Matt Melton is back with his annual conference review of yards per play. Here’s how the 2019 SEC shaped up:
So we know what each team achieved, but how did they perform? To answer that, here are the Yards Per Play (YPP), Yards Per Play Allowed (YPA) and Net Yards Per Play (Net) numbers for each SEC team. This includes conference play only, with the championship game not included. The teams are sorted by division by Net YPP with conference rank in parentheses.
First off, the gap between Georgia and Florida was much smaller than that between Georgia and the top teams in the West. You hate to see that.
That being said, neither the Dawgs nor the Gators underperformed based on net YPP. You know who did?
For the statistically inclined, the correlation coefficient between a team’s Net YPP in conference play and their conference record is around .66. Since Net YPP is a solid predictor of a team’s conference record, we can use it to identify which teams had a significant disparity between their conference record as predicted by Net YPP and their actual conference record. I used a difference of .200 between predicted and actual winning percentage as the threshold for ‘significant’. Why .200? It is a little arbitrary, but .200 corresponds to a difference of 1.6 games over an eight game conference schedule and 1.8 games over a nine game one. Over or under-performing by more than a game and a half in a small sample seems significant to me. In the 2019 season, which teams in the SEC met this threshold? Here are SEC teams sorted by performance over what would be expected from their Net YPP numbers.
Alabama.
By the way, I knew Vanderbilt had a terrible season, but I didn’t realize how terrible.
As I mentioned previously, Vanderbilt had the worst Net YPP of any SEC team since 2005. Here are the other four SEC teams that make up the bottom five of Net YPP.
Vanderbilt is the lone team to finish three yards per play underwater and they were more than a half yard worse than the second worst team (Houston Nutt’s final Ole Miss squad).
Woof.
Get The Picture 
this is conference play only… seems silly not to use at the very least FBS oppponents… That leaves out ND and GT… I have UGA as +1.7 for year…
FWIW, only 2018 ND (1.3) and 2017 Clemson (1.7) had Net YYP of less than 2.0 in the playoffs.
Teams with higher Net YPP are 9-3 in CFP Semi and 4 -2 in Finals… (LSU was <1 yard lower net than Clemson
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Makes you wonder what could have been with a little offense last year. Since the defense should be even better, it makes you excited that with a little offense what can be this year.
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Just looked back at Georgia’s 2018 YPP on offense and it was 6.71. Just match that in 2019 and it’s a spread of 2.48 which would rank 2nd below LSU. Once again I shall lament that Kirby burned an all-timer defense by prioritizing South Florida recruiting over competent offensive coaching…
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He’s young yet. He’ll learn.
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And 2019 was supposed to be a great offense with the O line and a junior QB plus swift. Big waste
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audibly loud sigh
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Jim Chaney put up a respectable 5th in the SEC with not-so-great roster and Guarantano at QB. I miss the days when everyone said I was an idiot for pointing out that Chaney is a good coach. I’ll also point out that Todd Grantham put up the #2 defense.
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