Still 4 games left to play. 8.5 points per game better.
For comparison, Clem has 38.
For comparison, Clem has 38.
36 TDs. Passed last year's season total of 35.
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CBS lists 11 throwing td's and 22 rushing td's, for 33 total. Which would still be on track for "improvement" with 4 games left.
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But I think we're arguing about who's the tallest midget at that point.
All that really matters is what we’ve done in conference games. Throw out GaState, Sc St and Charlotte.
We are 89th out of 131 teams in the nation in Total Offense. That's poor. Going to have to do much better than that to become nationally relevant. Don't know how any objective observer could disagree.
It's also kinda misleading too. You think UTSA would be the #12 best offense in the nation if they played our schedule?
A whole bunch of teams ahead of us that wouldn't be if they played our schedule. We play in a league with a lot of good defenses. Not apples to apples.
It's all relative. UTSA also does not have the reputed talent on offense that we have. Furthermore, we have played a lot of horrible and/or poor defenses on our schedule: Arkansas, Vanderbilt, Charlotte, Georgia State, and SC State. And Texas A&M is mediocre, at best.
And we are 10th in the SEC out of 14 teams.
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No, because if you are going to whine about bad performance against those teams, you can't disregard good performances against them.
Apples vs Oranges. Handicap those based on strength of schedule, and we would be much better. Still not good yet, but definitely improving.
Except in our league, our offense sucks under that metric too. And I previously stated we have played some excellent defenses: UGA, Kentucky and Missouri. But, they have been more than countered by the horrendous and/or poor defenses we have played on our schedule: SC State, Charlotte, Arkansas, Vanderbilt and Georgia State.
To dig a little deeper, Arkansas and Texas A&M have the 24th and 20th best strength of schedules. Arkansas has some real athletes on their defense but when you play Alabama, Miss State and even Cincinnati, it can skew the statistics. The same can be said for TAMU who has played a similar schedule plus Ole Miss, Florida and Miami. Neither Ark nor TAMU have poor defenses.
And our strength of schedule is 63rd....not murderous row, the weakest schedule of any SEC team.
What would ha e been helpful was to actually go on record with what sort of "improvement" we wanted to see.
I found some old threads with "you'll still complain if we're in the 50s" and "you'll call it improvement even if we're still in the 100s". (I know which I think is more likely)
But the fact remains, we can be completely inept, but score a couple more tds than last year, and it will be argued that it's "improvement".
The real question is, with a Heisman candidate qb and a healthy 5 star rb, what sort of jump in stats SHOULD we have seen, and have we actually done it?
Imho, we're headed for an off-season of "we've improved" vs "not nearly enough" types of debates.
It just would have been nice if someone put a target out there for what was substantial improvement, worthy of year 2 with an upgrade at multiple positions.
So far the SOS is not great but it will improve when we factor in Tenn and Clemson. But our record will likely worsen as well.
The fact is that while our Total Offense ranking is currently poor at 89th, it's not due to having played a tough schedule at this point.
I'm sure not arguing that our offense is good. I'm as disappointed as anybody. I saw some good things against Vanderbilt. Not having Lloyd forced us to open up the offense a little more. We have played some very good defenses and some bad defenses. Vanderbilt is not a good defense but it helps to get some confidence and momentum after the Mizzou game before playing Florida.
Good coaches, good coordinators adjust to the talent they have on hand. Ole Miss lost their hot shot QB from the previous 2 years and have gone from being pass happy to a superb rushing attack. Their offense is currently ranked 11th in the nation. Kiffin won 10 games in his 2nd season there , finishing as the 11th best team in the country. They are 8-1 currently with a totally different approach to offense from the previous 2 seasons. And Kiffin certainly did not inherit better talent than Beamer did. There is no doubt that Ole Miss is improving, significantly. Every Carolina fan on here wants to see Carolina light up the scoreboard, and more importantly win. Every Carolina fan here is pulling for Beamer and Satterfield. We might be improving but, it's gradual. When you look at Ole Miss and Tennessee, the old Steve Spurrier question comes up: "Why not us?".
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Agree completely.
It's ironic as well to use Kiffin as one of your examples. Not sure if you knew, but he was predicted to fall flat on his face after losing Carrol.
But while I agree with your post, my one idea was that regardless of how the season ends, people will argue they were proven right by the stats. It's the sort of thing where we could have set a reasonable target ahead of time.
We would probably have the same record with their schedule so far. The results for several similar opponents have been similar.
