Analytics, Basic Stats, and Recent Historic Context: The ABC’s of Penn State Football – National Championship DNA
There’s no single formula to win a college football national championship, but after we crunched the numbers, we found several statistical similarities among those teams that finished the year on top.
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Introduction
I believe it was around this time last season (or maybe was it the year before? IDK…dates and times all sort of congeal together these days) when I wrote something about the infectious four-letter word that permeates college football fanbases during these final few weeks leading to kickoff: HOPE.
Ah, hope. Doesn’t matter if the confluence of events necessary for your school to reach college football’s four-team, made-for-TV Valhalla is semi-realistic, ridiculous, or reason for you to be institutionalized…hope provides license for outlandish prognostications. Penn State fans are obviously no strangers to hope. Heck, coming off a sub-.500 COVID campaign and the promising-to-painful progression of the Nittany Lions’ 2021 season, hope is really all we had to cling prior to last year.
Fast-forward 12 months, obviously a lot has changed. For Penn State HOPE has given way to HYPE, which got us thinking…
The Penn State football program, and the Penn State football fans, aspire for the team to win a National Championship. We know that there are tons of factors that go into winning a championship: coaching, recruiting, culture, strength and conditioning, injury luck, in-game luck, weather luck, the bounces of an inflated, oblong hunk of leather. The list goes on and on.
But statistically, what makes a championship team? What categories do all modern college football national champions thrive in, and what stats aren’t an automatic indicator of success? What stats MUST national champions dominate, and what stats – be they basic or advanced – can champions get away with not being great?
In other words, what is the statistical DNA that makes a team a national champion?
To answer that question, we’re including every college football national champion since 2009 and comparing their performance in a statistical category against the FBS average that particular season. From there, we’ll assign a percentage of performance to the national champions compared to the FBS average. Generally, good teams will exceed 100 percent in offensive categories, and stay below 100 percent in defensive categories. For instance, if the average defense allows 5 yards/play and one of our teams allows 4 yard/play, this would be a value of 80% (good!). If they allow 6 yard/play this would be 120% (bad). Let’s see what commonalities and outliers exist and then discuss how we may expect Penn State to perform.
Yardage Gained and Allowed
We’ll start with yardage on a play, drive and game basis…and while we do, we’ll also introduce our spiderweb graphs. Again, we’re charting each national champion’s performance against the FBS average for offensive yardage gained and then turning that into a percentage – the higher the percentage, the better than average that team was.
So what stands out here? Well, in order to be a national champion, your offensive production USUALLY needs to be elite…especially in recent years. Collectively, national champions have posted yardage outputs of 125% vs. the FBS average with juggernauts 2013 Florida State, 2019 LSU, and 2020 Alabama flirting with 140% in these metrics. Really, the only “outliers” in this equation were the 2009, 2011 and 2015 Alabama teams – and even then, those archaic Crimson Tide offenses weren’t worse than the FBS average in yards/play, yards/drive, yards/game.
In 2022, Penn State’s 6.1 yards per play on offense was above the FBS average but fell short of matching the tallies posted by the four CFP invitees: Georgia and Ohio State (7.2 yards/play, tied for best in FBS), Michigan (6.5 yards/play, 13th in FBS), TCU (6.3 yards/play, 13th in FBS. Noting that this metric tends to correlate favorably with championship success, the Nittany Lions offense will most likely need to take another step with Drew Allar in command this season.
If we switch to yardage allowed on defense, it becomes crystal clear how Nick Saban hauled home a bunch of hardware without fielding an elite offense – he suffocated opponents on defense. The average of the defense allowance for championship teams was 79% (yard/play), 75% (yard/game), and 75% (yard/drive). The 2011 Alabama team, which shutout LSU in the national championship, allowed: 53%, 43%, and 44% of the FBS average…which is nuts. None of the champion defenses were below average (above 100%) in yards allowed but 10-Auburn, 19-LSU, and 20-Alabama came the closest. At least for LSU and Alabama though, they made up for their defense with a couple of the best offenses in the history of college football.
In 2022, Penn State ranked 3rd in FBS in yards allowed per play, trailing only Iowa and Illinois in this category – two teams that were undoubtedly aided by facing 6 rudderless Big Ten West offenses. Unlike offense, where all 4 CFP teams from last year finished in the Top 20 in FBS, only two defenses – Georgia and Michigan – finished in the Top 20 in yards allowed per play. In fact, TCU was below the FBS average in this metric.
HAVOC Generated and Avoided
Next up, HAVOC. For the 379th time, the HAVOC stat measures a defense’s ability to generate turnovers, sacks, TFLs and PBUs. Conversely, you hopefully already deduced that HAVOC Avoidance measures an offense’s ability to steer clear of turnovers, sacks and TFLs (note: PBUs are not included when measuring an offense’s HAVOC avoidance rate).
