No words. Should've sent a poet.
What about the basketball preview? Is anyone else majorly excited about the Aggies and Wolverines?
Thank goodness I'm limited to four tickets by the athletic department...how could i resist buying 50 of them otherwise?
Confirming what I had long suspected -- Central Michigan was almost as good (41 percent) on 3rd&15 vs. 3rd&1 (45 percent) and 3rd&2 (43 percent). Fascinating. Brian Kelly is (was) one crazy m----------er.
Thanks for the effort, Brian.
Brian,
Amazing stuff right here. Quite possibly the best you've done yet.
"Also: if the idea of maize and blue on your site is revolting, you can give me two other colors (specified in hex--ie, #A30924--, please) and get pretty team-color-appropriate ones.)"
Huh?? If you don't like maize and blue, then bugger off!
Another amusing graph is Arizona State's offense. I know they're much more effective passing than running, but their WORST third-down scenario is 3rd-and-1. 3rd-and-10 is just about the best. Go figure.
Shouldn't the topic of the day be Michigan officially failing to get an NCAA berth AGAIN!
Makes me sick.
any theories as to why the amazing usc 2005 offense and osu 2006 offense were below average on 3rd and middle distance?
also, may be a function of weak pac-10 defenses (any way to control for conference conversion rate) but the oregon offensive conversion rate, especially on third and long scares me. not looking forward to oregon offense vs. our secondary.
what about fourth down conversions?
Teams attempt so few fourth down conversions in a season that the data would be irrelevant. Going 0-for-1 on 4th-and-3 attempts for the season doesn't really tell you anything about a team's offense.
And I wouldn't be too worried about Oregon. Dennis Dixon might cause some problems scrambling, but just take a look at his QB rating from last year and you'll feel better.
OK, so what is the result of this analysis? what are the conclusions? can we definitively say that the M defense was better than everyone else b/c of all that Green (and lots of red on Chart 2 @ less than 10 yards to go)?
Is is possible to intergate (add up areas of green; - area of red, in) the curves to determine some final # that can rank each defense? and does that number agree with what one would qualitatively say about the merit of a defense?
It seems to me that this is very possible in your chart 1, and since it has been smoothed for 3rd&10, no additional weighting would be needed in that regard. SOS would still be an issue though. perhaps an iterative procedure could be used to rank each offense & defense. what has been done would be the zero-th iteration. then, rank each offense (& D) and assign a weighting factor to each teams O & D (wonky, but it's just a thought). that factor would then be used in the next iteration. recalc as you did here. get new rankings & weightings, recalc, etc etc etc. i don't know if the procedure would necessarily converge however.
I don't know...all this 3rd down info is great to know and it's good to see this stuff presented in a rigorously quantitative manner, but to me it still comes down to turnovers (INTs especially)and yards gained rushing vs yards allowed rushing. win both, and you are the winner of the game better than 90% of the time.
Brian,
Great job with this, I'm blown away. I pilfered the charts and took a look at Nebraska's third downs on DXP. Thanks for all the great work you do.
Interesting note in a tourney-related article on Yahoo Sports...
Thursday night's game between Michigan State and Marquette is more than just a meeting between Tom Izzo and his former assistant Tom Crean.
Crean is considered the heir apparent to the State program when Izzo eventually moves on – either to retirement or the NBA. But there is nothing imminent in East Lansing. There might be, however, in Ann Arbor, where Michigan coach Tommy Amaker is overdue to get fired.
The guy plenty of Michigan fans would love to see replace Amaker? Crean, who wouldn't just be a coach capable of leading the Wolverines back to national championship contention but one who would take a preemptive strike at its archrival up the road.
I was interested in the difference between the offenses of us vs a select few of the other top teams...
