While I was looking at some stats over lunch today -- if reading and doing math is what I do on my "break," I'm not sure what that says about my actual job -- I came across a few numbers that I thought y'all might be interested in given how frequently we all discuss the play of our offensive line.
Now, before I get into it, I want to note that I'm not delivering this stuff as the definitive assessment of the line's quality or lack thereof this year. We've got a long, long way to go. We're only halfway through the schedule and five of the next six are against conference teams. Further, I haven't crunched lots of other relevant numbers that are probably relevant to the OL's play, and have been unable to see what the metrics developed by people way over my pay grade -- Bill C., specifically -- say about our line.
With that said, considering only games played against FBS teams -- I prefer SEC-only stats, but we're not far enough along for that -- we've earned some fairly impressive OL-centric numbers.
First, there's our sacks-allowed percentage. This is a better stat than "sacks allowed per game" because it accounts for the fact that we're a run-first team. Just by looking at raw sacks-given-up numbers, you'd think that Army or Georgia Tech or Appy St. have the best pass protection every year for the past decade. Ga Tech is actually a great example. Right now, they've given up only 5 sacks all year to FBS teams. That's good for 20th in the country and 3rd in the ACC. But they've only attempted 40 passes in those games (35 attempts plus the 5 attempts that they were sacked on), which is dead last in the country. So in context, giving up 5 sacks is awful -- they've been sacked on 12.5% of all their pass attempts, which is 125th in the nation. (Ga. Southern, another option team, is dead least at a whopping 21.21%. Yikes.)
State has given up sacks on 2.04% of its pass attempts in FBS games, which is 6th nationally and 1st in the SEC. That's pretty strong, especially considering that LSU and Auburn are in the top 3 of the SEC in sacks per game and in the top 15 nationally in that category. (Each average 3 or more sacks a game. AU sacked us twice. LSU sacked us once.)
[By the way, the national sacks-allowed-vs-FBS stat is available here if you'd like to check it out.)
Now on to TFL-allowed percentage. Same deal as the sacks-allowed percentage. The raw numbers favor pass-happy teams. For example, the raw TFL-allowed stat shows that U. Miss. is 5th best in the SEC at preventing TFLs. But given how little they run, their raw numbers should be low. As a percentage of their overall run attempts, their TFLs-allowed numbers are not good -- 15.8% of all their run attempts vs. FBS teams result in TFLs, which is 13th in the SEC.
State has given up TFLs on 6.6% of its run attempts, which is 1st in the SEC. (I haven't found a database for this stat nationally, and I obviously wasn't about to crunch those numbers for the whole damn FBS.) Now, to be fair, we've only faced one really good TFL defense so far. Auburn is 2nd in the SEC and 28th in the country. (UGA is ok, but not stellar. 8th in the SEC and 69th nationally.) But still, not too shabby.
Even though the advanced stats for "highlight" and "opportunity" yards aren't out yet -- those are advanced stats that try to get at an O-Line's impact on rushing production -- our raw yards-per-carry numbers are solid. We're at 5.73 ypc vs. FBS teams, which is 3rd in the SEC. Yeah, that's buoyed a little by our crazy numbers vs. La Tech (8.2 ypc over 40 rushing attempts), but the stats from our three SEC games were pretty solid, all things considered. 48 rushes for 6 ypc vs. LSU, 37 rushes for 4.8 ypc vs. UGA, and and 48 rushes 4.1 vs. AU. And UGA's and AU's rushing defenses are freaking stout -- UGA gives up 3 ypc to FBS teams, and AU gives up 3.2 ypc. (They're ranked 2nd and 3rd in the SEC, both top 15 nationally.)
Also, just to be sure those ypc numbers aren't inflated too much by garbage time, I looked up our YPC while behind in games. While trailing by 14 or less points, we've rushed 39 times for 199 yards, which is good for 5.1 ypc, which is actually lower than our overall ypc. Also, among those 39 rushes, there was a long run -- 59 yards, I think when we were down against La Tech -- without which our ypc while down 14 or less points would decrease to 3.7 ypc. Now, we did a little better when down more that 15 -- 4.81 ypc -- so that certainly needs to be taken into consideration. Still, at least thus far, I don't think that it's just garbage time that's raising the average. (I don't think . . . .)
Of course, all of this means bubkis if the line takes a poo on the field against the teams we should be able to compete with from here on out. Here's hoping that the line continues to gel and gives the RBs room to do their thing and Fitz time to toss out balls for our receivers to drop. Zing!
Anywho, there you go. My PB&J's long gone, so I guess I need to do my pesky job again. Enjoy the daily squabble about the O-Line! I'll check back in later.
