Analytics, Basic Stats, and Recent Historic Context: The ABC’s of Penn State Football – Rose Bowl Preview

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Introduction

Prior to the start of the 2022 season, how many of us placed Penn State in Pasadena at the end of the year? All you lairs can put your hands down. Pegged as a rebuilding year at best, the Nittany Lions’ exceeded those meager expectations as their lone losses came at the hands of two teams (Michigan and Ohio State) still in contention to play for all the Tostitos on Jan. 9. The rest of the slate…well, the Nittany Lions managed to breeze through it sans some necessary last-minute Clifford magic at Purdue.  Though the official CFP rankings don’t concur, in our opinion, Penn State is pretty clearly one of the top-10 teams in the country, worthy of a Southern California showcase stage known as the “Granddaddy of them All” (RIP Keith Jackson) that could serve as the perfect springboard for a CFP run in 2023. So, today, we’ll wipe the dust off our Relative Performance Index (RPI) predictor and forecast how the Nittany Lions will stack up in several statistical categories against Utah in the Rose Bowl.

Relative Performance Index

If you recall, Relative Performance Index (RPI) examines a team’s performance against their opponents and compares that to the opponent average, conveyed in a percentage. In a hypothetical example, let’s say an opponent scores 40 points-per-game prior to playing Penn State but the Nittany Lions defense ends up holding them to just 20 points when they play – well, for that game, Penn State’s defensive RPI would be 50%. Had they allowed 40 points, the RPI would have been 100%. For a defense, lower numbers are better (i.e. allowing less than the opponent average). For an offense, higher numbers are better (creating more than the opponent defensive allowance).

Yardage

We’ll start looking at the performances of the Penn State and Utah offenses and defenses against their opponent rushing and passing stats. Below are the rushing graphs for the Rose Bowl teams’ offensive production. For rushing, you see that the average RPI for Penn State is 120% and 116% for Utah – meaning that both teams tend to rush for more yards per game than their opponents typically allow. Believe it or not, Penn State’s best RPI rushing score (175%) came at Michigan and its worst RPI rushing score (75%) came at Purdue – a squad hardly known as a defensive menace. Michigan only allowed 2.9 yards/rush this season but Penn State managed 5 YPR against the Wolverines. A HUGE chunk of that came on Clifford’s long run that set up PSU’s first score, so that per-rush average is slightly skewed. Either way, both the Penn State and Utah rushing offenses should generate a bit more than the allowance of the opponent.

On the other side of the ball, the Penn State and Utah defenses are similarly stingy against the run, allowing an RPI of 67% and 75%, respectively. In 2022, Penn State only allowed one rushing offense to exceed 100% RPI – again, Michigan, duh. Utah has been a touch more inconsistent defensively on the ground with 3 games over 120% (Florida, USC-Round 1, and Arizona). To Kyle Whittingham’s credit, the Utes corrected their USC problem in the Pac 12 Championship Game, only allowing 2.1 YPR, well below the Trojans’ average of 5.1 (41% RPI). So, in defensive rushing RPI, slight advantage for the Lions despite Utah’s impressive last showing.

Next, we move to passing yards/attempt RPI. Once again, Penn State and Utah’s season-long averages reside in the same zip code in this metric. For offensive passing, Penn State averages 109% RPI while Utah isn’t far behind with 104% — meaning both the Lions and Utes threw for a smidge more through the air than their 2022 opponents typically allow. But if we look closely, the floors and ceilings between both teams are pretty different. Utah has a low of 60% (Oregon) and a high of 134% (Colorado). After those two outliers, the bulk of the Utes passing performances range between 110 and 130% with a few “meh” games thrown in. The Nittany Lions have shown some boom potential with a couple of games over 140% (Auburn and Minnesota) and very few poor games with a low of 84% (Rutgers).

Defensively, Utah has a very tight range with one exception (40% at San Diego State). For the other 12 games, the Utes D has ranged between 75%-105% against the pass. The Nittany Lions have a bit more up and down with two really good games (Ohio-49% and Maryland-42%) and 3 games over 100% (which remember is bad; Auburn-120%, Minnesota-103%, and Ohio State-111%).

