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Topic: Offensive stat porn
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MikeDeTiger · « **on:** November 28, 2021, 04:38:59 PM »

{ utee94, close your eyes. }

I recently made a claim that times have changed lately and that the Big 12 is no longer a better offensive conference than the SEC. There was a time I was happy to concede that, but I've noticed that SEC offenses have gotten quite a bit more aggressive and creative the last several years. That was the calling card of conferences like the PAC and Big 12 while we were still happy to ground'n'pound. But by the eyeball test, that has shifted quite a bit. So I wanted to see if anything objective could support or refute this idea.

I don't like raw stats for this, because level of competition (i.e. quality of defenses played) and things like situational goals, filtering out junk time, etc. are important to me. So I'd rather one of the advanced stats, the philosophy of which makes sense to me and I more or less agree with as a metric (not the metric....I don't believe in the fabled One Stat To Rule Them All). Bill Connolly took his ball and went home so I can't use S&P anymore, which is a per-play metric. But FEI is still a good indicator, which is a per-drive metric. I went back 4 years, because I thought that constitutes "last few years" and also because I'm lazy and I'm not doing any more work to see when the trend changed. For that same reason I'm only including teams ranked in the top 50 offenses, because 1) lazy 2) I don't care once we get beyond a top 50 offense....you're not that good and not worth talking about in this context.

Results in table below. According to this sample not only is the Big 12 no longer better on the offensive side of the ball, they are in fact lagging behind. If anybody has access behind ESPN's paywall and feels like doing a quick sorting of S&P, I'd be interested to know how it shakes out. When it was available I relied more on that than FEI for analysis. Info available at footballoutsiders.com (and note it doesn't appear that 2021 is updated with yesterday's games, but we've got enough games played prior to that to feel confident that the order won't change much).

BIG 12/SEC OFFENSES IN ORDER OF FEI RANKING THRU TOP 50

MikeDeTiger · « **Reply #1 on:** November 28, 2021, 05:21:00 PM »

The SEC clearly has the advantage in Top 50 offenses over this time frame, but by how much? Again, too lazy to do any serious statistical modeling, but a quick look at the mean would be telling. Also, since the conferences are not the same size I wanted to see how much of each conference is in that Top 50 category, something to give us a bit more apples to apples comparison.

So strictly within the Top 50, the SEC has a higher average offensive ranking every year, with an average difference of about 9....or the average SEC team ranks about 9 spots higher than the average Big 12 team.

The ratio is just % of conference teams that made the top 50. I'm not sure the best way to think about this, but at a glance this appears to be a point in the Big 12's favor. They have a mode of 70% and the mean isn't much different, so it's a pretty decent representation. The Big 12 can be relied on to put nearly 70% of its teams in the Top 50 on a given year. The SEC's mode is 57%, with a mean of 60.79%, which is even closer. So in both cases we're dealing with pretty small variances and thus standard deviations. You can also rely on the SEC to put about 60% of its teams in the Top 50.

So the SEC averages better, but the Big 12 has more teams within the range. The Big 12 also plays a round robin while the SEC might as well be two separate conferences, but fortunately that only matters when trying to figure out something like how difficult the conference is on your defense. (Fortunate because, lolz, I'm lazy and don't feel like coming up with a formula to to analyze it.) When doing a straight comparison of conference offenses, that shouldn't matter.

MikeDeTiger · « **Reply #2 on:** November 29, 2021, 06:01:22 PM »

Tennessee went from being a no-show as a Top 50 offense to #9 this year. Pretty impressive turnaround.

Florida went from a consistent Top 15 O to dropping out of the top 50. That gets you fired in Gainseville.

Georgia is not flashy but are evidently very efficient. #3 offense twice in this time frame, and don't drop lower than mid-20's the other years.

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Topic: Offensive stat porn

MikeDeTiger

Offensive stat porn

MikeDeTiger

Re: Offensive stat porn

MikeDeTiger

Re: Offensive stat porn