I took a look at the combined tendency to get into various 3rd down distances, vs the efficiency at that distance...
xxx 1-3y(eff) 1-5(eff) 6-10(eff) 11-15(eff) 15+
UM 29%(-7.5%) 48%(-5%) 36%(+6) 11%(+3.5) 5%
SC 28%(+3%) 42%(+5.5%) 32%(+5%) 16%(+8%) 10%
UF 24%(+15%) 38%(+12.5%) 35%(+5.5%) 14%(+2%) 14%
OSU 31%(+4.5%) 46%(+1.5%) 29%(-6.5%) 12%(+14.5%) 13%
I eyeballed it, rather than go to the raw data - so there is probably some error, but I think by an large it is correct...
What does this mean - ?
UM and OSU by and large got into more 1-3y and 1-5y situations, with SC close behind, and UF lagging significantly. However, UF converted way more than the NCAA average (+15 to 12.5%) with OSU and SC doing significantly better (+5 to 2%) and UM lagging seriously (-7.5 to -5%). From what I can gather, with the dry "hand it off to tebow" game planning, this can only be summarized as a superiority of UFs O-Line on those short yard situations. Michigan got crushed on where we used to be dominant, and OSU and SC demonstrated about what you would expect. Considering our propensity to get into these short yardage situations, this could only be bad.
At 6-10y UM leads in tries, with UF close behind, and SC slightly behind, and OSU lagging. UM and UF performed only slightly above average here, with SC almost 10% better, and OSU dropping off significantly. How was OSU unable to convert these, yet pull out a whopping 14.5% on plays 11-15y? It is only speculation, but perhaps something with scheme or personnel killed them on those longer middle distances.
UM and OSU had the lowest 11-15y tries with SC and UF slightly more. OSU and SC converted the most, with OSU converting nearly 15% more than average. Wow, could TS have had such a big effect running around back there with the defense spread all over the field? Even so, getting in to less of these situations is always more desirable.
A huge difference is seen at 15+y tries, with UM at only about 5% and others in the 10-15% range. I think this is a definite victory in terms of scheme.
Not only that, but looking at combined 11y+ attempts (including those above 15y) - we had the lowest tendency to get into those situations, only 16%, vs SC26%, UF28% and OSU25%
Continued...
What is the take home? - I don't think scheme by and large is the problem - our offense keeps us in 3rd and lower yardage more often than the others in the comparison group, rarely getting us into 3rd and longer situations...
However, our inability to convert 3rd and short this past year (what used to be our strength), a situation we tend more than most to get into, probably more than any other factor lead to our inability to close out games definitively. Without this ability, we were stalled more drives that should have put games away.
Where do you point the finger? O line personnel? Zone blocking on runs? A combination? All I know is USCs d line ran through us like prune juice through an 80 year old man at the rose bowl, on nearly every play from start to finish.
Someone could probably throw some statistical analysis at it to look at it more definitively - multiplying the tendency to get into a specific distance and the ability to convert that difference - but by and large I think my take home points are on target.
Interested to hear anyone else's thoughts.
"From what I can gather, with the dry "hand it off to tebow" game planning, this can only be summarized as a superiority of UFs O-Line on those short yard situations. "
i think UF went to an empty backfield when tebow was in there, so they also had an extra blocker on these runs. that usually helps.
as for the M 3rd & short issues, i think brian's initial analysis was spot on: the Oline showed a distinct and (most likely) statistically significant deficiency at 3rd & short. at 3rd & NOT short, they were pretty good... so on 3rd & short, did the oline just not execute? or for some reason didn't exercise their talents as efficiently? i think the more likely reason is skeme: the zone probably isn't quite as efficient at "shove it down your throught" scenarios. I will be looking VERY closely at next years playcalling...will the coaches see this issue & move to a more traditional pulling guard skeme on 3rd & short next year?
what would shed more light on this issue is how other zone teams fare (UMinn, Denver, etc) WRT their competition. It would be a BIG discovery if one saw similar trends that Brain saw with M. that would lead to clear and indisputable evidence that the zone skeme is not as effective on 3rd & short.
I feel a sacrifice of several virgins would be the only appropriate response to this gift.
Wow. This is amazing and fucking free!
I used to hate blogs, but um, uh...
Trying. To. Justify. Hating. Real. Data.
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