||||||||||||
Clemson | 1.75 | 1.75 | ||||||||||||
Syracuse | 0 | |||||||||||||
NCST | -1.75 | -1.75 | ||||||||||||
Wake | -1.23 | -1.23 | ||||||||||||
Syracue | 0 | |||||||||||||
FSU | 3.23 | 3.23 | ||||||||||||
BC | 1.23 | 1.23 |
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?