Advanced Box Score: Miami

Each Week FTRS will take apart the traditional box score and present our readers with the key insights on how the game was played. You can view all the Advanced Box Score stories in the Football Analytics Story Stream. For any questions about the metrics listed below please first refer to the Advanced Stats Glossary for definitions.

Advanced Box Score

• 4 out of Tech's 7 drives lasted 10 plays or more, that is awesome. It is the return of the CPJ Death March.
• Our defense only allowed 17 points, but they didn't do much to limit Miami's offense other than the two turnovers. Miami's stats are great across the board except third downs and the 30% success rate on passing downs, which isn't really that bad.
• For the first time all year Tech's defense picked it up on third downs! Allowing only 3.4 yards per play and a 20% success rate is the biggest reason our defense was able to get the Miami offense off the field.

Win Probability

The last CPJ death march of the game moved us from winning 3 out of 4 times on average to expecting to win 19 times out of 20. The second interception wasn't that big of a deal because we would have probably just run the clock out any way. Miami would have had to have recover an onside kick and then also score a touchdown* or kick a field goal to force overtime. It's not impossible but it is just tough to do.

The third down pass to Tony Zenon was just out of the top 5 in WPA, but it was a huge play. The two spike plays in the 2nd quarter provided a huge swing for Tech and were really the first time in the game where Tech was seizing control.

Drive Chart

Not many drives here to analyze, but you have got to love Georgia Tech's ability to flip the field in the 2nd half. And no turnovers, I haven't celebrated this enough. With our defense we can not give the other team a short field from turnovers and our offense did a great job avoiding them this week.

Justin Thomas's Progression

This weekend I tweeted out a chart comparing Justin Thomas's performance so far to Vad Lee's from last year, and I thought it would be cool to track how he has played in each game. For comparison here is Vad Lee's QBR from week to week last year. The blue line shows Vad's QBR according to ESPN, and the red dashed line is the average for each opponent in their other games. A higher value for QBR is better, and 50 is average.

QBR has its own issues but in general it gives you a good sense of how a QB plays. It does take rushing into account so it works for our system. Here is how Justin Thomas has done so far this year:

He really has been impressive this year, and has played better than you would expect for each opponent but Tulane. Lets hope he keeps it up!

(*) Ed. Note: And go for two and get it after the first touchdown, thanks to jabbajacket for the catch.