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The Week that was for GT's Opponent's: Week 9

Checking in on our opponents' performances.

By Matt Mills
Bob Donnan-USA TODAY Sports
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. The jump after week 7 preseason projections were removed and new info was added, so you can't compare the overall values from before then to after then, but the relative ranks are still good.

Screen_shot_2013-10-29_at_4

    Let me know if this chart is hard to read without the labels on the lines.
  • Uh, what is up with Duke? They are a top 40 team according to F/+, I will have to look at their performance by game in the next section to see why that may be.
  • Georgia Tech is creeping ever closer to Clemson.....can we win that game? That would change the whole narrative about our season. I still think Clemson is much more talented than we are, but hopefully the FSU game just totally destroyed their psyche. That game gets more and more interesting each week.
  • But really guys, 5-3 against this schedule is huge. We have already played 3 top 15 teams, and once you add Clemson and UGA to the list that will be 5 top-25 teams.
  • It will be interesting to see how the Coastal shakes out with Miami and VT, especially with VT's loss to Duke. Those two seem to be the top of the class by a decent margin.

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 Per Drive Scored
GT Duke UNC VT Miami BYU Syracuse UVA Pitt
4.67 SU 5 Navy 3.40 MTSU 2.33 UNC 5.6 USF 3.33 Texas 6 Tulane 2.08 Ball St. 5 NM
3.88 Duke 2.92 Troy 2.8 BC 1.9 Pitt 3.8 GT 3.08 Boise 1.85 NCST 2 GT 3.47 Duke
3.11 UNC 2.69 Pitt 2.33 GT 1.55 GT 2.83 FAU 2.8 MTSU 1.06 Penn St 1.86 Maryland 2.22 Navy
2.92 UVA 2.43 Duke 1.53 UM 1.50 Marshall 2.4 Wake 2.4 Houston 0.78 Clemson 1.5 Duke 1.63 FSU
2.4 UM 2.33 Memphis 1.43 USC 1.27 ECU 1.62 UF 2.18 GT 0.78 NW 1 Oregon 0.91 VT
1.18 BYU 1 VT 1.25 ECU 0.83 Bama 1.43 UNC 2.18 USU 0 GT 1 BYU 0.88 UVA
0.91 VT 0.88 GT 1 VT 0.77 Duke 0.94 UVA 0.21 Pitt
0.88 Utah
Points Per Drive Allowed
GT Duke UNC VT Miami BYU Syracuse UVA Pitt
3.8 UM 3.88 GT 4.36 ECU 1.56 Bama 2.4 GT 1.75 Texas 4.76 GT 3.69 Ball St 4.86 FSU
2.33 UNC 3.47 Pitt 3.38 USC 1.50 Marshall 2.1 Wake 1.72 Houston 3.82 Clemson 3.45 Oregon 2.69 Duke
2.18 BYU 2.21 Troy 3.11 GT 1 UNC 1.53 UNC 1.33 Utah 3.73 NW 2.92 GT 2.4 Navy
2 UVA 1.5 UVA 2.33 VT 1 Duke 1.4 USF 1.18 GT 2.5 Tulane 2.45 Maryland 1.9 VT
1.55 VT 1 Navy 1.43 UM 0.91 ECU 1.21 UF 1 UVA 1.44 PSU 2.43 Duke 0.86 NM
0.88 Duke 0.77 VT 0.64 BC 0.91 GT 0.55 FAU 0.91 MTSU 0.71 NCST 0.94 BYU 0.21 UVA
0 SU 0.58 Memphis 0.00 MTSU 0.91 Pitt 0.64 USU 0.88 Pitt
0.6 Boise

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.

Screen_shot_2013-10-29_at_6

Gosh FSU is good, I mean they are blowing everyone out of the water. I am glad I inadvertently organized this chart with all the coastal teams on the first rows, and then the atlantic division teams. The coastal division seems to be much more rounded out, while FSU and Clemson are head and shoulders above the rest of the Atlantic.

What do you guys think? Any observations?

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