Next, total production in terms of yards-per-play (YPP). As far as RPI in this metric goes, the Penn State offense ends up slightly better than the Utah offense (112% versus 106%). Again, not much of a gap. In this same statistical cateogry, the Penn State defense is also a bit better than Utah with a performance of 81% (Penn State) to 92% (Utah). The Penn State defense has had zero games allowing more than 110% of the opponents’ YPP while the Utes have had 3 such games.

Sacks and Tackles-for-Loss

One thing we’ve discussed throughout the season is how strong Penn State has been in terms of generating HAVOC plays on defense. Unfortunately, we can only easily track the DEFENSIVE performance in the HAVOC metric – so no clue how good or bad the PSU or Utah offense is at limiting HAVOC plays in terms of RPI. But what we can do is predict whether Chop Robinson, Adisa Isaac and company are going to make life difficult for the Utah offense, or if Sean Clifford is going to spend his last game running for his life. As it turns out, both aforementioned scenarios are likely. The Penn State defense generates sacks and TFLs at a rate of 142% RPI – which is like really, really good. Utah is at 128% RPI – also really, really good. Interestingly in the graph below, for Penn State, there are 4 dots below 100% RPI  with all of them coming in the first 5 games of the year (the exception being Auburn which is 173%). Following the Northwestern game, though, the Nittany Lions defense hasn’t been below 150% RPI in this stat category, so they are on a HUGE roll here (look out 2023 PSU opponents). The Utes finished the season with a mind-boggling 263% RPI performance against USC in this combo category. Their only “bad” game was the 38% performance against Florida way back on Labor Day weekend.

 Scoring

Moving to scoring offense and defense (points-per-game) we see (surprise!) both teams and both units are better than average. This is what you’d expect from two double-digit win teams, I suppose. Penn State has a 148% RPI in points – an average boosted mightily by a 331% outburst in the White Out against Minnesota. The Nits had one very forgettable game (60% against Northwestern in the monsoon) but otherwise have been over 100% in every game. The Utes have one 200+% performance (Oregon State) but do have three under-100% games (Florida, Washington State, and Oregon) when it comes to RPI in points scored. To be fair, Utah’s Pac 12 opponents allow substantially more points per game than the Penn State’s opponents, so the bar for the Utes to clear is higher than the Lions’ bar. The Utah opponents average an allowance of 29.6 PPG while Penn State’s opponents surrendered 25.6 PPG. So Utah had to score more absolute points to hit the 100% RPI mark.

Defensively, it’s somewhat of an opposite story. Both teams hold opposing offenses to less than what’s expected points-wise at very similar rates. But if you average the averages, they’re almost identical. The Penn State opposing offenses generated 26 PPG this season and the Utah opponents averaged 29.6 PPG. Penn State has one shutout (Maryland) which Utah doesn’t have.

Predicting the Game

Using RPI to predict the game, we’ll focus on expected yards-per-play and points scored. The first table shows expected YPP. Here, we see that Penn State should end up with the advantage. This is true even though, thus far, Utah averages 0.4 YPP more than the Nittany Lions at 6.5 versus 6.1. But, the Penn State defense only allows 4.5 YPP versus Utah’s 5.7. It works out that, on average, the Penn State offense can expect 6.0 YPP and the Utes SHOULD be somewhat off their typical production, registering 5.1 YPP against Penn State according to our metrics. Advantage Penn State.

Yards are great, but what about scoring? Again, the Utah offense averages slightly more points than Penn State but the Penn State defense is stingier than the Utes. Factoring in RPI,  Penn State gets the nod. Our official RPI prediction is a 5-point victory for the Nittany Lions, 29-24 after rounding to the nearest whole number. Our model differs from what the degenerates in Vegas put the line at – Utah by 2 last time I checked.

Anyway, there you have it. This is the last ABC’s article for the 2022 calendar year and I want to thank everyone for reading along and crunching numbers along with us. Your support means the world. Thanks all and have a wonderful new year!