Analytics, Basic Stats, and Recent Historic Context: The ABC’s of Penn State Football – The Brent Pry Era: Part 1

Introduction

With the offseason hiring of Mike Yurcich, Penn State welcomes its fourth different offensive coordinator in five years.  Therefore, In comparison, the fact that defensive coordinator Brent Pry is about to enter his 6th season calling the shots on the other side of the ball makes him a relative stalwart and model of stability. So today let’s analyze how he’s done leading the squad over the past five years. 

During Pry’s tenure, there have been periods of frustration – the 2017 and 2018 OSU comeback losses, the 4th quarter of the 2017 Rose Bowl, the first half of the 2020 season – but all-in-all the fan barometer of our time with Pry seems mostly positive. But what do the stats say? Are there specific areas of weakness? 3rd down defense? Pass defense against otherwise mediocre quarterbacks? Let’s find out.

Yardage & Scoring

To provide appropriate context, we are only calculating conference games. I’m doing that mostly to normalize 2020 versus the previous 4 years of the PSU defense by leaving out the annual non-conference rent-a-win’s vs. Akron, Kent State, Georgia State and all the other non-Power 5 schools that come to get clobbered and collect a check – basically, the statistical “gimmes” are gone.

Let’s start with the Big Picture and look at the total average performance over the last 5 years on some of the basic defensive stats. Again, the table below shows the Nittany Lions defense’s average since 2016 in conference games only along with their total league rank in parentheses. The third column in the table features the top Big Ten team in each specific category over those same five years with their yards or points allowed in parentheses. 

Interestingly, if we look at only rush OR pass yards against, the Penn State defense is smack dab in the middle of the league. But when you combine those two into total yards, the Lions end up 5th  in the Big Ten. Below is the graph of Rush Yards per Game (RYPG) and Pass Yards per Game (PYPG) allowed by each conference team’s defense from 2016 to 2020. The label underneath each team logo is the total average yards per game allowed. You see that Penn State hasn’t been at the level of Michigan, Iowa, OSU, or Wisconsin for passing yards (y-axis) and is even behind Illinois, Nebraska, and Minnesota. And in rushing, Wisconsin and OSU have been top of the conference and the Lions are in the logjam at ~135 RYPG-allowed. Overall though, for yardage, Penn State has been solid over the last 5 years but definitely a step behind Michigan, Ohio State, and Wisconsin.

Before we leave yards, let’s look at Penn State’s year-by-year performance for passing yards (blue) and rushing yards (orange) allowed. Over the 5 years, the mean average for PYPG-all has been 211 YPG and for rushing 164 YPG. You can see that on the passing side, there’s been a lot more volatility with the team having 3 seasons that were better than average (2016, 2018, and 2020) and two that were fairly below average. On rush defense, they only had one season (2018) that was below average. The two best seasons ranked 9th (2019, 107 RYPG-all) and 14th (2017, 117 RYPG-all) out of the 70 Big Ten teams of the last 5 years.

Drilling down one more level and looking at average yards-per-play, we see where Pry’s defenses tend to really shine. Since 2016, PSU has ranked 4th in the conference in YPP, allowing a respectable 4.91. This figure only trails Michigan (4.69), Iowa (4.75), and OSU (4.78). In YPP, Penn State is slightly ahead of Wisconsin (4.99). I calculated hundredths of a yard here to show just how close these schools are. The Penn State performances year-by-year are shown below. Out of the 5 years, not once were the Lions below the league average. 

The Penn State defense has been pretty good limiting opponent in Brent Pry’s time, but what about scoring defense? Look at the graph below (and get used to the format…). It shows the year-by-year performance of the Penn State defense in terms of points-allowed-per-game (PPG-All) in the Big Ten. The graph shows Penn State’s annual performance (blue number next to the logo) and the league average (black number on the gray line). Here is a stat where Pry has excelled with his units. The team has had a “bend don’t break” reputation for several years and it’s exemplified by this data. For example, in 2017, the defense ranked 3rd in the league in points allowed at 19.1 (trailing only Wisconsin’s 14.1 and Northwestern’s 18.9) even though the Lions ranked 6th in yards allowed (348). 

