Analytics, Basic Stats, and Recent Historic Context: The ABC’s of Penn State Football – PSU vs. Rutgers
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Introduction
Yes, I know it was Rutgers. And, yes, I know that Rutgers is Rutgers. But don’t rain on my parade, man. During a season that started out sweet, devolved into sour, and no matter what happens next Saturday will be tough to swallow in the end, Penn State’s 28-0 blanking of the Scarlet Knights in the home finale was oddly satisfying. The Nittany Lions defense totally dominated the overmatched Rutgers offense while, on the other side of the ball, a true freshman QB provided a much needed shot in the arm (pun intended) against a not-so-bad Rutgers defense. The team — not just one particular unit –played well in a performance that had us thinking back to the better days of September and early October.
Quick Hitters
- Against Rutgers, our superstar punter (and ABC favorite) Jordan Stout averaged a pedestrian 42.9 yards/punt, his 3rd lowest output of the season. Buuuuut the Stout apologist/excuse maker in me contends that Saturday might have been his best performance of the season since 6 of Stout’s punts were downed inside the 20. It was unsettling to see the Lions punting so often from Rutgers territory but it turned out to be a showcase for Stout.
- Yesterday Penn State’s quarterbacks were 17 of 32 passing, which equates to a pretty poor completion percentage of 53%. Buuuuut if you remove the very sick and very cranky Sean Clifford and his 2 of 8 first-quarter cameo and only look at Christian Veilleux’s 15 of 24 passing, well, that’s a respectable 63% completion percentage.
- For the first time in the James Franklin era, the Lions have shutout 2 Power 5 opponents in the same season – Indiana and Rutgers. With that said, this marks the second James Franklin season with multiple shutouts, the first being 2017 (Akron and the infamous Georgia State FG-icing timeout game.) Since 2015, the Penn State defense has 5 conference shutouts: 2015 Illinois (39-0), 2016 Rutgers (39-0), 2019 Maryland (59-0), 2021 Indiana (24-0), and 2021 Rutgers (28-0).
Basic Statistics
Statistical sweep! All green shades on the Penn State side. Brent Pry’s defense was absolutely dominant against Rutgers allowing only 160 yards on 60 plays (2.7 yard/play). Prior to Saturday, the best defensive performance in total yards was the Villanova game (280 yards allowed) and in terms of yard/play allowed the best was Wisconsin (3.8 yard/play). This Rutgers performance blew both those stellar performances out of the water. The Penn State defense stifled a Rutgers offense that had averaged 313 yard/game on the season going into Week 12, so celebratory chicken soup for every defender in Blue and White.
On the flip side, Penn State’s offense took longer than expected to get going against a slightly-below-average Big Ten defense – Rutgers was 9th in yards allowed before Saturday (12th in yards allowed/play) and 10th in Scoring Defense. An obviously off/sick Sean Clifford slogged through the entire first quarter and generated a total of 32 yards on 14 plays (2.3 yards/play – very bad). In the subsequent three quarters, a healthy, fresh, and Canadian QB (Veilleux) captained an offense that racked up 375 yards at a 6.3 yards/play clip.
Veilleux looked competent and confident, especially after he got a few plays under his belt. Naturally, because of that, plenty of PSU fans chirped about why Veilleux wasn’t brought in vs. Iowa instead of Ta’Quan Roberson. Would he have managed to hold off Iowa’s (at the time) vaunted defense? No one will ever know, but after Saturday, we can (and will) speculate.
Advanced Stats
General rule around here: When you prevent the opponent (yes, even Rutgers) from scoring, well, we’re gonna take a deep dive, analytical look at that skunking. Therefore, this week, it’s Defense, Defense, Defense.
HAVOC
First up, HAVOC. For the newbies to this weekly numbers-filled extravaganza, HAVOC is the percentage of plays where a defense generates a tackle-for-loss, sack, or turnover. HAVOC is the brainchild of Bill Connelly, currently of espn.com. Defenses want to have a high HAVOC rate (obvi) while the better offenses tend to post low ‘HAVOC Against’ values.
Penn State’s game-by-game HAVOC marks are listed in the graph below — the defense’s ability to generate HAVOC is on the x-axis and the offense’s ability to minimize HAVOC is on the y-axis. Down and to the right is the best spot to be in this graph.
Quick analysis of the graph shows that the Rutgers game was 2nd best in terms of HAVOC for the season (behind Iowa). The offense allowed HAVOC on 9% of plays (14% is FBS average) and the defense generated HAVOC on 18+% of plays. This type of HAVOC ratio should typically end up as a win whereby the team is minimizing bad things on offense and maximizing bad things for the opposing offense. But Iowa is an outlier…because Penn State lost. Against the Hawkeyes the PSU defense generated 14 combined TFL and sacks (season best) and one turnover. The offense allowed only 3 TFL+Sacks (again – season best) but gave the ball away 4 times. A very strong defensive effort was squandered on that October day in Iowa City.
Yards-per-Play
We discussed yard-per-play above but I want to contextualize it a bit more here. The graph here shows the mean-average-yard-per-play (MAYPP) for the offense on the x-axis and the MAYPP the defense allows on the y-axis. Again, down and right is best for the team.
For the full game, the offense was middle of the road at about 5.5 YPP. But, if you extract the Clifford time (which you can’t, but we will), it balloons to 6.3 YPP, which would be one of the best performances of the season. Interestingly, look at the break between the wins and losses. For the year if the offense generates 5+ YPP they win. If they don’t, they lose. Defensively, the game against Rutgers was so much better than every other performance for the year and was a great way for them to be remembered by the fans at Beaver Stadium. Brent Pry’s bunch has been a consistently good, borderline great, defense throughout the season and went out on a fantastic note at home.
Points-Squared-per-Yard (P2PY)
We’ve discussed this stat before and it’s one of the more predictive equations in terms of understanding win/loss probability. It’s as it sounds — you take a team’s points and square it and then divide by their yards gained. For the game yesterday, Penn State scored 28 points on total 407 yards for a P2PY of 1.92. Rutgers, scoring zero has a P2PY of 0 – simple math there. The P2PY differential (P2PYD) indicates to a team’s dominance, or lack thereof, in a particular contest. Saturday’s win against Rutgers represented Penn State’ 2nd best P2PYD of the season, trailing behind the Ball State game.
In the context of James Franklin’s whole tenure at Penn State, the 2021 Rutgers game ranks as the 33rd most dominant performance in P2PYD. That’s out of a 99 games total so, in the grand scheme of things, this won’t be particularly memorable. Saturday’s nooner was less dominant than big wins like 2018 Pitt (3rd overall at P2PYD of 6.55), 2017 Michigan (19th overall at 2.85) and even some big losses like 2017 Ohio State (27th with a P2PYD of 2.22). But, for a team that’s been reeling lately, having lost 4 of 5 games and looking for any ounce of positivity going into the offseason, that 1.92 built on the back of next year’s potential starting quarterback looks stellar.
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