Analytics, Basic Stats, and Recent Historic Context: The ABC’s of Penn State Football – Week 1: PSU vs. Purdue

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Introduction

“I have lived seven lifetimes tonight.” – Me

Though my fingers will clack clack away for a dozen or so paragraphs, I don’t really have words for what happened on the first day of September in the year 2022 A.D. (or C.E. or whatever we’re doing these days). I do know this, though: all Penn State fans aged exponentially this week, lower our life expectancy at least ten years. Talk about a rollercoaster. We went from Sean Clifford starting poorly, to being really good, to leaving for Drew Allar, to coming back and being awful, to leading one of the most impressive drives this side of Iowa City in 2017. We watched a Purdue receiver who had 500 yards in 3 seasons at Buffalo and Iowa roast the “vaunted” Penn State secondary for 153 yards and a touchdown. The Penn State defense looked suspect on some drives but came up huge in the last two Purdue possessions to give the Nittany Lions a chance and lock up the win, respectively. The run game had 77 yards in the first half, which was on pace for “pretty good,” only to finish with 98. We’ll do some fun stat-y stuff below, but there is absolutely zero that can be taken away from this game in terms of trends. This game was like the AMC stock of college football.

Basic Statistics

Frankly, I am stunned by some of the numbers listed in our standard postgame table, posted below. First, the fact that the Penn State offense only had 20 fewer yards than Purdue and had a better yard-per-play (YPP) average is pretty surprising compared to how it felt in the moment. Seemed like there were Purdue receivers catching slant after slant (save the occasional drop) and the Penn State defense appeared to have no answers. It also felt like Penn State’s passing attack never got in rhythm thanks to a ton of drops and poor throws while neither team managed to muster a run game. Still though, Penn State managed 5.6 YPP (compared to 5.1 last year against FBS opponents). And the Lions defense held Purdue to 5.3 yards per play, substantially less than the Boilers 5.9 average from 2021.

In 2021, the Purdue passing game ranked 5^th in the country in yards-per-game at 355 and T-39 in YPA at 8.0. Somehow the Penn State defense, while giving up 365 total passing yards, held the Boilermakers to 6.2 YPA, which is like Iowa Hawkeye territory (i.e. pretty bad). Meanwhile, the Penn State offense was good for 255 YPG at 6.7 YPA in 2021 and reached 308 and 7.5 , respectively, on Thursday, which is pretty okay.

Despite those pleasantly surprising metrics, the run games of both teams are still driving on a donut tire donut tire. The Nittany Lions forced the issue and looked good-ish on the ground in spurts during the first two series featuring the freshman RBs, but then lost steam. Their longest run of the night came on a 12-yarder from Keyvone Lee that looked to be the start of a game-sealing, statement drive in the 4^th quarter. The very next play, however, Sean Clifford threw the pick-six and the running game was effectively muted for the remainder of the contest.

Recent Historic Context – Bringing the C Back to the ABC’s with Quick Hitters

(checks time) It’s nearly midnight and your author has work in the morning, then a flight to Anchorage in the early afternoon, so we’re going with the quick hitter version of ABC today. Deal with it. The ups-and-downs of this game demand it. Plus, there’s not a ton of advanced statistics to examine after about 15 FBS games have been played.

1. This game is the 102^nd of James Franklin’s Penn State tenure and marks his 68^th win against 34 losses (66.7 win percentage).
2. The 31 points allowed is the 6^th most in a Penn State win since 2014, the start of the James Franklin era. The most was 44 Nebraska racked up 2017 during a garbage time points extravaganza.
3. Penn State and Purdue each turned the ball over once on Thursday.In the Franklin era, there have been 18 games where the turnover margin was 0. Penn State is 12-6 in such games.
4. This is the 29^th game of the Franklin era in which PSU threw for 300+ yards and the 5^th with Mike Yurcich calling the plays. Penn State is 23-6 when they pass for 300 or more yards.
5. This is the 36^th game where the PSU offense ran for fewer than 100 yards. They are 17-19 in those games.
6. I tweeted after the first half about how Penn State ran the ball on 61% (23 of 38) of its plays. By game’s end, this flipped to the Lions passing on 56% of their plays. For his tenure, Mike Yurcich’s offenses throw 54% of the time, making him the only OC under James Franklin to throw more times than he calls a run (John Donovan was exactly 50%). Joe Moorhead was 46%, Ricky Rahne was 42%, and Kirk Ciarrocca was 45%. Still need to get the run game going…
7. The 61 rush yards allowed is the 17^th best under Franklin. The team is 15-2 in these games. In fact, PSU is 34-6 when allowing fewer than 100 yards rushing under Franklin.
8. The 365 passing yards allowed is 8^th most since 2014 and is considerably higher than the 208 YPG average compiled in that same 8-year span. But, the 6.2 YPA allowed is 52^nd best (middle of the pack).
9. In yards-per-play, the differential was Penn State +0.3. In 70 games, the team is 54-16 when they have a positive YPP differential.
10. The Nittany Lions allowed 3 TFL and 1 sack on offense in this game. That is a dramatic improvement from 2021 where on average they gave up 9.6 TFL+Sack. In its most efficient outing of 2021, the Lions surrendered 5 TFL and 0 sacks.
11. The kicking game is apparently in good hands after the departure of Jordan Stout. Barny Amor averaged 46.9 yards on 8 punts with 3 downed inside the 20 (should’ve been 4…). He appears to be a weapon. Jake Pinegar was perfect on extra points and the kickoff duties are split depending on whether or not they want to entice a return or just take a touchback. That was pleasant to see.
12. Sadly, the defense only accounted for 2 sacks and (I believe) 1 TFL. Manny Diaz is expected to be a wizard when it comes to generating negative plays. Over the years, his teams have averaged more than 10 TFL+sacks. This should improve.
13. To illustrate how up and down this game was, here are the yards by quarter:

• Penn State: 81, 137, 33, 155
• Purdue: 102, 103, 156, 65

In the 2^nd quarter, Penn State scored 21 points and in the 4^th, 14. In the <100 yard quarters, they scored 0. Purdue had a poor 4^th quarter and let the game slip away.

So that’s it. There’s 12 contextual stats that allow us to see some areas where we should see (or need!) improvement and others where we’re at least holding steady compared to 2021. I have no idea what is going to happen in the next 11, 12, 13 or 14 games (wishful thinking) but based on the initial 60-minute sample size, this Penn State team will either be amazing, terrible, or a mix of both depending on the quarter. So, it’ll be… fun? Frustrating? Maddening? Euphoric? Yes, in fact it’s going to be all of those and it will likely go from one to the other in a matter of minutes.