With the season now over and 2020 around the corner, let’s talk about the first year of the Geoff Collins era. We’ve heard the buzzwords and we know the defining narrative about a long and arduous rebuild, but what did “year zero” actually look like? Let’s look at the data and figure it out.
Want to look at the stats yourself? Take a gander at this spreadsheet.
2019 Georgia Tech Offense
2018 SP+ Finish: #40
2019 SP+ Projection: #57 (-17)
2019 SP+ Finish: #112 (-82)
(Some) Key Numbers
The below list represents only a choice selection of the numbers I had at my disposal.
Good Stuff
Passing
- Standard Downs Sacks Allowed (garbage time removed): 2
- Standard Downs Completion Rate (garbage time removed): 52%
- Standard Downs Yards per Attempt (sack-adjusted, garbage time removed): 6.18
Rushing
- Highlight Yards per Rushing Opportunity: 8.57
Efficiency
- Success Rate in Scoring Opportunities: 51%
Bad Stuff
Passing
- Completion Rate: 46%
- Sacks Allowed / Yardage Lost: 23 / 142 yards
Rushing
- Line Yards per Carry: 0.31 (note: not adjusted for situation and formation)
- Stuffed Rate: 25% (national avg: 20%)
- Rush Explosiveness Rate: 8%
Efficiency
- Average Starting Field Position: 26.7 (national average: 29.5)
- Plays per Drive: 4.9 (national avg: 5.5)
- Yards per Play: 4.86 (national avg: 5.74)
- 3rd Down Success Rate: 31%
- Passing Downs Success Rate: 24% (national avg: 31%)
Drive Progression
- Time per Drive: 2:17
- Time between Scoring Opportunities: 6:16
- Scoring Opportunities per Drive: 0.36 (national avg: 0.47)
- Points per Scoring Opportunity: 3.49 (national avg: 4.44)
- Stopped Rate: 71% (national avg: 65.7%)
Conversions
- Successful Conversion Rate: 34%
- Average Conversion Down Distance: 7.30 yards
- Go-For-It Rate: 14%
In English, Please?
Grade: F
There’s no sugarcoating it: this offense was bad. We knew Tech was bound to take a step back offensively given the turnover on the offensive line, the installation of a new offensive scheme, and a lack of returning production at a lot of positions, but no one could have anticipated this level of ineffectiveness. This offense placed significantly below the national average in almost every measurable category and finished ranked bottom-20 in the nation overall (per SP+). There were a few bright statistical spots and at points in a few games, the Jackets seemed to put things together offensively, but overall, this unit needs a lot of work over the next nine months. Let’s dive deeper into some of the numbers to take a closer look at its major issues, starting with the basics:
Average Starting Field Position: 26.7 / Plays per Drive: 4.9 / Yards per Play: 4.86
When considered together, these numbers reflect an average Yellow Jacket offensive drive, which started at the Tech 26.7 and usually ended around the 50, which puts teams squarely in no-man’s-land on the field. Depending on the line-to-gain, an offense could go for it to extend their drive into plus-territory and potentially churn out a scoring opportunity, but conventional wisdom suggests that teams should punt from here to try to pin their opponents within their own 10-yard lines. This is fine for one or two drives a game, but making a habit of getting stuck in no-man’s-land and having to punt is...problematic.
Compare this performance to the average FBS drive: the average offense starts at just about their 30-yard line, gains around 36 yards on 6.2 plays, and loses possession (or is forced to make a drive-ending decision) around their opponent’s 34-yard line. That 16-yard difference between drive-end locations makes a world of difference in in-game decision-making — being at the opponent’s 34 puts kicking a 51-yard field goal on the table and makes a stronger argument for attempting a fourth-down conversion to extend the drive (since the offense is already fairly deep into plus-territory). However, Tech’s offense could not move the ball effectively and thus failed to generate these scoring opportunities on a vast majority of their drives, which ended in quick three-and-outs.
Time per Drive: 2:17 / Time between Scoring Opportunities: 6:16
And boy, were those three-and-outs incredibly quick. The Yellow Jacket offense spent just over two minutes on the field per drive, but in a number of cases, the unit went three-and-out in barely 90 seconds of game-time. The Tech offense didn’t necessarily pride itself on being pacy (taking about 28 seconds per play) — its inability to move the ball just made for quick drives. This kept a fairly-decent Tech defense (more on them later this week) on the field much longer and (probably) tired that unit out more quickly.
Rifling through three-and-outs meant that it took longer for Tech to actually piece together scoring opportunities — on average, about 2.63 drives (that 6:16 mark above, divided by Tech’s average time per drive) passed before a drive in which Tech crossed its opponent’s 40. Given that Tech only averaged around 11 drives per game, this made for few chances to get in scoring position and put points on the board.
Stopped Rate: 71%
Here’s where we get a little more complicated — stop rate, a defensive effectiveness metric pioneered by The Athletic’s Max Olson, measures the proportion of defensive drives that ended in punts, turnovers, or turnovers-on-downs. Essentially, this number puts data behind the colloquial football belief that teams who get more stops win more games — thus, a higher stop rate is better.
