And surprised. I wouldn’t have guessed that Quan’s name was called so much. I regard him as a reliable receiver with good hands, but it looks like he has big play ability. I’m also encouraged by the number of short yardage touchdowns Vondrell punched in. It’s great to have a super-speedster like JC, but it’s equally important to have a guy that can road grade the ball against goal line-D. The loss of JC will hurt . . .someone is going to have to step up. My vote is for some option plays involving Chiles, McGee, DeSean Hales, two tight ends, and receivers that can block downfield.

First off, how do you expect me to read that list of figures with Brooke Daniels waiting there in the next article?
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Now that I’m back, what jumps out to me is that we clearly lacked a consistent offense last year. We rolled the dice and sometimes we came up winners, but without the big play we could just not get the job done. I take this as an indictment of the offensive scheme in general and poor line play in particular. The line may get better this year, but will the offense?

include sacks? Sacks can really disrupt your offense and are a killer in yards per play.

Since Im on my lunch break…

I was thinking about this, and touchdowns are always difficult to look at in my opinion. I mean if Charles busts a 75 yard touchdown, does that really mean our offense was running better, or does it mean something happened that cause an opening, and he could have scored from 5 yards out, 50 yards out, or even 500 yards out (if possible I mean, you get the idea).

The yards on the touchdown therefore in my opinion dont really count toward evaluating the offense. If you want to know how well the offense was working, it could also be useful to see how they set up that touchdown. Is the difference between a FG drive and a TD drive then if that home run play opens up? If coverage is blown or Jamaal shakes one extra guy? Or is the offense really working better on one rather than the other?

To attempt to get an idea about this, and since PB provided the numbers, I took the yards gained on the drive, and subtracted out the touchdown play’s yards.

This gives us a number representing what the offense did right before it scored a touchdown.

Average Yards Before Touchdown: 47.2
Yards per play Before Touchdown: 6.56

Now, looking closer at the field goal drives, one should be eliminated from that list. The 40 yarder against OkState came at the end of the game. Further conventional offense in this case was not an option. The aggie one was at the end of the quarter, but seeing how it was 4th and 2 at the time, I think its safe to leave this one in.

This takes a poor sampling size, and makes it damned near ridiculous though, but just for sake of argument, here are the revised numbers with that case removed.

Avg Plays: 9.33
Avg Yards: 53.5
Yards/Play: 5.73
FG Length: 38.67 (Minus 17 yards means average drive ended on the 21.67)

That OkState FG drive was right at the averages, so it didnt change the numbers much.

The last thing I wanted to look at was field position. On the FG drives, our best starting position was on the opponents 34, with an average position at the 24.8 yard line. So I took the TD data, and took it down to a subset, to include only the drives that started at the 34 yard line or worse. Those drives gave me the following numbers:

Avg Plays: 8.77
Yards: 79.05 (Avg position then starting on the 20.95 yard line)
Last Play Average = 20.4
Yards/Play = 9.01
Yards Before Touchdown = 58.64
Yards/Play Before Touchdown = 6.68

Again, the sampling size is pretty small, so all of this can be taken with a half of a salt grain, but heres some thrown together conclusions for discussion anyway.

1) First off, average yard line for field goal is damned close to the average length of a touchdown play. The amount we came up short of a TD equaling the amount we usually got for a TD seems to imply that the big play is the difference maker. If that hole opens, we score, if not, we fall short and settle.

2) Field position seemed to have little impact our TD drives. The stats are surprisingly similar between the long drives, and the easier ones. However I do think its worthy to point out that no FG drive started with good field position. Perhaps its a consolation that we didn’t settle for field goals on scoring drives from inside the opponents 34. Of course we didnt look at missed FGs, turnovers, failed drives, etc… But whatever, I want to hang my hat so I am.

3) Texas on the entire season had a yards per play average of 6.17, which is right smack dab in between the yards per play before a touch down, and the yards per play before a field goal. Perhaps the offense was working less efficiently on those drives, or perhaps there just more big plays within the TD drives that jump up that average.

4) I also wonder what these numbers look like on other teams, particularly those numbers discussed in point 1. Is this a usual occurrence? Or should there be more of a discrepancy between what you score on, and what you have left to go on field goals?

Honestly, you could say that about any sport. Teams can grind out points at times, obviously, usually the team with the largest number of easy points (for football, that means big plays…for basketball, it would mean fast break points or maybe wide open shots) wins. That was one of the initial thoughts behind my Points Per Play (PPP) measure, and it’s starting to ring true with correlations to wins as well (I have a post about that coming up this weekend…I know, you’re a-twitter just thinking about it!).