Analytics, Basic Stats, and Recent Historic Context: The ABC’s of Penn State Football – Maryland Recap

That was a disaster and the chaos is likely to continue.

Introduction

Welcome to our new weekly feature on fortheblogy.com where we’ll look at a mixture of common and advanced stats for the team’s most recent “performance” in the context of the entire James Franklin tenure and try, as frightening as it might be, to predict where this team is headed. There are other writers on the site who will continue breaking down the schematic elements of the team and I will focus on results through a mix of math and cool (hopefully) data visualizations – this is the ABC’s of Penn State Football. Enjoy!

Basic Statistics – Summary

In case you couldn’t watch the game, or blacked out and have memory loss, Penn State was thoroughly beat down by the Maryland Terrapins. The table below shows the common boxscore statistics and if you didn’t watch the game, you’d might think that, while Penn State lost, it was kind of close. It wasn’t close though. From start-to-finish, on both sides of the ball, this game was never close and the Nittany Lions were uncompetitive in virtually every way. Yes, Penn State outgained Maryland and had a time-of-possession advantage but neither of these things mattered as Maryland demonstrated good efficiency (6.6 yards-per-play), aggressive defense (+3 turnovers), and, as with virtually every other Penn State opponent in the last several years, the ability to throw the ball at will (nearly 11 yards per pass attempt). 

Basic Stats Offense – Context

Since the start of the James Franklin era, from Jon Donovan, through Joe Moorhead and Ricky Rahne, to today, Penn State’s offenses have averaged 5.8 yards per play (YPP) excluding FCS opponents. Coincidentally the low water mark for the team was the 2014 game against Maryland with a 2.6 average YPP. In total, 82 games have been played against FBS opponents and yesterday ranks as the 16th worst performance based on YPP. This wasn’t against the historically good Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, or Iowa defenses. This was against a Maryland defense that is currently giving up 5.9 yards per play and in a game where Penn State ran 93 offensive plays. Since 2014, there have only been two other games where the offense ran over 90 plays – 2017 Iowa (99 plays for 579 yards; 5.8 YPP) and 2018 Indiana (92 plays for 573 yards; 6.2 YPP). Both of those other games ended up with Penn State winning. Yesterday’s 93 play performance did not and frankly, demonstrated a level of offensive ineptitude that we haven’t seen in years.

In addition to the lack of ability to generate yards despite an abnormally high number of offensive plays, Penn State abandoned the run game yesterday by throwing on 61% of their plays (57 pass attempts to 36 runs). This is also an unusually high number and represents one of only ten games in the last 83 where the pass play ratio exceeded 60%. Penn State is 3 – 7 when it throws on 60+% of their offensive plays in games including 2016 Minnesota (overtime win), 2017 Michigan State (rain delay loss), and 2019 Minnesota (loss, many terrible interceptions). The other 6 games were all coordinated by Jon Donovan.

Basic Stats Defense – Context

In the 2014 loss to Maryland, which was the offense’s most anemic performance since 2014, the Penn State Defense kept it close by only allowing 2.9 yards-per-play (YPP-A). Last year, in the 59 – 0 drubbing of Maryland, the defense gave up 2.2 YPP-A and overall, since 2014, the defense has allowed 4.85 YPP-A. For reference the FBS average defense allowed 5.7 YPP-A in the last six years. Penn State’s defense has been above average in yardage (and far above average in points) allowed since Franklin took over. Yesterday, Penn State gave up 6.6 YPP-A. As we watched former Penn State recruit Rakim Jarrett beat our secondary time and time again yesterday, I knew it was bad. I didn’t think it was that bad though. This ranks as the 7th worst performance since 2014. Very unfortunately for the rest of the year is that the 6th worst game was last week against Ohio State (6.7 YPP-A). 

