Analytics, Basic Stats, and Recent Historic Context: The ABC’s of Penn State Football – The 2021 Run Game

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Introduction

In what might be the understatement of all understatements, Penn State’s rushing attack really struggled throughout 2021.

Like, really struggled.

Didn’t matter who carried the ball – Noah Cain, Keyvone Lee, John Lovett, Devyn Ford – or when they carried the ball for that matter – 1^st down, 3^rd down, garbage time, high-leverage situations – the Nittany Lions lack of consistency on the ground diluted the potency of Mike Yurcich’s offense as promising drive after promising drive suddenly stalled thanks to a barrage of bottlenecks at the LOS.

But, we wondered, just HOW bad was the Blue and White’s 2021 run production with respect to the rest of the FBS and Penn State’s historical averages? The masochist in us wants to know…so that’s where we’ll begin our after-season analytics investigation of the 2021 Penn State Nittany Lions.

Data

Per usual, most the data used in this piece was mined from cfbstats.com and only includes statistics compiled against FBS competition. One of the main issues with NCAA statistics is that sacks are counted against rush yards. So, today I will (where possible) refer to ‘Sack Adjusted Rush Yards’ meaning that I redacted the sack yards from rushing totals and adjusted the carries accordingly. While not technically accurate, doing this extra work gives us data more representative of the true production of Penn State’s run game.

For Penn State game logs and seasonal breakdowns, the data used comes from sportsreference.com and does include FCS opponents. Examining full game logs was vital in discovering certain trends in performance.

Yards per Game/Yards per Carry

We’ll start with just a simple look at Penn State versus the rest of FBS by year over the last 13 seasons. In the graph below, we have Sack Adjusted Rush Yard per Game (SA-RYPG). To figure out just how good or bad Penn State did in a particular season, just look at the Lion logos. The gray line in each column represents the FBS average for SA-RYPG in that specific season.

Couple things stand out here…

Technically, 2021 wasn’t the worst per game rushing performance by a Penn State team…but it was the worst of Penn State teams able to carry 85 scholarship players. The 135 adjusted rush yards per game in 2021 does top the 123 yards put up by the sanctioned-riddled 2014 offense captained by notorious OC John Donovan – a team that had no depth and a patchwork-at-best offensive line.

Another notable takeaway from this chart is that Penn State’s rushing attack has finished below the FBS average 8 of the last 13 years. Some of these years (2011, 2016, 2017) were basically spot-on average. But in 2021, the FBS average was 190 SA-RYPG and PSU’s 135 represents the furthest value below average of any recent PSU team. In 2021, Penn State ranked 115^th out of 130 FBS teams in SA-RYPG.

But Nate you say, “Who cares how many yards are generated by rushing across a game? All that matters is how efficient each attempt is.” Yes, I agree 100%. Therefore, let’s move to Sack Adjusted Rush Yards per Attempt (SA-RYPA) and see just how efficient (or inefficient) the Nittany Lions were in 2021.

Welp, that’s worse. The 3.9 SA-RYPA for the Nittany Lions in 2021 ranked 124^th nationally and matched their worst output per carry (tied with the aforementioned 2014 PSU team with all its issues) since at least 2009. For those scoring at home, the graph above has 1,640 dots on it – one for every FBS team — including the Penn State logos. The 2021 Nittany Lion logo is lower than 1,549 of those damn dots. Compare this season’s 1,550^th rank to 2018 (165^th, 5.8); 2017 (254^th, 5.6); and 2019 (468^th, 5.3)…and, well, there’s really no comparison.

With that established, Penn State’s improved passing game did pick up a bit of the slack in 2021. The graph below charts total offensive yards per game. Considering 2021 was Penn State’s 10^th best total offensive yards performance since 2009, then yeah the passing game made the Nittany Lions offense somewhat respectable. They were still a bit below average (2021 FBS mean = 393) but 2021 Penn State was better than the 2011, 2014, and 2015 teams that were 44, 68, and 53 yards below average respectively.

