Opponent Stat Preview: Georgia Tech Offense vs Ole Miss Defense

Check out our first two previews profiling the bowl game when Ole Miss has the ball and Georgia Tech is on Defense: Part 1 / Part 2

Today we will be Previewing the Music City Bowl when Georgia Tech is on Offense and Ole Miss is on Defense.

Per Play Performance

S&P+ is a statistical measure of a team's performance on a per play basis. The "S" stands for success rate, "P" for point value, and "+" is opponent adjusted. It is essentially OPS+ for football. It takes the slugging percentage, your explosiveness, and adds it to your on base percentage, your success rate, and adjusts for opponent. 100 is average and everything greater than 100 is good, (120 is about top 20 or so) so for each category the higher the bar the better. You can read more here.

These are the normal per-play measures of success I have used all year, but just in case here is a quick refresher; Passing Downs are 2nd-and-7+ and 3rd/4th-and-5+, Standard downs are all other downs. Overall S&P+ is the total S&P+ for the unit, offense or defense. A new category is Drive Efficiency, which measures your success on the drive, not each individual play that makes up the drive.

• These are clearly the strengths of the two teams. Our passing offense could use some work, but I'm ok with it. Our hope here has to be that Ole Miss is surprised by the option and plays undisciplined.
• Other than that? These are two evenly matched squads. No one has a clear advantage and each unit is capable of playing at a high level.

Special Teams Breakdown

These numbers are national rank according to FEI's Special Teams Rankings. They are measured by comparing each team's performance to national averages for kicks in the same situation. For example missing a 50 yard field goal is punished less than missing a 25 yard field goal.

* The average yards to endzone when "Georgia Tech Kicks" is their opponent's average starting field position for all drives, as measured as the distance from the endzone. When "Ole Miss Returns" it is Ole Miss's average starting field position on all drives

Ole Miss is really bad at returning things, giving themselves pretty terrible starting field position. Georgia Tech will need to continue to exploit this continue to not allow big returns. Georgia Tech can't afford any missed field goals that have cost us in big games this year.

There really isn't much to this matchup, may the best man win.

Well that was Part 3 of 4 in our Opponent Stat Preview, tomorrow we will look at what will happen when Georgia Tech has the ball with some drive based statistics.