Analytics, Basic Stats, and Recent Historic Context: The ABC’s of Penn State Football – PSU vs. Auburn

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Introduction

Penn State is 3-0 with two wins over ranked opponents! James Franklin’s squad is off to a great start to the year and the Whiteout victory over Auburn keeps the 2021 snowball building. It’s early, but doesn’t this team and this season already feel special? This edition of Penn State football is resilient as evidenced by the fact that the Nittany Lions seemingly had to beat two opponents on Saturday – Auburn and the SEC refs. A team of a lesser caliber would’ve folded after some of the calls (or non-calls), but not this group. They are a team of immense character and are really starting to get rolling. I love that I get to do this every week!

Quick Hitters

1. The defensive pass interference penalty against Auburn with 2 minutes remaining notwithstanding, the refs were terrible in the Whiteout. Opponents average 7 penalties for 61 yards in Whiteout games and Auburn accounted for 6 for 45 on Saturday night versus Penn State’s 5 for 31 (WO average 4-36). On the surface it looks basically average but if you watched the game, it’s pretty obvious that far more plays went against the Lions than for them. Question 1 on the ref exam should be: Can you count to 4? The team last night would’ve got that one wrong at least once.
2. Late last week we published the QB RPI blog post, which tried to predict the performance of Sean Clifford and Bo Nix in the Whiteout in three categories: completion-%, yards-per-attempt (YPA), and Passer Rating. Let’s see how we did:

We pretty much nailed the Bo Nix predictions. In the post, we wrote: “If Bo Nix throws for 205 yards at 5 YPA, Penn State will win.” He threw for 185 and 5 YPA. And guess what? Penn State won.

On the flip side, Sean Clifford outplayed our expectations by leaps and bounds and I couldn’t be happier for him. He stepped up big time this week and statistically had one of the best nights of his career. If he keeps this going, this team will go far.

Basic Statistics

As we move the basic stats table, the Lions had wins in the columns you want them to have wins: points and yards-per-play (YPP). Since 2014, the Lions are now 50-11 in games where they win the YPP battle and are 63-0 in games where they score more points than their opponent. At the end of the day, obviously the only thing that matters is outscoring your opponent but efficiency per play tends to be one of the best indicators of success for a team and this Penn State team is 3-0 in that category this season. In the still-young 2021 campaign, Penn State is averaging 6 YPP versus 4.2 by their opponents. If they can manage to keep this trend up, they will win a lot of games.

If you want to look for areas of concern, and we should, the running game has struggled for the 2^nd time in 3 games this year. Against Wisconsin they averaged 2.8 YPC (Yards-per-Carry). Against Ball State it was 5.0 and against Auburn it was 2.5 YPC. For the season, they are averaging 3.78 YPC which is currently 72^nd in FBS against FBS competition and 12^th/14 in the Big Ten excluding FCS games. I don’t love this. None of us should. Part of the issue is that they’re struggling to break long runs. The three longest runs of the season are 43 (Clifford – Ball State), 34 (Cain – Wisconsin), and 20 (Clifford – Auburn) yards. We don’t really expect Cain to break long runs. Before the 34 yarder in 2021, his previous long was 27 against Purdue in 2019. But, in 2019, we also had Journey Brown who had breakaway potential. We haven’t yet found 2021’s Journey Brown and we will need him before the season ends. The running game has to be a threat or those 9 yards-per-pass attempt will shrink fast. Thankfully, John Lovett suited up and played for the first-time last night. If you don’t know what to expect from him, check out our preview. I am very confident that he will give us that homerun threat we’ve been missing.

Advanced Stats – Big Ten Check-in

Today, we’re going to look at the rest of the conference and their performance in the offensive, defensive, and overall effectiveness metrics. I fully understand that the strengths of schedule are different between say, Penn State who has played Wisconsin (good), Ball State (bad), and Auburn (good), compared to Michigan who has played Western Michigan (fair), Washington (fair), and Northern Illinois (fair). But it’s not too early to see where some of the trends lie. As a reminder – the Offensive Effectiveness (OE), Defensive Effectiveness (OE), and Overall (WAR) have been described previously. All stats are based on games against FBS competition.

We will look at a graph of OE (X-axis) against DE (Y-axis). The labels are the OE (top) and DE (bottom). For OE, higher is better (further to the right) and for DE, lower is better.

Thus far, Michigan is the class of the conference with the best offense and the 3^rd ranked defense. The Wolverines are in a whole different zip code on this graph of OE (X-axis) against DE (Y-axis). Are they going to maintain the OE of 59? No, almost certainly not as that would be top 1% in CFB since 2009. But they’re off to a great start on both sides of the ball and are a team to be reckoned with going forward.

In the “surprise” category are the OSU defense and Michigan State. Ohio State currently has its worst defense since at least 2009 but notably, 2020 wasn’t too much better. Maybe this is a trend? On the flip side, MSU has its best offense since at least 2009 and this is coming off its worst performance in a decade in 2020.

In the “obviously” category, Wisconsin and Iowa have strong defenses and about averages offenses and the worst teams in the conference are Indiana and Illinois. Keep in mind, though, the Hoosiers have played two Top 10 opponents – Iowa and Cincinnati.

Penn State currently ranks 5^th in defense and 4^th in offense which, given the tough schedule is very respectable and are both dramatic improvements over 2020.

Penn State still plays the conference’s top 3 current offenses and 3 of the 4 best defenses as of now. There will be only a couple of apparently easy games going forward – Indiana and Illinois (along with Villanova) – and the bulk of the schedule will be contentious. I, for one, cannot wait to see how the season plays out and believe that the battle-tested Nittany Lions will continue to improve throughout the season.