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Official Statistical Analysis Thread

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I'm not surprised at all by the importance of passing efficiency offense and defense. I've always looked at both of those closely, although I think yards per pass attempt, which I look at first, is probably a lot of what goes into the formulas and is a simpler proxy for it.

Ridiculous as it is to make any request of you at this point DBB, I'd love to see how strongly an efficiency metric that Phil Steele likes, yards per point (both offensively and defensively), correlates to winning if the numbers can easily be derived on your spreadsheet from the total O and D and scoring O and D stats. I remember from Steele's mag that the 2002 OSU D allowed 24.5 yards per point, which is absolutely off the charts outstanding (bigger numbers are better defensively and worse offensively).
 
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Jagdaddy;903820; said:
I'm not surprised at all by the importance of passing efficiency offense and defense. I've always looked at both of those closely, although I think yards per pass attempt, which I look at first, is probably a lot of what goes into the formulas and is a simpler proxy for it.

Ridiculous as it is to make any request of you at this point DBB, I'd love to see how strongly an efficiency metric that Phil Steele likes, yards per point (both offensively and defensively), correlates to winning if the numbers can easily be derived on your spreadsheet from the total O and D and scoring O and D stats. I remember from Steele's mag that the 2002 OSU D allowed 24.5 yards per point, which is absolutely off the charts outstanding (bigger numbers are better defensively and worse offensively).
Click to expand...

Funny you should bring this up Jag...

Back in our Bucknuts days in '02, I dredged up some old studies I'd done in Statistics 421 at OSU. Back then I'd studied more or less what you're talking about, but I also threw in First-Downs-per-Point as well. Offensive Efficiency is what I called it for lack of a better term. The correlation to winning was very high (don't remember the exact number), but I don't think it was anything like 0.93 like we have for the composite of "The 18".

Anyhoo... The truly amazing team w.r.t. this stat was not so much the 2002 D but rather the 2002 OFFENSE. Not because the defense didn't carry the team that year... they did. But the 2002 offense didn't have any really great offensive numbers, but their efficiency was ridiculously good. Part of that, I am sure, was due to great defense and special teams.

I'm watching my son today while my wife is out of commission, but I should have this done by noon tomorrow.
 
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Quick question DBB, when gaining those scoring statistics, points allowed and points scored, where the people collecting the data sorting out the special teams points and defensive scores such as fumble/int returns and safeties?

The thing that always pissed me off about fantasy football is that you could have a shut out going with your defense and the QB throws a pick six to the other team and the points get charged to your defense when they actually had no hand in the points given up. By that I guess have they filtered the scoring to show that yes the points scored were all offense v. defense?
 
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Bestbuck36;903983; said:
Quick question DBB, when gaining those scoring statistics, points allowed and points scored, where the people collecting the data sorting out the special teams points and defensive scores such as fumble/int returns and safeties?

The thing that always pissed me off about fantasy football is that you could have a shut out going with your defense and the QB throws a pick six to the other team and the points get charged to your defense when they actually had no hand in the points given up. By that I guess have they filtered the scoring to show that yes the points scored were all offense v. defense?
Click to expand...

The data that I use are "Refreshable Web Queries" in a MS Excel Spreadsheet. These queries are linked to data on the NCAA statistics site.

To answer your question: The NCAA site calculates points scored on a team; not points scored on a defense. To be honest, I like it that way.

Scoring Defense is a TEAM effort. I know some people want a measure of how good a defense is which eliminates outside effects. But it takes a whole team to keep the other team from scoring: Offense and Special Teams play their roles in maintaining field position, ball-control and momentum (as well as preventing the opposing Defense/Special Teams from scoring).

Considering all the ways that the "other" aspects of the game affect Defense; eliminating scores that occur when the Defense is not on the field will still not eliminate the effects of the offense and special teams.

Like I said; it's a team game. The stats that I post typically reflect that.
 
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DaddyBigBucks;903959; said:
Anyhoo... The truly amazing team w.r.t. this stat was not so much the 2002 D but rather the 2002 OFFENSE. Not because the defense didn't carry the team that year... they did. But the 2002 offense didn't have any really great offensive numbers, but their efficiency was ridiculously good. Part of that, I am sure, was due to great defense and special teams.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the number for that was around 12 yards per point I think. I suspect that Mo C picking up third and short like Justin Timberlake picking up Hollywood hotties was a big part of it. Tressel's comments about "the punt" notwithstanding, I've always thought 3d and short was the most important play in football.
 
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Jagdaddy;904036; said:
Yeah, the number for that was around 12 yards per point I think. I suspect that Mo C picking up third and short like Justin Timberlake picking up Hollywood hotties was a big part of it. Tressel's comments about "the punt" notwithstanding, I've always thought 3d and short was the most important play in football.
Click to expand...