This type of relationship (ranking better in scoring defense than total defense) generally held true until last season. In 2020, the Lions ranked 6th in the conference by allowing 27.7 PPG (below the mean average but better than median) but ranked 3rd in yards allowed at 329 YPG. That 329-yard average was the best performance by a Brent Pry defense at Penn State. And, remarkable, it occurred during Pry’s worst year (by far) in scoring defense by a touchdown. There are reasons why this happened that I’ve outlined in previous articles (offensive turnovers in opponent territory, for example) but let’s just chalk it up to #2020Sucked.

Conversions and Chaos

Each season it feels like Penn State has poor 3rd down defense and, to a lesser degree, doesn’t get enough turnovers or force a ton of negative plays. It seems like I’ve watched far too many Indiana, Ohio State, and Michigan State quarterback’s pick-up critical 3rd downs to extend drives. But is that reality or perception? Let’s look:

We start with 3rd down conversions. Turns out, Pry’s defenses – in this category, anyway — haven’t been nearly as bad as people want to believe. Compared to the rest of the Big Ten, there was only one below average year (2016). The best seasons relative to the league were 2017 and 2018 – Penn State finished 4th in the Big Ten in 3rd-down defense both years. In 2019 and 2020 wasn’t far off, finishing 5th. 

Moving on to chaos (Havoc) plays, another statistical category in which Pry has faired well. If you’re not a regular reader of ESPN’s Bill Connelly, the inventor of the stat,  Havoc is the percentage of defensive plays that result in a sack, tackle-for-loss, turnover, or pass defended. My calculation doesn’t include the defended passes but is otherwise the same. Here’s another case where Penn State has generally excelled and been better than average in each of the last five seasons.  In 2016 and 2018, the Lions finished  2nd in the league in Havoc Rate. During Pry’s tenure as DC, there have been 17 Big Ten defensive units that have achieved 17+% Havoc and Penn State teams were three of them. Aside from the Lions, the rest of the 17 are Michigan (4), Ohio State (3), Indiana (3), Wisconsin (2), Northwestern and Minnesota (1 each). Iowa, despite its excellent DL’s over the last 5 years, has never achieved better than 16% Havoc and neither has Michigan State. 

Here’s Penn State’s Havoc Rating year-by-year:

If we just focus on sacks (blue bars) and TFL (orange bars), we start to see why PSU has been so good in Havoc. The TFL numbers in 2016, 2018, and 2019 are fall in the Top 18 of the league in the past five years. Penn State’s 84 TFL in 2016 ranks 2nd only to 2019 Ohio State’s 87 TFL. The league’s defenses have averaged 52 TFL per season and the Lions have averaged 65. That’s a big difference. In terms of sacks, it’s a similar story. Penn State’s defenses have ranked 2nd (2016), 4th (2017), 1st (2018), 4th (2019), and 4th (2020*). So, yeah, Pry’s defenses can pressure the QB and create problems behind the line. Oh, he asterisk for 2020 is because not all teams played the same number of games. Still though, even when considering sacks/game, Penn State still ranked 6th last year. 

Now, let’s look at Penn State’s ability to generate turnovers under Pry. When it comes to forcing and recovering fumbles, Pry’s defenses again tend to finish above league average. While the Big Ten recovered-fumbles average floats between 5 and 6 depending on the year, PSU has managed to recover at least 9 fumbles in three of the last five seasons. That’s the kind of Havoc you want as a Defensive Coordinator.

How about interceptions? Well, that’s a bit of a different story. In this category, Pry’s defenses only finished above average one time – 2018, 11 INTs. It’s a bit disappointing to see the team performing so well in every other facet of the Havoc metric and then come up short in interceptions. If only there was a new safety coach coming for 2021…

Lastly, let’s combine INTs and fumbles so we can examine Penn State’s rank in total turnovers. Thanks to a high amount of fumble recoveries, Penn State has managed to finish above average every year except 2018 and 2020. In those two down years, Penn State was perfectly average and slightly below average, respectively. 

Summary

In Part 1 we confirmed Penn State has generally been a Bend-Don’t-Break defense under Pry. The Lions tend to give up a fair number of total yards but do an excellent job preventing teams from scoring by limiting big plays (the low YPP). Additionally, Pry’s teams are better than average when it comes to stopping opponents on 3rd down and creating Havoc in the form of sacks, tackles for loss, and fumbles.

In Part 2 – coming in early April — we’ll examine more advanced stats to see how well Penn State stacks up to the conference in preventing explosive plays, limiting opponent Time of Possession, and overall effectiveness.

Pattern photo created by jcomp – www.freepik.com