Analytics, Basic Stats, and Recent Historic Context: The ABC’s of Penn State Football — Mike Yurcich, QB Whisperer

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Introduction

Shortly after Mike Yurcich’s surprise hire as Penn State’s new offensive coordinator back in January, we used a wide array of basic and advanced stats to examine how well his previous offenses performed and why Nittany Lions fans’ initial excitement for what could be in 2021 was totally justified. Then, a couple of weeks ago, we crunched various numbers to figure out, at this this point in his career, whether Sean Clifford is more Trace McSorley or Christian Hackenberg. 

Today, we’ll sort of morph those two concepts together.

That is, since 2013, how have Yurcich’s quarterbacks performed and what might that portend for Sean Clifford in 2021? Statistically, we’re going to keep it simple, but I think (hope!) there are some nuggets in here that make us optimistic for the season.

The Basic Basics

First, let’s introduce today’s graph format. 

Mike Yurcich has been an FBS OC and/or QB Coach since 2013 and the plots used throughout this blog post list his team’s performance (orange star) by year. The orange label is the team (obvi) and the orange number is his team’s value (double obvi). The gray dots represent every other FBS team in that particular year. The black bar and black numbers are the mean average for the season and, finally, the table labeled “Sean Clifford Performance” is the value that our man Sean had each season in the same statistical category. Stats in the graph are against FBS competition only while Clifford’s stats are for his full workload. 

Got it? Cool.

With that behind us, here we go!

Pass Attempts

We’ll start with Pass Attempts per Game (PA/G) in the first graph. Since 2013, teams average roughly 32 pass attempts per contest, although PA/G have dropped slightly from then to now. Typically, Yurcich’s teams tend to throw more than most teams, topping out at 39.8 PA/G in 2015 with Oklahoma State. The lowest average was 29.0 PA/G when Yurcich was the Passing Game Coordinator/QB Coach at Ohio State in 2019 with Justin Fields – an outlier that has a lot to do with the Buckeyes blowing teams out, and with Fields’ insane efficiency, which we’ll talk about later. 

In 2019 and 2020, Sean Clifford averaged ~27 PA/G, so history tells us we should expect to see an uptick in the number of times he throws this season. Brief side note: in the original Yurcich ABC’s article, we demonstrated that MY was more pass dominant than his PSU OC predecessors, so this is semi-confirmation of that.

Completion Percentage

Throwing the ball is one thing. Completing it is quite another. So let’s check out completion percentage next.

In this statistical category, Clifford has been perfectly average. His 59% in 2019 and 60% in 2020 matched the mean of his peers. Coach Yurcich’s quarterbacks have been above-average in completion percentage more often than not (4 solidly above-average, 2 average, 2 below). With that said, the four above-average seasons came from either Mason Rudolph (2015-2017) or Justin Fields. However, If Clifford plays to the average of Yurcich’s previous QBs, his completion percentage should rise slightly to 61% – I’d take it.

Passing Yards

Now we move on to Yards-per-Attempt (YPA). Scroll down to the graph. Notice all those orange stars above the black lines? Yeah, us too. Those stars indicate that Yurcich’s teams have never been below-average, and really highlights the impressive yearly progression of Mason Rudolph (2015-2017) – improvement that bodes well for the future of Penn State quarterbacks. Clifford obviously had a regression from 2019 (8.3 YPA) to 2020 (7.5 YPA) and if you go look at the 2020 game logs, it’s not good. Clifford’s YPA for 2020 goes as follows: 6.8, 9.4, 6.0, 4.6(!?), 7.9, 5.8, 6.0, 8.6, 13.0. As I said above, his stats include all games played, so 2019 Idaho counts. If we remove that non-FBS game from 2019, he still maintained a respectable 8.0 YPA, but obviously there’s plenty of room for improvement in this category in 2021.