We’ll start with the offense here and HAVOC avoidance – lower percentages will be better. Here, the blue represents sacks allowed, orange is TFL allowed, and gray is overall HAVOC. As you can see, this graph is all over the place and provides plenty of mixed messages. Let’s try and make sense of it.
Start with 2019 LSU. Coach O’s explosive attack full of future first-rounders (Joe Burrow, JaMarr Chase, Justin Jefferson, Clyde Edwards-Helaire) actually allowed sacks at an above average rate (almost 120%) but had an overall HAVOC number of under 80%. This implies that they had few turnovers. In fact, since 2009, the 2019 LSU team had the 45th fewest turnovers per game (0.79) of any team that played FBS football during those years, which falls 2nd on our list to only 2017 Alabama at 0.61. An average team turns the ball over about 1.3 times per game. Twice (14-OSU and 16-Clemson) has a national championship winner been below the FBS average in turnovers per game. The major takeaway from this chart seems to be that if you have enough weapons, national championship offenses can survive and thrive from HAVOC missteps…making HAVOC avoidance less-than-crucial to winning it all.
With that said, Penn State finished 27th in FBS last year, averaging just 6.2 sacks+TFL per game and finished above-average in turnovers lost.
Switching to defense, where higher percentages are better (as in, you’re generating more HAVOC plays than the FBS average, ONLY ONE NATIONAL CHAMPION (22-Georgia) finished below-average in this metric…which when you consider all the studs on that defense, doesn’t make any freaking sense. But the numbers are the numbers. That lone outlier also shows that national champions tend to make life hell for opposing offenses.
The next lowest performances in HAVOC generation come from 2010 Auburn and the 2020 Alabama team, both of which were offensively dominated. We can infer from gray data points outside of the blue and orange, that some teams (2009, 2011, 2012 Alabama) generated a lot of turnovers. Having world class defenses full of NFL All-Pros can do that.
Last season, Manny Diaz’s first as coordinator in Happy Valley, Penn State was historically great in HAVOC generation. The Nittany Lions’ 20.8 HAVOC plays per game were 7 more than the FBS average and represented the 4th highest HAVOC generation of ANY FBS team since 2009.
Red Zone Offense and Defense
This is interesting. Let’s start with offensive points per Red Zone trip (blue) and total Red Zone points per game (orange). As you can see below, there is differentiation between the circles for nearly every team which indicates that these national champions tend to be closer-to-average in terms of points/RZ trip but are elite when it comes to the number of Red Zone points they score per game. This means that national championship offenses GET into the red-zone more than an average team, even if they’re not scoring touchdowns inside the Red Zone at a ridiculous pace…meaning when it comes to winning it all Quantity trumps Quality inside the Red Zone.
Defensively, it’s the opposite story. Most of the defenses are close-to-average in terms of points per RZ attempt (blue) but allow a much lower overall rate of RZ scoring per game – giving up fewer total opportunities, again quantity trumps quality. The way the stats line up on both offense and defense, generating/preventing Red Zone opportunities is a CRITICAL component among national championship teams. In other words, Red Zone excellence is a key strand in national championship DNA. Champions move the ball inside the 20 on offense, and keep opponents from ever reaching the 20 on defense. Simple.
Overall Scoring
For scoring, as with everything else, there is a good allowance for having a near-average scoring defense with a good offense (2010 Auburn) and vice versa (2009 Alabama). Almost no championship teams have elite scoring offense and defense. Instead, they tend to get it done with one elite unit and one good unit. Exceptions exist (2011 Alabama, 2013 Florida State, 2022 Georgia) but it isn’t mandatory.
In 2022, Penn State’s defense finished 9th in FBS in points allowed per game (elite), and 15th in FBS on offense with 35.8 points scored per game (great).
Overall Thoughts
When it comes to what makes a champion, there is likely no single formula and having one elite unit on either offense or defense can get it done. And this isn’t to say that you can have a good/fair/poor unit on the opposite side of the ball – the other group must also be above-average. Overall, though, I think the difference between really good (NY6 level team) and playoff/championship team is razor thin. Think back to 2017, 2019, and 2022 – Penn State fit the statistical national championship criteria laid out in this blog post. Yet none of those squads even made the playoff. In 2017, a blown lead against OSU and bad luck/rain delay against MSU got in the way. In 2019, poor play in the first half against Minnesota and an iffy OPI on the final drive cost them 11 regular season wins. In 2022, the Lions fell apart in the last 8 minutes to lose to Ohio State. So what will become of 2023? Going into this slate, there is more talent, coaching stability, and enthusiasm going into the season than there has been in a very long time. But, even with all of those ingredients in place, the team will have to overcome the little things to get over the final barrier to the playoff.
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