The guys at Football Outsiders have created a stat (F/+) that they’ve honed into having a fairly high correlation with winning percentage, but they’d only used it to track offensive and defensive efficiency. This week, Georgia had climbed as high as 11th nationally under their metric.
Then they went and factored in special teams performance.
Look who else gets downgraded big time: Virginia Tech, the special team gurus.
The surprising part, is how much better our O is than our D in that metric. Do they count the TOs for tds against the D?
The disintegration of the STs this season has been the one consistent head-scratcher for me. Proves you can’t really ever count on any facet of a team to pull you through, the other components have to offset your blind spot. On punts, particularly, is it simply underperformance by the gunners (too slow)(I honestly can’t say I’ve paid enough attention to know who the outside coverage is) – OR – players attacking the return blocking incorrectly? Something is out of whack when the team is surrendering +14 yds. per return.
I would venture some of the same principles are at play on punt returns, because it seems as though Boykin has been continually bottled up with little room to make his first cut after receiving punts.
This is a systemic problem. It will improve only when the HC assigns someone to be in overall charge of special teams or performs that function himself.
12 Rk vs 92 Rk is ominus for today. Not good. Hope Kevin and Blair have gotten it out of their collective systems.
My guess is the defense is sturdy enough to overcome even this ST diasparity against the ’11 edition of Abuurn.
You wuz rite. Kevin’s 17 yarder is a distant memory. Kickoff coverage (and there was a lot) was nice and probably lifted the numbers.