A penny for the OBC’s thoughts here…
Have at it in the comments.
Daily Archives: September 29, 2023
Romance is dead.
Oy vey.
If I’m Mrs. Day, I’m seriously rethinking my life choices about now.
Filed under General Idiocy
That’s so Georgia Tech.
I lack the words for this, I’m afraid.
Georgia Tech football will debut special black uniforms for Saturday’s home game against Bowling Green. The uniforms pay tribute to the Black Watch defenses of the 1980s.
The Yellow Jackets new look features a glow-in-the-dark black jersey and black pants with white and gold numerals, logos and piping, paired with a gold helmet that includes a black interlocking GT logo.
The game is at 12:30. PM. Glow in the dark jerseys for an afternoon game? At Georgia Tech, you can do that… for some reason.
Filed under Georgia Tech Football, Stylin'
Count down
Kirby Smart was asked about Notre Dame’s personnel meltdown against Ohio State with the outcome of the game on the line, and as you might expect, had some thoughts.
But what’s drilled on the practice field on a Wednesday doesn’t always translate to live-game execution on Saturday. Especially an end-game, all-hell-breaking-loose situation with tens of thousands of people losing their minds around you.
“You can’t simulate the chaos,” says Smart. “And you can’t simulate the stress.”
…
“It’s a little more chaotic as offenses have evolved,” Smart says. “You go back 10 years ago, 15 years ago, we played an LSU-Alabama game [when Smart was a Nick Saban assistant] where they had the same people on the field almost the whole game. As tempos evolved, increasing the number of plays for offenses and offensive personnel, specialized, it’s made defenses try to match and react to that. When you do that, you try to involve more players.”
Smart cited another very modern reason why teams are substituting more: to spread out the snap count and keep players from transferring.
“You can blame some of this on the portal philosophically because you want to play more guys so you can keep them in your program,” he says. “So you’ve got to create roles for guys, and well, you’ve got to sub ’em. Fifty years ago you played 11 players, and that’s all you played. Defensively we’re playing 30 or 40 guys, and that creates confusion within your own group. And offensively, too.
“So more than ever this year, it’s been a concern for me, burning timeouts and organizational things you can’t afford to do. So we’ve put a much larger emphasis on that in practice. We don’t have one guy who looks at it. We have guys in the box who are constantly looking at it.”
Why am I not surprised?
Seriously, leave it to Kirby to tie this back to recruiting/the transfer portal, because for Smart everything begins with personnel. But I also find it interesting that he frets about using timeouts. To reiterate something I posted before, I think he’s given a lot of attention to the premium the new clock rules put on managing your timeouts carefully.
Filed under Georgia Football, Strategery And Mechanics
Orange out
Ugh.
Apparently part of Auburn’s game plan tomorrow is to try to nauseate as many Georgia players as they can. I hope Kirby’s got them ready to deal with this fiendish plan.
Filed under Auburn's Cast of Thousands, Stylin'
“Being explosive and not turning it over — it’s a pretty simple game.”
In the last week or so, I posted something about Georgia’s offense needing to be explosive in order to be successful. Some of you were a little dismissive of the suggestion. To those of you who feel like that, I strongly suggest you read this Seth Emerson post ($$).
You should read it for two reasons. One, your head coach is a big believer:
But Smart, armed with analytics, said it might be something else: explosive play margin, as in which team has more.
“You would think turnovers are a greater indicator,” Smart said, “but explosives are greater indicators of win-loss — of how much more you’re explosive than your opponent.”
Second, call it coorelation, call it causation — whatever, the numbers check out.
But whatever it, is the important thing is differential with your opponent, so you factor in offense and defense. Ole Miss did its own computations and sent them last year to Georgia, and Smart latched on to it because of how much of an indicator of wins and losses it proved to be.
For this story, we’ll go with TruMedia, which defines explosive plays as completions of 16-plus yards and rushes of 12-plus yards. Using those parameters, the No. 1 team in the nation last year in explosive play margin was … drum roll … the national champion Georgia Bulldogs, with a plus-5.6 margin. And the year before, though the Bulldogs weren’t first in that category, they were second: a plus-4.3 margin.
So, how are they doing with net explosive plays thorough four 2023 games? Pretty well…
It’s early, but Georgia is again doing well, averaging 6.3 more explosive plays per game than its opponents, tied for the best in the SEC (with Kentucky) and tied for fourth in the FBS.
There’s a lot more in Seth’s piece, so I would recommend reading it in its entirety, but bottom line, pay attention to explosiveness. Kirby Smart definitely does.
Filed under Georgia Football, Stats Geek!
Get The Picture 