Your memory is much better than mine Jagdaddy. After putting my son to bed, I ran the number for offense for the past 6 years and found that OSU's offensive efficiency in 2002 was, to be precise, 12.4463 Yards/Point. That is indeed quite good, and only one other OSU team did better in the Tressel era. This year, Troy Smith led the Buckeyes to an offensive efficiency of 11.1089 Yards/Point.

Taking all of the last 6 years together (the Tressel Era), Ohio State is 12th in Offensive Efficiency at 12.75 Yards/Point. Texas is #1 at 11.06 Yards/Point. I hope that xrayrandy doesn't get wind of the fact that Texas has a better number for their 6 year average than OSU has for their best year.

FWIW: The best single-season efficiency rating was achieved by Kansas State's 2002 squad, who managed to score a point for every 9.4485 yards of offense.

The most interesting number that I found though, was the number that Jagdaddy asked for: the correlation to winning.
  • Over the last 6 years, Offensive Efficiency Ranking has a correlation of 0.853 to Winning % Ranking.
On a personal level, this is a vindication of sorts. Not everyone at Bucknuts back in 2002 thought that the "efficiency" stats I posted were meaningful. A correlation of 0.853 over a period of 6 years for all of Div. IA is a slam dunk. This is a very important metric.

The rankings for the Big 10 for the Tressel Era are as follows:

RK__Team_____________Y/P_
1___Ohio State______12.75
2___Iowa____________12.96
3___Michigan________12.98
4___Wisconsin_______13.58
5___Minnesota_______13.71
6___Penn State______14.30
7___Mich State______14.39
8___Purdue__________14.75
9___Indiana_________16.03
10__Illinois________16.52
11__Northwestern____16.75
 
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DaddyBigBucks;904307; said:
Your memory is much better than mine Jagdaddy. After putting my son to bed, I ran the number for offense for the past 6 years and found that OSU's offensive efficiency in 2002 was, to be precise, 12.4463 Yards/Point. That is indeed quite good, and only one other OSU team did better in the Tressel era. This year, Troy Smith led the Buckeyes to an offensive efficiency of 11.1089 Yards/Point.

Taking all of the last 6 years together (the Tressel Era), Ohio State is 12th in Offensive Efficiency at 12.75 Yards/Point. Texas is #1 at 11.06 Yards/Point. I hope that xrayrandy doesn't get wind of the fact that Texas has a better number for their 6 year average than OSU has for their best year.

FWIW: The best single-season efficiency rating was achieved by Kansas State's 2002 squad, who managed to score a point for every 9.4485 yards of offense.

The most interesting number that I found though, was the number that Jagdaddy asked for: the correlation to winning.
  • Over the last 6 years, Offensive Efficiency Ranking has a correlation of 0.853 to Winning % Ranking.
On a personal level, this is a vindication of sorts. Not everyone at Bucknuts back in 2002 thought that the "efficiency" stats I posted were meaningful. A correlation of 0.853 over a period of 6 years for all of Div. IA is a slam dunk. This is a very important metric.

The rankings for the Big 10 for the Tressel Era are as follows:

RK__Team_____________Y/P_
1___Ohio State______12.75
2___Iowa____________12.96
3___Michigan________12.98
4___Wisconsin_______13.58
5___Minnesota_______13.71
6___Penn State______14.30
7___Mich State______14.39
8___Purdue__________14.75
9___Indiana_________16.03
10__Illinois________16.52
11__Northwestern____16.75
Click to expand...

Great stuff. Rep. to be provided after I've spread enough around elsewhere.
 
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I have finally worked the numbers for defensive efficiency. For Ohio State fans, these numbers are a heck of a lot more interesting.

Recall that Jagdaddy asked for the correlation of yards/play to winning %. For simplicity I have chosen to refer to Yards/Play as "Efficiency". Offensive Efficiency is two posts north of here. Defensive Efficiency is below.

On a NCAA wide level, the most striking difference between offensive efficiency and defensive efficiency is in their variability. There is a much bigger difference between the best defensive efficiency and the worst than between the best offensive efficiency and the worst.

The best single-season efficiency was achieved by the 2001 Miami Hurricanes: 28.9320. The worst was the '02 Army squad: 9.6029.

While the variability is very different between offensive and defensive efficiency, correlation to winning is actually very similar.
  • Correlation between Defensive Efficiency Ranking and Winning % Ranking for 2001-2006: 0.848.
Again, this is a very high level of correlation.

