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Atlantic Coast Conference Check In: Week 3

Each week we will take a look at how the ACC teams stack up against each other in some metrics.

By Matt Mills
Sam Sharpe-USA TODAY Sports

You can view last week's measurements here in order to see the change from last week.

No time for new metrics this week (or specific team colors, but they are all the same anyway, so much orange in the ACC), so I'll continue to look at Drive Efficiency. The following plot shows the Points Per Drive Scored and Allowed of each ACC team's offensive and defensive units. Hover over each dot to view the team associated with it. I have only excluded drives that end in kneel-downs so far. As we add more games we can start removing garbage time possessions, games against FCS teams, and also adjusting for opponent quality. (Just for clarification, a higher points per drive allowed is a bad thing....looking at you Georgia Tech.)

  • Wake continues to struggle beyond reason on Offense, but somehow is also very stringent on defense.
  • Georgia Tech is in it's own realm of terrible on Defense, but we sure do score some points. I'd expect this trend to continue.
Scoring points is definitely a product of a good offense, but having good field position also helps. In order to measure the quality of field position I found the expected points an average team would score for each spot on the field. The following plot shows the average expected points for a team's offense on the x-axis and the average expected points per drive for their opponent's on the y-axis.

  • The two values are kind of related. If you consistently have great starting field position then you will probably score more often and give your opponent worse than average field position.
  • Not sure if Louisville's loss to UVA was totally a product of giving UVA great field position but UL really isn't helping themselves.

You'll notice that, generally, a team that has better field position (more expected points per drive) also scores more points per drive. We can isolate how a team's offense actually does regardless of field position by measuring how many points they scored over their expected amount, and do the same for a defense (negative points over expected means a defense allows less than their opponent's field position would suggest).

  • Georgia Tech's Offense continues to excel, ranking second only to NC State's offense, NC STATE!?!?! Dat defense tho....
  • It seems that Louisville's starting field position has yet to hurt them as they are allowing a little more than a point less per drive than they would be expected to based on their opponent's starting field position. To give it some context a team averages around 10 drives per game, so Louisville's defense has saved about 11 points per game so far.
Is there anything you'd like to track each week on our conference buddies? Let me know in the comments.

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