Sometimes, stats do have a story to tell.

Top passing offenses last 2 years (by yards/attempt): Baylor (9.9), UGA (9.4), FSU (9.4), Bama (9.1), KSt (8.9).—
David Hale (@DavidHaleESPN) April 03, 2014

It’s when you break that down that it gets a little interesting.  In 2012, Georgia led the nation in yards per passing attempt, at 10.0 ypa.

Last season, Georgia’s 8.9 ypa was good for eleventh nationally.  “Aaron Murray threw past 20 yards only 9.6% of the time. His throws were focused more on the shorter zones, hitting the 6-10 yard range 23% of the time compared to an average 16.6%.”

Either Murray developed a noodle arm, or his game was affected by all the injuries to his receiving corps.  Which do you think?

Friday morning buffet

Plenty to sample…

• Here’s a shocker:  “But as the College Football Playoff’s selection committee wrapped up two days of meetings at the Gaylord Texan on Thursday, it’s clear that objectivity is a sticking point as the college football season draws closer.”
• Patrick Garbin tells us that over the last two decades, experience has nothing to do with the performance of Georgia’s offensive lines.  I think that’s supposed to relieve us.
• For some reason, Vanderbilt has decided to move its home game against Ole Miss to the Titans’ stadium, which seats 68,798.  That seems like an invitation for OM fans to come fill the place up.
• This doesn’t sound good:  “The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation of Florida State University into whether its handling of the Jameis Winston rape allegations violated Title IX laws…”
• How would you like it if Finebaum hosted a live show from Sanford Stadium?
• Texas paid $266,990 to a search firm to help find Charlie Strong.  I bet most of us would have offered to do the job for a tenth of that.
• Here’s a look at how much of a role conversion rates and big play potential on both offense and defense as well as field position played in determining the last ten BCS champs.
• Marc Weiszer takes stock of how Georgia’s new focus on special teams is going.
• Tramel Terry, on life as a new defensive back:  “Each day it’s getting better and better. I’m just trying to get all the little terms and get them out on the field instead of thinking so much. Other than that I’m fine. I’ve just got to work hard in the summer time and get my feet right. I feel like I’ll be fine and be ready to play this year.”

Much ado about nothing

Once again, here’s a post that shows, contrary to the insistence of many who love to believe otherwise, that penalties committed have little to do with a team’s wins and losses.

Wednesday morning buffet

Grab a plate.

• Tracy Rocker sounds pretty no-nonsense about his charges:  “You produce, you stay,” Rocker said. “You don’t produce, next. It’s all about playing with the right combination and to get guys to produce with full-speed effort. That’s the most important thing. That’s what I’m working on up front is effort. Try to eliminate the MA’s (missed assignments) and go forward.”
• Bill Connelly looks at how the 2013 FBS teams ranked in order of their per-game difference between projection and reality as to offensive and defensive scoring efficiency.  Georgia ranks 116th.  He didn’t speculate how much of that to chalk up to luck, randomness or something else, but perhaps I need to dust off the ol’ “regression to the mean, bitchez!” meme.
• Another day in paradise on Finebaum.  (Do any of his listeners actually care about basketball?)
• Athlon ranks the SEC head coaches.  I don’t get how you can put Malzahn ahead of Miles, but that’s just me, I guess.
• Kirby Smart is coaching defensive backs again, drawing upon his experience at Georgia:  “He just coaches us at a different level, trying to get us to understand it from his point of view because he played the position and he knows what’s going on…”  They should be awesome in run support this year, if that’s the case.
• Today, Quayvon Hicks is Georgia’s only healthy scholarship tight end.
• One reason CAPA is going to Washington:  “One obstacle in securing some of the protections we want is the NCAA is colluding and excluding opportunities for trust funds. To solidify an antitrust exemption would be to the detriment of player protections.”
• Malik McDowell has outlasted his momma.
• I missed this when it came out, but Pete Fiutak’s April Fools’ story about Herschel finding a loophole in the NCAA eligibility rules and announcing a return to Georgia is a fun read.  Richt then joked, “If you can find an extra year of eligibility for Champ Bailey and Richard Seymour, we’d find a spot for them, too. ”

Monday morning buffet

As you might expect, there’s a little extra union-y seasoning in the chafing dishes this morning.