For the past several years, the Penn State passing defense has been suspect. From J.T. Barrett, Dwayne Haskins, Brian Lewerke, Peyton Ramsey, and Tanner Morgan fans have been witness to seeing offenses dissect the back seven of Penn State. Again, yesterday was no exception and was frankly worse than a number of those games mentioned above. Maryland’s offense gained 10.8 yards-per-passing attempt and shredded the defense yielding the 5th worst performance since 2014. In the graph below, no, the 32 yards-per-attempt is not a typo. That was the 2015 Army game where they threw and completed one pass for those 32 yards. Interestingly, when PSU yields more than 9 yards-per-attempt they have an 8 – 4 record. This does not give me confidence going forward though…

Advanced Stats – Offense

Throughout the past couple of years, I’ve been working on developing a few different stats to predict game outcomes and rank teams. Some of those stats include Havoc Avoidance for offense (the opposite of Bill Connelly’s Havoc rate for defenses), ball control, explosiveness, and then the overall offensive and defensive ratings. Here, rather than look at individual game performance, we’re going to evaluate the 2020 season compared to the average seasonal performance from 2009 to 2019. 

We start with Havoc Avoidance Rate (HAR). HAR is an offense’s ability to not have negative plays. Negative plays include sacks, tackles-for-loss, interceptions, and fumbles lost and is calculated by summing those four metrics and then dividing by the total plays run. Against Maryland the Penn State offense had a HAR of 80% meaning that something bad happened 20% of the time. The 2020 HAR has been pretty good (89% against Indiana) to poor (77% against OSU). One of the hallmarks of Kirk Ciarrocca’s offenses has been the ability to avoid havoc plays. With this team though, it appears he may be losing grip of that and the mistakes of the offensive line, quarterback, and coaching are adding up. 

Next, we’ll look at the offensive explosivity. The explosivity calculation is based on a combination of yards and points per 100 plays. An average team has an explosivity value of 19 and good teams are over 30. This Penn State team lacks any amount of explosion and if holds at the current pace will rank as the worst team in FBS since at least 2009. That is not hyperbole. The worst ranked team was 2013 Florida International with a value of 3.7. So far, Penn State has generated explosion values of 1.96 (IU), 1.43 (OSU), and 0.9 (Maryland). The offense just can’t seem to do much. They control the clock and sort of move the ball but there are no big plays, they don’t score at even close to a mediocre rate and this is very disheartening to watch. On the bright side, there’s literally nowhere to go but up.

Finally, for offense, let’s look at the Overall Effectiveness (OE) score. This is a combination of ball control, ability to score, and implicitly HAR and explosivity. Again, we’re very hopefully at the bottom in this calculation. An average offense has an OE of 30. The teams led by Joe Moorhead, and even Ricky Rahne were above average offenses, often ranking in the top 20 or so of the country. Kirk Ciarrocca’s teams also tend to rank very high because they’re good at both controlling the ball and generating points. This team sort of gets half of the picture and does good things to control the ball but can’t score and is demonstrating below average performance with yesterday’s game being considerably worse then either of the first two contests. The Indiana game, despite the mistakes, was nearly average. OSU showed a bit of a drop but was still near average. Yesterday was a disaster with a value of 18.9 which is close to the memorable offensive performances of Jon Donovan in Franklin’s first two years. 

Summary

From a statistical standpoint, this team is in bad shape and the outcomes are becoming increasingly concerning. Both the offense and defense are underperforming expectations by considerable margins. Based on the basis statistics, if both sides of the team play like this through the year, they likely will not win a game and since the close loss at Indiana, it is getting worse. In the advanced stats, the offense is downright brutal at both generating positive plays and overall. By explosiveness, they are historically bad through three games and yesterday there was nothing that would make people think that is going to get better. Obviously, this is frustrating because of what we expected from the team this year. Yes, there were injuries and departures, but we expected to have the talent to overcome that. Also, we had a QB with experience and new offensive coordinator with a pedigree of success and building strong quarterbacks. Next week, we’ll explore more on the defensive advanced stats (to note, they’re not much better), but for now, all we can do is hope that this team and the coaching staff find the heart and wherewithal to overcome and turn the tide. This will be the most pressure any of them have felt and we’ll learn a lot in Lincoln on Saturday.