Steele on Georgia, 2013 edition

You can find the link to his preview of #9 Georgia here (note the link there downloads as a pdf).  It’s chock full of stuff and it’s certainly not an unreasonable analysis, as this comment about the offensive line indicates:  “With the way this unit has gone I’m not sure how to interpret this, but the line returns intact w/101 car sts and should be one of the top O-lines in the country.”  I feel ‘ya, Phil.

If you’re looking for predictions, he calls for Georgia to win the SEC East again.  But the most interesting tidbit I’ve gleaned so far comes from his statistical analysis of last season.  I’ve mentioned before that Steele puts a lot of stock in a team’s yards per point metric.

Steele makes a very big deal out of yards per point (YPP).  You can read a breakdown of it here.  Essentially, it’s a measure of offensive and defensive efficiency – the lower a team’s offensive YPP is, the more efficient it is at scoring and the higher a team’s defensive YPP is, the better it is at making its opponents less efficient on offense.

Take a look at Georgia’s defensive YPP numbers.  From 2008 through 2011, they ranged from 12.7 to 14.9.  Last season, that number jumped to 18.2.  That number isn’t Sabanesque, but it’s a big swing in the direction of the elite.  And that’s in a year when SEC offenses improved generally and Georgia’s run defense had its ups and downs.  Maybe Grantham didn’t impress us last year, but it looks like he did alright.