“Stopped” rate is the same stat for offensive drives — it measures how ineffective an offense is based on how many of its drives ended in a loss of possession. Lower stopped rates means more offensive drives ends in points.
Given those definitions, it’s pretty easy to grasp that getting stopped on 71% of your offensive possessions is...not good (and how that leads to the other problems mentioned above). To put this in the context of an average Georgia Tech game from 2019, that means that eight of Tech’s 11 offensive drives per game result in zilch. It is not feasible to win games this way, especially when you’re not creating scoring opportunities often (only 36% of drives passed the opponent’s 40-yard line).
Line Yards per Carry: 0.32 / Stuffed Rate: 25%
Line yards reflect the contribution of the offensive line within a short- to medium -length rush carry — for all rushes of fewer than seven yards, on zero- to three-yard carries, the line gets 100% of the credit for the gain; on four- to six-yard gains, the line takes 50% of the credit; and on any losses, the line gets 125% of the credit. Some outlets often adjust this average further based on formation (shotgun versus non-shotgun), down, and distance.
While we don’t have other outlets’ adjustments on hand, the unadjusted number is still valuable to understand how much push the Georgia Tech offensive line was able to get for its running backs, which was seemingly...not much. The Jackets are missing out on almost a full yard per rush compared to its opponents because of poor line play, which weakens how multidimensional (yes, I know they can only run or pass the ball, but bear with me) this offense can be. “Establishing the run game” is a worn-out cliche, but at a certain level, it makes sense — if an offense can’t run the ball effectively, teams will take advantage of that by stacking the second and third defensive levels with defensive backs and daring said offense to beat them on the ground (the reverse is also true: if an offense can’t pass the ball, opposing defenses will stack the box and dare it to beat them over the top — Clemson did this versus Tech in Week 1).
Stuffed rate is a sister stat to stopped rate (insofar as it’s the offensive version of a primarily defensive stat), reflecting the percentage of carries that end in losses or no gain. Suffice to say, getting stuffed on one of every four carries is not good and further underscores the lack of quality offensive line play for the Jackets this season.
The caveat to all this OL criticism is that this unit not only had the toughest job in the offensive transition, but also suffered a rash of injuries to key starters and even some backups this season. The latter (combined with Parker Braun’s transfer before the season) had a serious effect on the talent level available to play along the line and therefore the unit’s performance. This is a unit poised to get better even if it simply has all of its starters healthy.
Successful Conversion Rate: 34% / Yards per Conversion Down: 7.30 / Go-For-It Rate: 14%
To get the definitions out of the way, conversion downs consist of all third downs and any non-punt plays on fourth down, yards per conversion down is the average distance needed to convert a conversion down, and Go-For-It rate is the percentage of times an offense attempted a fourth-down conversion.
In unison, these three stats paint a picture of how effective an offense is at extending its drives, and on top of that, Go-For-It rate measures how aggressive its decision-making is. Intuitively, offenses want to maximize their conversion rate while minimizing the yards they have to gain to convert in these scenarios.
But Tech frequently could not do either of those things. Being in a seven-yard hole on third and fourth downs changes the play-calling calculus; third-and-long (well, medium trending towards long) is an obvious passing situation, while fourth-and-long becomes an obvious punting situation, regardless of where you are on the field. When Tech wanted to be aggressive on fourth down (~14% of the time, down significantly compared to 2018 and to opponents’ 17% GFI rate in 2019), it usually ended up being in a disadvantageous situation (at least, relative to their opponents), usually facing a fourth-and-3.5 from its own 46-yard line on average (compared to opponents’ fourth-and-2.6 from Tech’s 47). It’s hard to criticize a lack of aggressiveness on fourth down, especially considering offensive ineptitude led to 82 punts on the season and few opportunities to actually attempt conversions. But given the previous regime’s penchant to take risks on these sorts of margins (sometimes to a fault), it would have been nice to see that aspect of Georgia Tech’s offensive identity live on, despite defensive-coordinators-turned-head-coaches’ usual hesitancy to roll the dice.
In Summary
And there-in lies the central problem for Georgia Tech’s offense in 2019: it was unable to establish a consistent offensive identity. In some games, QB James Graham seemed to be aiming to air it out and win the game with his arm; in others, he moved more like a true option quarterback and extended plays with his feet. At some points, Tech’s offense seemed to want to do nothing more than run the ball up the middle with RB Jordan Mason. After a decade in which the Jackets had become synonymous with a single play-style, they now subscribed to multiple, and none seemed to last particularly long.
Offensive scheme overhaul is hard, and no one has learned that lesson better than the players and coaches at Edge Athletic Center this fall. One of the predominant narratives of this season has this is a roster built and trained for a different offense by different coaches. Given that, regression from Paul Johnson’s consistent yet effective plodding offenses was to be expected, and year zero of the Geoff Collins era has been a fall from grace in that vein. Based on 2019’s performance, progress could be slow-coming, but it should come...eventually. Given an expected top-25 recruiting class and a bevy of returning production, there is ample room for this offense to grow in 2020. But will it seize that opportunity? Will it establish a new offensive identity beyond the buzzwords? We’ll find out next August.