The Week That Was for GT's Opponents: Week 7

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:

• I hate this chart. Our performance in the last two weeks hasn't been just an increase in opponent talent bad, it has been us playing like crap bad. So frustrating
• Miami broke the scale, the turnovers they are having are going to come back to haunt them sooner or later.
• Currently BYU is rated higher than Virginia Tech is. They are a very balanced team and the gap between BYU and us is widening.
• Wow Duke, UNC, Syracuse, and UVA are really helping out the ACC 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.

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 are running over the rest of the ACC, that game in two weeks is going to be great. This chart is starting to come together as well. You can see Clemson and FSU have separated themselves with their performance, while VT and Miami are both playing great against ACC opponents.

What do you guys think? How do our opponents stack up so far?