Other note-worthy items:
  • OSU led the nation in Defensive Yards/Point in both 2002 and 2006. No other team led the nation in more than one year during Tressel's Tenure at OSU.
  • OSU led the nation in Defensive Efficiency during the Tressel Era. Auburn is the only team in the nation that is within one-full-point of Ohio State in this metric over the last 6 seasons.
  • The Big Ten Rankings for Defensive Efficiency during the Tressel Era are below:
RK__Team__________Yards/Point___national rank
1___Ohio State______19.31________1
2___Penn State______18.22________5
3___Iowa____________17.37_______10
4___Michigan________16.62_______17
5___Wisconsin_______16.31_______23
6___Purdue__________16.12_______25
7___Minnesota_______15.56_______36
8___Mich State______14.00_______72
9___Northwestern____13.90_______74
10__Illinois________13.69_______82
11__Indiana_________13.03______100
 
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I've been waiting for awhile to let everybody digest the numbers above before I break down what I think they mean. Some of you have probably already come to the same conclusion.

The teams that did the best in this metric combined offenses that didn't turn the ball over, great special teams play, and brick wall, punch-you-in-the-neck, not-in-my-house-or-yours-either defense. Bend-but-don't-break might be a term that people like to throw around, but the Buckeyes did not give up 400 yards to ANYONE last year. FWIW, 2006 is the only year this century for which the Bucks can make that claim.

So what do you call that kind of approach? Taking care of the ball, focusing on field-position, etc...

Tresselball is what I'd call it.

Tresselball leads the nation in this metric by a large margin. Teams have to gain more yards on the Buckeyes for every point scored than for any other college football team in existence. USC isn't better at this. Alabama isn't better. Neither is Oklahoma or Texas or Miami or ANYONE.

Let the writers say what they want about Tresselball. Let them use it as a term of derision.

Wear it like a badge of honor.
 
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National Championship Numbers

We're not alone:
The last 7 BCS Championship Games have been lost by a team that had won it at some point in the previous 4 seasons.​

Time to give an old trend new life:
Of the 8 teams that have been blown out (17 or more points) in the NC game since the inception of the old Bowl Coalition; the first four to accomplish the dubious feat (Miami, Florida, FSU, Tennessee) all went on to win an NC game. It took them an average of 3.5 seasons to gain redemption. Three of them won their redemption with a blow-out of their own.​


The 4 teams to have been blown-out in the NC game most recently are; Virginia Tech, Nebraska, Oklahoma and (ouch) OSU.
  • VT has had 2 superior programs join their conference since their beating in the NC game in 2000 (at the hands of one of the 2)
  • Nebraska has averaged 5 losses per season since being pantsed by Miami in the '02 Rose Bowl. They may yet have their redemption.
  • Oklahoma may yet gain their redemption, and it may come soon.
  • Ohio State has not yet had an opportunity for redemption; though it is worth mentioning that of the 4 teams that HAVE redeemed themselves, 2 of them did it the very next year. One of those teams was Florida, who was blown out by Nebraska in the '96 Fiesta Bowl and went on to obliterate the Seminoles for the NC the very next year.
History has a way of repeating itself.
​
 
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Whatever happened to...

Whatever happened to the art of stripping the ball?

Do you remember how in Tressel's first year we had that road game at the Rose Bowl against UCLA (of course)? Do you remember how ferociously our team worked at stripping the ball during that game? Where has that gone?

I wondered about that when I saw Pat Fitzgerald's press conference on BTN. His team won, but the thing that he expressed with the most passion was that his team did not work hard enough to strip the ball. I wondered if our coaches are having that talk with the Buckeyes after 3 straight games of zero turnovers.

So I did what I often do when curiosity gets the better of me. I broke out the spreadsheets. What I found is puzzling.

For Interceptions, Ohio State ranks 15th in the country and 1st in the Big Ten during the Tressel Era (2001-2006) with an average of 15.67 interceptions per season. You may recall that this was an item of particular focus last season after the dearth of picks in 2005. We went from snagging 6 of the opposition's passes in '05 (ranked 108) to 21 interceptions in '06 (ranked 3rd nationally).

Well maybe it's time to focus on stripping the ball and recovering it; because our ranking in Fumble Recoveries is not quite as good.

Ohio State has recovered, on average, 8 fumbles per season over the past six years. Only FIVE teams in Div. I-A (or whatever) have recovered FEWER fumbles in that time, and one of them (FIU) has only been I-A for one of those seasons. For the curious, the other teams are Kansas, LSU, SMU and Illinois. Our 12 fumbles recovered in 2002 was the most during that time. Our ranking of 47th in the country in 2001 (10 recoveries) was the best during that time.

FWIW: USC had the best average in the nation for BOTH interceptions (18.83 - tied with VPI) and fumble recoveries (16.00) from 2001 to 2006.
 
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Your memory is much better than mine Jagdaddy. After putting my son to bed, I ran the number for offense for the past 6 years and found that OSU's offensive efficiency in 2002 was, to be precise, 12.4463 Yards/Point. That is indeed quite good, and only one other OSU team did better in the Tressel era. This year, Troy Smith led the Buckeyes to an offensive efficiency of 11.1089 Yards/Point.
Click to expand...
hmm... field position is huge here... as well as take aways... great stuff.
 
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