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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. And remember the weeks are the F/+ ratings GOING IN TO that week.
Here are some of my observations:
- Well that was a plummet. With UNC LOSING to Eastern Carolina (and playing like crap, they got outscored by 3 Points Per Drive on average) and Duke not playing well against Troy our opponents didn't do us any favors. You can see their drops this week, both are the worst team we will play all season. Oh, and we didn't play our best against VT either, hence the loss.
- Miami is playing great against terrible competition and the one opponent they struggled with was Florida who is straight up dominating people on Defense. I don't think Miami is actually that good but, they will be a tough test.
- Still terrified to face UGA, they will be the best team we have played in a while.
- Is BYU good?? There is no way right? They have played like crap this year...haven't they??
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.
| Offense Points Per Drive | |||||||||
| GT | Duke | UNC | VT | Miami | |||||
| 3.88 | Duke | 2.92 | Troy | 3.40 | MTSU | 1.55 | GT | 5.6 | USF |
| 3.11 | UNC | 2.69 | Pitt | 2.33 | GT | 1.50 | Marshall | 2.83 | FAU |
| 0.91 | VT | 2.33 | Memphis | 1.43 | USC | 1.27 | ECU | 1.62 | UF |
| 0.88 | GT | 1.25 | ECU | 0.83 | Bama | ||||
| Points Per Drive Allowed | |||||||||
| GT | Duke | UNC | VT | Miami | |||||
| 2.33 | UNC | 3.88 | GT | 4.36 | ECU | 1.56 | Bama | 1.4 | USF |
| 1.55 | VT | 3.47 | Pitt | 3.38 | USC | 1.50 | Marshall | 1.21 | UF |
| 0.88 | Duke | 2.21 | Duke | 3.11 | GT | 0.91 | ECU | 0.55 | FAU |
| 0.58 | Memphis | 0.00 | MTSU | 0.91 | GT | ||||
So our performance against UNC doesn't look so hot now that they allowed 4.36 points per drive to ECU. VT scored more often against us than they did against Marshall, and held us to less points per drive than everyone else this year....I'm getting depressed thinking about how much we underperformed on Thursday.
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.
The last column is the average number points per drive margin for each ACC game. Clemson and FSU have done the best so far, but not many ACC games have been played. This chart is going to look really cool, I promise, we just need more games.