Fun with numbers: Georgia and defensive yards per point

As this post indicates, I’m a fan of Phil Steele’s yards per point metric:

That’s why I’ve become more and more enamored of a stat that Steele (and others) keep track of – yards per point (ypp).  In essence, it’s a measurement of how efficient an offense is at scoring and it also measures how good a defense is at making opponents’ offenses inefficient.  (I use the term “efficiency” here in Paul’s sense of making effective use of field position.)

Teams with excellent special teams, teams with high, positive turnover margins, teams which yield less penalty yardage than they receive and teams that don’t give up many sacks are going to be more efficient scoring teams than their opponents.

They’re also going to be better on defense at making their opponent’s less efficient at scoring.  Which leads me to wonder how Georgia currently shapes up in defensive yards per point.  Given an SEC-worst 35 points yielded by the offense and special teams in five games, it’s about as poor as you might expect.  Here’s the conference, in order of defensive yards per point, from best to worst:

TEAM	YARDS	POINTS	YPP
Alabama	958	42	22.81
LSU	1311	64	20.48
Vandy	1117	63	17.73
Florida	1293	74	17.47
Arkansas	1942	114	17.04
Ole Miss	2042	123	16.6
Tenn.	1353	82	16.5
Auburn	2199	137	16.05
Miss. St.	1754	118	14.86
Kentucky	1812	123	14.73
S. Car.	1551	119	13.03
Georgia	1293	103	12.55

Oof.  Georgia looks like the high school slut of the SEC there.  Easy.  It takes almost twice as much yardage to score against Alabama as it does the Dawgs.

But here’s where the fun part comes in… what if you take out all the scores that weren’t allowed by these teams’ defenses and then match up defensive ypp?  Well, I went back through the box scores and did just that.

TEAM	YARDS	POINTS	YPP	S/T PT	OFF PT	ADJ PT	ADJ YPP
Alabama	958	42	22.81	0	0	42	22.81
LSU	1311	64	20.48	0	0	64	20.48
Vandy	1117	63	17.73	7	14	42	26.6
Florida	1293	74	17.47	0	7	67	19.3
Arkansas	1942	114	17.04	7	14	93	20.88
Ole Miss	2042	123	16.6	0	14	109	18.73
Tenn.	1353	82	16.5	0	0	82	16.5
Auburn	2199	137	16.05	0	7	130	16.92
Miss. St.	1754	118	14.86	0	7	111	15.8
Kentucky	1812	123	14.73	0	14	109	16.62
S. Car.	1551	119	13.03	0	0	119	13.03
Georgia	1293	103	12.55	14	21	68	19.01

That, as they say, is more like it. Georgia jumps from twelfth to sixth, just behind Florida.

A few observations I draw from the data:

• It’s not that I’m running this exercise to show that defensive yards per point is misleading.  Quite the contrary:  points are points.  A pick-six counts just as much as a seventy-yard touchdown drive.
• But it’s pretty clear in Georgia’s case that if it can clean up the peripheral scoring issues it’s creating with turnovers on offense and mistakes on special teams, the defense left to its own devices can more than hold its own.
• One reason Alabama and LSU look so formidable defensively is that they don’t give up the easy score elsewhere.
• How much of South Carolina’s rank on the board do you blame on Ellis Johnson and how much on Stephen Garcia?
• Vanderbilt’s defensive coordinator is Bob Shoop.  If the Commodores can keep up anything close to the early pace they’ve established on defense, it’ll be borderline criminal if we don’t hear his name in the mix for this year’s Broyles Award.  (Or, after the season, on a candidates list for some school with deeper pockets looking to upgrade an underperforming defense.)  Those are some damned impressive results.