Difference between Spurrier and Beamer is that Spurrier had a track record of getting it done. And Spurrier was not gun shy at making changes on his staff.
I would think 3rd down conversion rate, red zone scoring, would be good metrics to compare. What good does a bunch of yards matter if it isn’t followed up with points? Those are the areas I look to see improvement in.
True, we can also score lots of points, like the beginning of the A&M game, with the offense doing very little.
I get the impression we can devolve into an argument just over which stats to use.
Of course, being from the South we can always find something to argue over...True, we can also score lots of points, like the beginning of the A&M game, with the offense doing very little.
I get the impression we can devolve into an argument just over which stats to use.
Right now we sit at 17 offensive TDs in conference play. Last year we had 19. With two conference games to go, we should surpass that total, though probably not by a whole lot. I guess it depends on how you define "progress".
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Smartest thing I've read on this board this calendar year I believe. It won't get the praise or focus it deserves though. I agree with you. We need metrics. For me, at the end of the season, for offense, I WOULD'VE wanted 28-32ppg and 395-415 yards per game. Both of those metrics would've been reasonable goals for this year. We have an outside shot at the 28-32ppg, but I don't feel confident considering our remaining games are the Orange crush. Idk..., we're currently averaging about 40 more yards a game (368) more than last year (337) and almost 9 points (31.1) more than last year (22.6)......but are we passing the eye test? I'd say no
I think we have more than an outside shot at 28+ ppg, even 30 IMO. Little skewed based on competition thus far, but I think we could have some success on O against them. They're d's aren't world beaters. To finish out the season north of 28 ppg, we only need to average 19 ppg the last 3, which I think is very attainable. To get to 30 ppg, we need 27 ppg, which may be prove much more difficult.
Florida is 114 in Total Defense -
- #1 offense UT
- #3 offense UGA
- #25 offense UTAH
- #36 offense LSU
Tennessee is 81 in Total Defense
- #3 offense UGA
- #17 offense Bama
- #36 offense LSU
- #41 offense Florida
we beat FL last year, & it wasn’t close.
Doing it again-with a better overall record, at their sold-out place, and a bulls-eye(revenge) on our backs would show large improvement, IMO.
GO COCKS! BEAT the GATORS!
Agreed.
The ppg is a complicated stat as (for example) we got 10 points at A&M that could largely be attributed to the defense getting 2 turnovers in the red zone. It would be messy, imo, to go back through each game of last year and this year and weed out those situations.
Another poster focused more on yards per game to eliminate this gap. Measure if the offense is moving the ball.
I honestly don't feel too strongly about this one. I will say that I can't help but think of A&M and how 17 points were scored by special teams and defensive TO's, and the offense managed 13 points that they "earned".
yeah - I posted a couple of weeks ago when folks were talking about our PPG, referencing 42 points (I didn't count the SC State game and missed 10 points in others) that I could think off just from top of head that was from defense and special teams providing less than 33 yards to go - translates to immediate 50 yard FG, or actually scoring themselves. Here below is a full analysis of it.
14 points against Ga State (2 blocked punt TDs)
14 points against Charlotte
7 points against Kentucky (1 yard to go and 5 yards to go from fumble and int)
14 points against SC State (2 yds to go after INT and 32 after 30 yard Punt RT to the 32)
17 points against A&M (KOR TD and INT to 5 yard line & fumble to the 19)
3 points against Vandy fumble to the 17)
69 total points set up by Defense or S/T - 23.4 offensive points. I don't have the time to do last year, but would be interesting to see how they compare against the same metrics.
Nice.
Maybe I'll get to last year, but it would seem to be a big time investment. How did you go about getting those numbers? (Looking for an easy way to duplicate for other years)
just googled us vs x team and used ESPN's play by play - it gives you a drop down list for the drive, so pretty easy to see by just clicking drives less than 33 yards.
Prob would take about 30 - 45 mins or so to put together doing it that way.
We will never KNOW for sure because we are not playing OLE Miss' schedule. Here though is something we do KNOW for sure: one of those 2 programs Total Offense ranking is 11th in the nation. The other school's Total Offense ranking is 89th in the nation. One of those 2 schools is on the cutting edge of college football trends today...... that is playing dominant offense football. The other is just muddling along. I believe we can agree that we hope that changes.
Satterfield reminds me of the offensive version of one of our old defensive coordinators....Wally Burnham. He'd occasionally come up with a game plan that made you think "Hey, he's actually getting it." But then it would back to the normal WTF is he doing on defense.