Haven’t run the numbers yet, but pretty sure the Voluntears (sic) defense reached new levels of ass against Spencer and the Other Cocks. Not Jax returning to BP levels of ass… But bad-ass levels of Bad Ass… in a bad way
Now I have run the numbers and... yeah...
Woof, Smokey... Just... woof...
They allowed 453 yards, the same number they allowed to Florida, but against Florida that was actually worse, as Florida's average yardage is significantly less than half of that.
But they allowed a PE of 233.82, to Spencer freaking Rattler. How bad is that?
That's a differential pass efficiency of 1.730. That is almost unbelievably bad. It is so bad that you can only do that bad for a game; NO ONE has a DPE that bad on the season. The worst season-long DPE is Charlotte's at 1.324. So Charlotte allows 32.4% higher passing efficiency than what teams normally get. For one day, Tennessee was more than twice as bad.
How bad is that?
There are 4 Power 5 teams that have had a worse day this season, and some of those are P5 only by courtesy:
- Louisville (against BC)
- Miami Florida (against MTSU)
- MSU (against Minnesota)
- Northwestern (against Wisconsin)
That's it. That's the list. Those are the single-game DPE performances that were worse than what Tennessee did against Spencer.
As some have observed: Yes, Tennessee is usually pretty bad. Their season-long DPE is 1.046, which is 80th in FBS. Seriously... Allowing 4.6% more than your opponent usually gets in PE is 80th in the country. They allowed 73% more PE than Rattler usually gets.
So on the season, Tennessee is ranked 80th, and is thus better than about 39% of passing defenses, better than about 25% of the power 5.
There have been over 600 P5 passing defense performances this year: Tennessee against South Carolina was better than less than 1% of them.