• Not funny, Hutson:  “A noodle arm like me, it’s takes quite a bit of effort for a kid from Florida that can run to get it out there,” Mason said. “I try to crow hop and throw it as far as I can so I don’t underthrow him because I’m going to hear it from (offensive coordinator Mike) Bobo if I underthrow him. “
• Nick Saban’s buying another recruiter.
• Vanderbilt is keeping an eye on unionization.
• Spurrier, on his players coming to him with a list of union demands:  “Well, the NFL has a players association. They did that to their coaches and their owners. The owners and coaches said, ‘Yeah, OK, we’ll do that.’ They want to play, they don’t want anything unrealistic.”
• The Sporting News gives its list of the ten greatest Georgia players of all time.
• Going to Congress about unionization?  Two can play at that game.
• The Tennessee legislature considered a bill that would have required all of Tennessee’s Division I institutions to pay 1% of revenue from tickets, merchandise, and broadcast licensing to a Student Athletic Trust Fund run by the state.  Shockingly, UT opposed the bill.
• Chase Stuart suggests it may be time for us to take QBR more seriously.  (It would be easier for me if ESPN didn’t pimp it relentlessly.)
• You’ve got questions?  CAPA’s got answers.
• Predictably, Kevin Scarbinsky thinks an Alabama-Auburn playoff rematch would blot out the sun.
  Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2014/03/30/3021177/georgias-davis-focusing-on-football.html?sp=/99/160/166/#storylink=cpy

Wednesday morning buffet

Dig in, peeps.

• From his new role as H-Back, Quayvon Hicks vows that this year will be different.  “I fell off and it won’t happen again,” the junior said. “I’m going to do what I’ve got to do to make sure I’m on the field all season this coming fall.”  I’ll leave it to you to ask the obvious follow-up question.
• Football Study Hall looks at how sack rates affect point production.
• Barrett Sallee argues that SEC teams have a track record of thriving with inexperienced quarterbacks.
• Division III is struggling financially, but is is likely opposed to the easiest way to cut costs, limiting the number of teams in the NCAA championships.  Typical.
• Man, it hurts a little reading this.  What could have been.
• The NCAA is looking at adding parties other than college presidents and giving them voting rights to its Board of Directors, while reserving an option go into a president-only executive session when desired.  Accountability without effect – it’s the NCAA way!
• Another Mark Richt has lost control incident.  You think he’ll make a crack about it?
• Dr Pepper spends the money to have its name plastered on the CFP championship trophy.

The stat guy and the analyst

I think Gary Danielson is one of the best color guys in the business.  His opinions on other aspects of college football, though, often don’t click with me.  That being said, I found this exchange he had with Bill Connelly at the recent Sloan Sports Analytics Conference to be a fun read I thought I’d share:

Gary Danielson: To me, stats tell the story of what has happened, not what will happen. I find it interesting, but I just don’t use it a lot. I played for the Lions, and I thought we had a chance to win every game. I didn’t want to find out that we didn’t.

It’s hard to put in highbrow stats into a game. It’s not like the NFL game — it’s a lot different. So many players, such different talent levels. The stats I use are most closely associated with the credible stats that Cris Collinsworth gets in the NFL.

Let me ask you this: If a team, according to stats, gets inside the 20-yard line four times, and they don’t score any touchdowns, is that a good thing?

We actually chatted about this for a few minutes. His point was that creating scoring opportunities is a very positive thing (and potentially a sign that you’ll be creating more), but blowing opportunities is tough. Teams quite often lose because of blown chances (see: Iron Bowl 2013), but teams that generate opportunities are likely to keep generating opportunities. The bottom line: stat folks are often seen as searching for concrete, black-and-white conclusions. Yes, you should absolutely go for it on fourth down here. Yes, this is good, and this is bad. Et cetera. That’s the common perception. But really, it’s the exact opposite. Most stat lovers revel in the gray area, the total lack of concrete answers.

Both get some good points in.  A guy like Bill isn’t arrogant enough to suggest stats paint a black and white world, but there are people out there – shoot, there are commenters here – who will try to insist otherwise.  On the other hand, sometimes there’s more to learn about the sport in Bill’s gray area than Danielson seems ready to admit.

The real issue is that college football is a much harder sport to illuminate with statistical analysis than most others.  But that doesn’t mean the search doesn’t have its rewards.

“You’re hiding all the good numbers from me.”

