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Each week I will be doing my best to take a deeper look into the stats of each game. You can see all of this year's advanced box scores in the "Advanced Stats and Analysis" story stream. Curios as to what some of the definitions are? Check out Football Study Hall's Advanced Stats Glossary.
| Passing Downs | Quarter Performance | |||||||
| GT | VT | Natl Average | GT | VT | ||||
| Num Plays | 22 | 16 | Yards Per Play | Success Rate | Yards Per Play | Success Rate | ||
| Success Rate | 32% | 13% | 31% | Q1 | 4.38 (16) | 50% | 9.56 (9) | 56% |
| Avg Yards | 5.77 | 2.43 | 5.72 | Q2 | 5.29 (17) | 35% | 5.59 (17) | 35% |
| Standard Downs | Q3 | 4.8 (15) | 40% | 2.78 (9) | 44% | |||
| GT | VT | Natl Average | Q4 | 2.28 (18) | 17% | 4.12 (17) | 24% | |
| Num Plays | 44 | 36 | Down Performance | |||||
| Success Rate | 36% | 47% | 48% | GT | VT | |||
| Avg Yards | 3.32 | 6.58 | 5.62 | Yards Per Play | Success Rate | Yards Per Play | Success Rate | |
| Passing Plays | 1st | 3.48 | 33% | 5.64 | 44% | |||
| GT | VT | Natl Average | 2nd | 5.77 | 41% | 5.76 | 35% | |
| Num Plays | 25 | 27 | 3rd | 3.64 | 36% | 3.7 | 20% | |
| Success Rate | 24% | 56% | 41% | 4th | 0.33 | 0% | - | - |
| Avg Yards | 5.64 | 7.52 | 6.39 | Drive Performance | ||||
| SD/PD Sack Rate | 2.3% / 0.0% | 0.0% / 12.5% | 1.8% / 4.2% | Num of Possesions | Avg Start Spot | Explosive Drive % | Methodical Drive % | |
| Running Plays | GT | 11 | 22.3 | 0% | 18% | |||
| GT | VT | Natl Average | VT | 10 | 34.40 | 10% | 10% | |
| Num Plays | 41 | 25 | % of Possible Yards Gained | GT: 32.3% | VT: 38.1% | |||
| Success Rate | 41% | 16% | 43% | Georgia Tech Hidden Yards | -133.4 | |||
| Avg Yards | 3.22 | 2.92 | 4.97 | Turnovers | GT: 3 | VT: 0 | ||
Observations:
- Virginia Tech's Offense was bipolar on Thursday. A 13% success rate on passing downs vs. a 47% success rate on standard downs would imply that they couldn't pass the ball very well. But then when you look at their play type breakdown they had a 16% success rate on running plays and a 56% success rate on passing plays. I had to look further into this so here is a table breaking down the performance by play type AND down type.
| Down Type \ Play Type | GT | VT | |||
| Runs | Passes | Runs | Passes | ||
| Standard Downs | Yards / Play | 3.00 | 4.27 | 2.41 | 10.32 |
| Success Rate | 39% | 27% | 18% | 74% | |
| Count | 33 | 11 | 17 | 19 | |
| Passing Downs | Yards / Play | 4.13 | 6.71 | 4.00 | 0.88 |
| Success Rate | 50% | 21% | 13% | 13% | |
| Count | 8 | 14 | 8 | 8 | |
- So there it is. We could not stop their passing game when they had a threat of the run. 10+ yards per play on passes on standard downs seems rather ridiculous (the national average is about 6.5 yards per pass on standard downs). But then we absolutely killed them when they tried to pass the ball on Passing Downs, I don't think I need to put any frame of reference on only allowing .88 yards per pass on passing downs.
- Man our offense could not get anything going on early downs. Our standard down success rate was only 36%, so we weren't setting our offense up for easy drives, and our 1st down yards per play was atrocious. Our average distance to go on 2nd and especially 3rd downs was actually better than Virginia Tech's. And we weren't making many big plays either, and had 0 explosive drives (10+ yards per play on average). As bad as our offense was performing our defense was doing their part to keep us in the game. The defense did an incredible job of limiting VT's scoring to give us a shot.
- I think the Drive data in the bottom right of the table pretty much sums up why we lost. 3 turnovers just won't cut it against tough opponents, we only gained about a third of the possible yards available to us, in the past we are at 50-60% of possible yards, and VT had a 133 yard advantage in field position (the "hidden yards" field). We did just enough wrong to lose this game. We didn't play any worse than Virginia Tech did, but we just had too many mistakes to overcome. If we eliminate our mistakes then I think there is a different tone this week, our performance wasn't so bad, just unfortunate to get a loss.