Negative Plays

When examining negative plays – the majority of which occur during runs – there’s a clear line of demarcation in the chart below. Notice that in the last of the Paterno years and Bill O’Brien’s two seasons in Happy Valley, Penn State lost yards on roughly 14% of all plays. When Franklin arrived, these numbers jumped to 32% and 31% negative plays in 2014 and 2015, respectively. Then, during the Moorhead, Rahne, Ciarrocca years, the percentage of negative plays dipped slightly – 27 percent in 2017 low 20’s in 2019 and 2020, sub-20% in 2018. However, In 2021 this negative play number jumped back up to 26% which surprisingly is still lower than 2017. Problem is, this 2021 offense didn’t possess the explosivity of the 2017 offense to counter the rise in negative plays.

For context, Penn State had 375 rush attempts (again, FBS only) in 2021. That means, the Lions had a TFL+Sack number of 96 (26% rounded up). Taking that to 20% reduces Penn State’s negative plays to 75 (nearly two fewer per game). Getting down to 15% adds up to 56 TFL+Sack, which equates to three-plus fewer negative plays per game.

Explosive Plays – Long Runs

(In a Paul Simon voice) Where have you gone Saquon Barkley/Miles Sanders/Journey Brown? Nittany Nation turns its lonely eyes to you (three). Newsflash: 60-yard lightning strike touchdown runs – the type that filled Penn State’s post-sanction season highlight reels – really do a great job of covering up all those warts that arise from negative plays. So how did Penn State do in this regard in 2021?

The chart below plots the number of long (10+ yards) rushes that all FBS teams have averaged per game since 2010. You can see that the FBS average is ~8 year-over-year and Penn State pre-Franklin was typically below average. Then, from 2015 through 2019 Penn State was at or above average. Having Sunday-caliber backs playing on Saturdays will do that for you. In 2021 though, Penn State slipped back considerably, all the way down to just 5.0 long runs per game.

Looking at this data slightly differently, we see a similar story. On a per-carry basis, teams tend to average a 10-yard or greater run 20% of the time. The 2015-2017 teams (the Saquon era) dramatically exceeded the average and finished 17^th in FBS in 2017 at 27%. There is a steady line down from 2018 to 2021 with this year having a 13% rate and a ranking of 122^nd nationally (still somehow better than Indiana, Rutgers, and Purdue).

If we break it down one more level and look at the length of the “long runs” by year, we see again that the homerun-hitting 2016-2019 seasons are nothing but a distant memory these days. Here, in this chart, the rows are the length of the runs, the bar height and labels are the number of such runs, and the x-axis are the years. To me, these might be the most staggering numbers of the entire post. Notice the lack of explosion since Journey Brown’s unexpected retirement in the late summer of 2020.

For instance, in 2017, Penn State had 14 runs go for 50+ yards. In 2020 and 2021 combined, Penn State had 0 runs exceed 50 yards. Heck in 2021, Penn State only had 13 total runs go for more than 20 yards. I think that about sums is up…you can look through the rest of the chart below for other insights.

Penn State Game by Game

To conclude, I want to switch gears and look at the Penn State game logs from 2000 to 2021 (not sack adjusted),so that we can dig one layer deeper on the performance of the running game. Again, 2021 and 2014 were the worst performances for Penn State’s rushing offense since 2000. There were seasons with individually worse games than in 2021, like the 2006 Michigan game where the Lions averaged -0.6 yards-per-rush (yes, minus.6), but even that year, the team averaged 4.3 YPR for the season. The 2014 team averaged 2.9 YPR and the 2021 team 3.1. The next lowest were: 2012 (3.6) and 2003 (3.7). In both of those years, and even 2014 for that matter, the program was in far worse shape (beginning of the dark years, the first year after the scandal, CJF’s first year still under sanctions) than in 2021.

What’s more, in the above plot, every dot represents one game. In 2021, the high water marks (and statistical outliers) were the Ball State and Indiana games where Penn State averaged 5.0 YPR. In only 2 other games (Iowa and Rutgers) did they manage better than 3.0 YPR. Since 2000, there have been 273 Penn State games played and in 70 of them the offense generate fewer than 3.0 YPR. Eight (8!) of those games were in 2021, which is the same number as in 2014.

Summary

The rushing “attack” was anemic for Penn State in 2021. No matter how you slice it, the team did not bring balance to the table when it comes to moving the ball offensively. I do not think you have to run effectively to be an exceptional offense but, when you try to force the run, and can’t execute, you hurt yourself and that was a consistent theme this season. They couldn’t run but kept trying and that 100% cost Penn State a couple of wins (cough, Michigan State).