There are so many ways ESPN’s influence over the sport of college football depresses me.  Here’s another one, straight from MIT’s eighth Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

The panel, like the other larger productions at Sloan, is being held in a spacious ballroom at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Its organizing idea so far has been a particular cogent observation by Oliver, which is that “best” and “most deserving” are two completely different things when it comes to ranking teams for inclusion in a playoff. Addressing both separately, instead of trying to cram them into one metric, is a perfectly sensible thing to do, and for this, ESPN has brought all its considerably weaponry to bear. Oliver and other senior analytics staff have spent the last two years immersed in college football, which has lagged behind other sports in statistical sophistication…

… But we haven’t really talked much about CHAMP and FPI during the football playoff panel. It’s been more focused on how the individual SOS and dominance numbers are good tools for committee members to look at, if they want. It’s enough to make you wonder why ESPN would even bother with the catch-alls. Then, suddenly, Rece Davis, Mark May, and Lou Holtz are bellowing down at the audience in Ballroom A at the Hynes from two giant screens, projected on either side of the room, howling about who the best team in the country is. “Alabama,” says a grinning Holtz. “They’re the best team in the country, they don’t have the best record—that’s the problem.”

… It’s an open secret that the ESPN analytics team generates far more data than it makes public, and certainly more than make it onto TV. “We’re still a TV company first,” many analysts will tell you in private moments, when you ask about stuff that only lives on “dot com.” This means that anything that isn’t generated for a specific story will get dumped into what’s called an NST (notes, stats, trends) pack, and sent out as notes to anchors. If you really like an item, you might phrase it in 140 characters or less, to make it tweetable, though those often go unclaimed as well. You learn whom to pitch to (Kirk Herbstreit is great; Jay Bilas is a sponge) and whom to avoid (maybe stay away from Corso). ..

… That isn’t evil; it’s just good sense. ESPN is not a statistics-generating non-profit put on Earth to further our understanding of sports. But it is the tension at the heart of the entire conference: TV personalities using numbers and concepts with their edges sanded down, a platform (panel, conference, network) that often insists analytics are dichotomous with all other forms of knowledge about sports…

It’s not enough to have various talking heads spinning a narrative your way. ESPN arms them with serious looking metrics that ESPN in its infinite wisdom has concocted to make them sound more authoritative to the listening public. And to, who knows, maybe even a selection committee or two.  That’s some seriously pernicious power there.

Going for two

The NFL is pondering changing the extra point rule because it’s almost automatic now.  That’s not exactly the case on the college level, but given there’s a certain percentage of folks who think that anything the NFL adopts should automatically be considered by the NCAA, you might be interested in reading what Chase Stuart has to say about the prospects of a mandated two-point play rule.

Say what you want about the tenets of Bill Snyder’s offense, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.

Bill Connelly starts with a pretty interesting premise.

The word “spread” has come to describe about 38 different styles of offense in college football. If you line your tight end up detached from the line, you’re a spread. If you utilize mostly four wideouts, you’re a spread. Hell, if your quarterback lines up mostly in the shotgun, you’re a spread. These all have kernels of truth in them, but at this point, the spread has mostly lost its meaning. Saying a team runs a “spread” offense tells you almost nothing about what kind of offense the team actually runs.

At its heart, though, the spread ethos is about putting playmakers in space and giving them room to make plays. It originally developed as an underdog tactic of sorts, as a way to spread out and harry more talented defenses and hopefully force some mistakes. But there is a certain level of tactical superiority to the idea, and after a while, a lot of the most talented teams in the country began to employ more and more spread tactics.

And uses that to get to the following line of inquiry:

But who actually spread you out the most in 2013? Whether a team is actually doing it well or not, the spread is designed to create numbers advantages and get the ball-carrier away from a mass of tacklers. That often leads to solo tackles. So which offensive systems led to the most solo tackles?

There are some interesting results, with this leading the way.

The most interesting team on the list might be right at the very top, however. Kansas State was the most spread-’em-out team in the land according to this method. That seems quite strange, at least until you read what Mike Nixon wrote about KSU back in 2012.

No matter what the defenses throw at them, the Wildcats can adjust and exploit the holes of the defense. Mixing in a balance of traditional offset I-formations, single-back two tight end formations, several three-, four-, and five- wide spread variations, and even a dose of the Wildcat, KSU creates endless headaches for opposing coaches.

Even better yet, the Wildcats are extremely balanced in their run/pass splits out of each formation. While some teams become extremely predictable when they line-up in particular formations, KSU seems to do an incredible job of self-scouting to ensure they do not fall into any formation tendencies and become predictable. Whether it’s a strong play-action game out of the offset I-Formation or running a quarterback lead draw out of a shotgun spread formation, the Wildcats make sure opponents are threatened across the board in every formation they show.

The Air Raid gets the attention, but KSU creates a spread ethos in a way that includes a lot of tight ends and fullbacks (and about two good receivers). The Wildcats are incredibly unique, and considering they ranked 14th in Off. F/+ in their first year after Collin Klein left, it appears they know what they’re doing.

It’s funny how much Bill Snyder’s name comes up when you study college ball.  He’s a damned good coach.