Clifford also finished behind the FBS average of 231 Passing Yards per game in both his seasons as a starter – 222 YPG in 2019, and 209 YPG in 2020. To be fair, remember, Clifford threw 3-4 less passes per game than the average FBS QB, too. So it’s not unreasonable to assume he’d be at or slightly above 231 passing yards if he had a handful more throws. But, this category also highlights Clifford’s lack of efficiency. For instance, in 2019 Justin Fields under Yurcich’s guidance threw for 41 more yards per game than Clifford despite having 1ish more attempts per contest. And when Yurcich’s offense is truly humming (2017 Oklahoma State) you really see how efficiency (10.1 YPA) manifests into productivity (389 YPG). Can Clifford it be that good under Yurcich? Probably not. But can he be much better than the previous two seasons? Absolutely.

TD-to-INT Ratio

In 2020, Sean Clifford’s TD-to-INT ratio was about half (16/9 = 1.8) of what it was in 2019 (23/7 = 3.3). He had more interceptions in 9 games in 2020 than he did in 12 games in 2019. Interestingly, while the mean average for 2020 was 2.59, Clifford’s 1.8 ratio was spot-on the median average which means that there were a handful of QBs who were pulling up the mean. And, year over year, you can see that the 2.59 mean of 2020 is the 2nd best in our dataset. Here, as discussed before, is a Clifford stat that was markedly better in the 2nd half of 2020 versus the first. In Penn State’s five losses, Cliff threw 11 TDs and 8 INTS (1.4 ratio) and in the four wins he threw 5 TDs and 1 INT (5.0). A TD-to-INT of 5.0 would have put Clifford in the top 15 FBS QBs last season. 

Again, contrast Clifford with Yurcich’s quarterbacks. Once Yurcich got things rolling at Oklahoma State, his QBs posted exceptional TD-to-INT ratios ever since. Take Texas QB Sam Ehlinger, for instance. Ehlinger saw substantial playing time in all four years but didn’t fully blossom until Yurcich arrived. Here’s Ehlinger’s TD-to-INT progression at Texas:

2017: 1.6

2018: 5.0

2019: 3.2

2020: 5.2 

From 2018 to 2019 Ehlinger went from 5 to 10 INTs on about the same number of total attempts. Then, under Yurcich, he reverted back to form with 5 INTs in 2020 (granted on slightly fewer attempts) and had the highest TD-to-INT ratio of his career. This may be reason for optimism considering it mirrors Clifford’s first two years. 

Last point on TD/INT – 2019 Ohio State – WOW! That team had the 2nd highest TD-to-INT ratio (48/3 = 16) since 2009 when Boise State went 37/2 = 18.5 (I excluded 2020 Ohio – only played 3 games – and 2018 Georgia Southern – 110 total pass attempts in 12 games from this ranking). 

I do want to look at one semi-advanced stat and that’s Pass Attempts per TD – a good data point illustrating offensive efficiency. Lower is better with the best possible value being 1. You can see from the graph, the FBS average has been fairly stable in this statistical category for years: basically between 22-23. The best value since 2009 came from Ohio State in 2019 (Yurcich!) with 8.46 Pass Attempts per TD. The 2020 Texas team, with their score of 10.78, ranked 37th out of 1510 FBS teams since 2009. Penn State  ranked 26th for the 2019 season at 13.9 Pass Attempts per TD and then 51st in 2020. Coach Yurcich has never had a “bad” year here,  and has had generational performances in his last two seasons. The mostly-Sean Clifford-led Penn State offenses have been respectable in this this stat, too. I’m not sure what to read into this except it’s clearly a place where both coach and QB have been above average.

QB Rating

Lastly in stats we get to QB rating. It’s pretty much the same story as all the other ones – Yurcich’s QBs have typically been above-average with Justin Fields being amazing; Clifford was somewhat above-average in 2019 and regressed to average in 2020. 

Mason Rudolph, Justin Fields, and Sam Ehlinger were talents and Mike Yurcich seems to have positively influenced their performance. Sean Clifford is on his 3rd OC in 3 years and has clearly had some ups-and-downs. But…coming out of high school, and in his first season quarterbacking Penn State, he posted above-average stats and won games. This is a time when a mentee can use an accomplished mentor to get the most out of him and I firmly believe that, based on the on-field performance of past Yurcich QBs, that’s exactly what Sean Clifford has now.

Finally, below are my projections for Clifford’s production for the 2021 season.