Analytics, Basic Stats, and Recent Historic Context: The ABC’s of Penn State Football – Week 2: PSU vs. Ohio

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Introduction

“It’s only Ohio. It’s only Ohio.” – Me, muttering myself over and over while I look up ticket prices for the CFP National Championship Game in LA.

Yeah, it’s only Ohio, but over the past two years we’ve witnessed Penn State play down to the level of lesser competition often enough (see: Illini, Fighting) to not take any game for granted. Saturday, against the Bobcats and their retro helmets, Penn State showed why we fans should return to a state of unfettered optimism for 2022 and beyond. The guys with college experience under their belts – Sean Clifford, Chop Robinson, to name a couple – had very good games. And the young guys – Nick Singleton, Drew Allar, Harrison Wallace, DDS, and so many others – got real reps against a real opponent and showed why they were so coveted as recruits. Most importantly, their early-season emergence provides insurance that if there are injury issues down the line (which 100% will happen) the team isn’t going to collapse as they did last year. Penn State’s depth is as good as it has been in a very long time.

Quick Hitters (first seen on Twitter – go follow @PSU_Analytics)

I am trying to be more consistent about using Twitter on Saturdays, posting more postgame reactions and stats there. Those will augment the Quick Hitter section. Just FYI.

1. Against Ohio, 17 different Penn State receivers caught passes. By my count, here’s the breakdown: 9 wide receivers, 3 tight ends, and 5 running backs. That’s the kind of ball distribution you hope to see vs. a MAC team.
2. Penn State generated 6 plays that eclipsed 30 yards. 4 of them were 40+. 2 of those were 60+. In 2021, Penn State only produced 4 plays over 60 yards for the whole year.
3. We all loved the do-everything special teams MVP of 2021 – Jordan Stout – and it’s obvious his presence has been missed through as there are clearly some kicking issues that need to get fixed (1 missed XP and 1 missed FG against Ohio). But one area that’s absolutely nailed down is punting. Barney Amor is an absolute magician and should get half the credit for the safety against Ohio (PSU’s first safety since 2018 against Pitt). So far, in 11 attempts, Amor has 1 touchback and has pinned 5 punts inside the 20 (including some inside the 5, like the safety punt). He’s a weapon, folks.

Basic Statistics

Holy mackerel that table is glorious! The ol’ green sweep in the left column.The Nittany Lions scored over 40 points for the first time since Week 2 in 2021 (Ball State) and the 572 total yards on offense is the most since 2020 against Illinois in the short-lived B1G Champions Week celebration. On the defensive side of the ball, the 10 points allowed is in the range of top-70% of the Pry era and shows Manny Diaz’s unit is on the right track. The 264 yards allowed ranks tied for 21^st best of the entire James Franklin era. Just a great performance all the way around.

The story of the day against Ohio was the running game and the emergence of the young stars, led by Nick Singleton who had runs of 11, 70 (TD), 48, and 44 (TD) yards. Singleton rushed for 179 yards all together while Kaytron Allen contributed 23 yards on 6 carries. The team’s 6.9 yards-per-carry is the 10^th best of the James Franklin era, only bested twice since 2019 (Memphis and Idaho). Since 2020, the Lions have not averaged more than 5 yards per carry in any game. So if the running game output felt different on Saturday, that’s because it was different.

Now, one aspect to keep an eye on re: the running game is consistency I do not have a lot of contextual data on this, but it felt somewhat boom-or-bust against Ohio. Singleton tallied 173 of his 179 yards on four carries, good for a 43.3 YPC average. On Penn State’s other 30 carries, the Lions accumulated 61 yards (2 YPC). That means Penn State generated 74% of its rush yardage on 12% of its carries. You can’t expect to get 7 yards every carry. You’ll have some chunk plays and some that go for negative yardage. That’s football. But the Ohio defense had 8 tackles for loss (and 5 sacks) against Penn State, which is a lot. This running game volatility – explosive runs paired with seemingly too many negative plays – has been seen in Happy Valley before (2016 – 2017). In those years, the up and down was the result of the combination of having a generationally-talented running back trying to find daylight behind an inconsistent offensive line. Through two games, 2022 feels very similar [AUTHOR NOTE: I don’t necessarily think this volatility is a bad thing per se. It’s infinitely better to have this than what Penn State had in 2021 and the young RBs bring traits that haven’t been seen since at least Journey Brown. It’s just an observation.]

Advanced Stats – Keeping the Focus on the Offense

As mentioned, the defense had a very good day against Ohio. This is an undeniable fact. But, the offense was so good that we’re sticking with them for the advanced stats section.

We’ll start with red-zone scoring, which has been a torn in the Lions’ paw over the last couple of years. Below is the points-per-red-zone attempt by year. Each dot represents one FBS team and the lion-head obviously represents Penn State’s performance that particular season in this metric. Through two games, Penn State is having its best red zone performance since at least 2009 (It’s only Ohio…and Purdue, too, I guess). In 6 red-zone attempts Penn State has scored 5 TDs and 1 made-FG. So, you know, that’s pretty good. Sure, we will almost certainly see Red Zone efficiency drop through the season, but keeping the number in the 5.5+ point range will almost certainly lead to a higher scoring average than we’ve seen in recent years.

We’ll get to our explosivity metric in the coming weeks but for the first two games, the Nittany Lions have 6 TDs coming from outside of the red zone. This is 52% of their total points has come on plays that began outside the RZ. Again, this number will certainly drop over the year, but Penn State is off to a white hot start in explosivity. The highest percentage of points scored from outside the red zone since 2009 was 38% in 2016.

Anyway, we end with the Offensive Efficiency. Through the early part of 2022, you can see that the distribution is much wider throughout FBS than the other years. These numbers will become more condensed as the season progresses. But I want to look at Penn State specifically. The Nittany Lions through two games have the 29^th best offense in FBS and are 4^th best in the Big Ten (Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota). Ohio State is 5^th…which is a bit of a shocker. But back to Penn State…if the Lions can continue to produce on offense, it will reverse a downward trend over the past handful of seasons since a high point in 2017. Penn State’s metric in offensive efficiency will likely average out a bit too (i.e. drop through the year) but this is undeniably a great start.

For the 464^th time, yes, it was only Ohio. But for an offense that often struggled to get going against ANY opponent in 2020 and 2021, Penn State appears to have turned a major corner in 2022.