joe's blog

The only fireworks he needed were the ones he created in the backfield.

Our sincerest well wishes to everyone celebrating freedom and the anniversary of our beautiful America. Don't drink and drive. And come Tuesday if you haven't gained 5 pounds, well, you're doing it wrong.

*I posted this last year. I think it's appropriate to post again this year.

The crazy 2010 season has left us no time to sweep around our own porch. Things are now a little more relaxed with the bye week. So let's take care of some outstanding items.

2010 Memorabilia Contest Winners

• hokietriana
• Zegolf
• HokieGal
• Linze2

2010 Trivia Final Standings

1. Winner - VTJawo 14
2. vtbaz 12
3. The Miz 11
4. RonMexicoRules 4
5. magduffs 2
6. furrer4heisman 2
7. hokieshark 1
8. 1MoreHokie 1
9. hokie4u2c 1
10. Hokie_Wolf 1

Standby for an email if you've won.

Over the next couple or months you're going to start seeing some changes around here, for the better of course, so stay tuned. If you have any suggestions of any new features you'd like to see just let us know. Thanks to everyone for supporting us!

The Davey O'Brien Foundation released their semifinalists for the 2010 Davey O'Brien National Quarterback Award today. It came as a surprise to me that Tyrod Taylor was not among the final 16 quarterbacks. Through eight games I believe Tyrod can hold his own against any quarterback in America. No, he isn't going throw for 3,500 or even 2,500 yards in a season, he doesn't play in an offense that generates gaudy or even flashy statistics. However, he makes the most of his opportunities and produces big plays.

Let's ignore accumulator statistics and focus on averages instead.

Yards per attempt (AVG): 3rd
Touchdowns per attempt (TD %): 6th
Interceptions per attempt (INT %): 12th (lower is better)
QB rating (RAT): 4th
Yards per rush (AVG): 8th
Touchdowns per rush (TD %): 13th
Completion percentage (CMP %): 15th

When compared to the 16 semifinalists Tyrod rates favorably. He's not last in any category, but he's one of the least accurate passers and does rate last in touchdowns per rush among the semifinalists with a rushing score. However, his top three rank in yards per attempt, in my opinion, nullifies his low completion percentage. If Tyrod's throwing for more yards on fewer completions then he's making bigger plays. That's good by me. He's only had a handful of designed rushing plays called for him in the red zone, so the low touchdowns per rush isn't shocking.

To put it bluntly, Tyrod is taking care of the football, scoring points and burning defenses with his legs. He should have been a semifinalist.

The last couple of weeks the film study has focused on things we did wrong. Enough of that bunk, let's take an in depth look at our five touchdowns.

1st and Goal at the Duke 14

This is a simple four man pattern off of the play-action fake. Boykin runs a 5-yard in, Dyrell streaks down the middle of the field to the end zone, Andre Smith runs a post to the corner of the end zone and with no one to block Kenny Younger is going to leak out of the backfield into the flats.

The first thing I noticed about this play was the great protection. The offensive line nailed their blocks and Darren Evans chopped down the blitzing linebacker.

Duke man covered Andre Smith with a safety. Smith ran a fantastic post route and split the safety and corner helping over the top. It was an all too easy touchdown.

My full ballot is after the jump. Here's a quick justification of the movers, shakers and frozen.

• Oregon or Auburn? Oregon has looked more dominate, but Auburn has beaten better teams. I'm going with the Ducks because I'm infatuated with the Blur.
• Mizzou travels to Nebraska this Saturday; both tagteamed the state Oklahoma over the top rope. We'll know a lot more about each team after they play. For now Mizzou gets a huge bump, because they're undefeated. Nebraska's loss to Texas is an even bigger blemish on their resume after the 'Horns got dropped by Iowa State.
• Florida State drops because I should have bumped them down last week after they struggled with BC.
• Iowa's losses are respectable, as soon as they notch a quality win they'll move up.
• I didn't think I'd rank Virginia Tech before we played Georgia Tech, but then a lot of other teams lost and we started playing offense.

I know this ballot is a mess. Let me know what I need to change before Wednesday.

Your sights and sounds of Blacksburg or wherever Hokie Nation is headed.

I hope at some point, someone was wearing that pumpkin on their head.

via: @Slicktrip

Enter Sandman from the North Endzone, aka the happiest place on Earth.

@vtbeach

Good afternoon class, for today's math less we're going to have guest lecturer Brian Fremeau explain the Fremeau Efficiency Index. The floor is all yours Brian.

The principles of the Fremeau Efficiency Index (FEI) can be found here. FEI rewards playing well against good teams, win or lose, and punishes losing to poor teams more harshly than it rewards defeating poor teams. FEI is drive-based, not play-by-play based, and it is specifically engineered to measure the college game.

FEI is the opponent-adjusted value of Game Efficiency [((Points For – Points Against)/7) / (Total Competitive Possessions/2)] (GE), a measurement of the success rate of a team scoring and preventing opponent scoring throughout the non-garbage-time possessions of a game. FEI represents a team's efficiency value over average. Strength of Schedule (SOS) is calculated as the likelihood that an elite team (two standard deviations above average) would win every game on the given team's schedule to date. SOS listed here does not include future games scheduled.

Mean Wins (FBS MW) represent the average total games a team with the given FEI rating should expect to win against its complete schedule of FBS opponents. Remaining Mean Wins (FBS RW) represent the average expected team wins for games scheduled but not yet played.

Offensive FEI (OFEI) and Defensive FEI (DFEI) are the opponent-adjusted ratings of all non-garbage-time drives from scrimmage. Field Position Advantage (FPA) is the share of the value of total starting field position for the season earned by each team against its opponents. Field Goal Efficiency (FGE) is the point value per field goal attempt earned by the field goal unit.

It's OK if that doesn't resonate with your brain right away. As you start to follow along things will begin to make sense. Game Efficiency was developed in part because traditional statistics found in a box score didn't really do a good job telling the story of a game. The flow of a game transitions and changes drive by drive, not quarter by quarter. Quarters and time are a construct of the rules of football, whereas drives and time of possession are a product of play. Therefore, developing a method to analyze efficiency and even predict future outcome based on the outcome of past possessions makes sense.

Brian was kind enough to pass along a table of Virginia Tech's Game Efficiency scores. You'll notice that the JMU debacle is absent. That's because the FEI model is a graph, the games are nodes and the outcomes are links among them. There's not enough connectivity between I-A and I-AA teams to be relevant to the analysis, because on average each I-A team only plays one I-AA team a season.

• The loss to Boise State (0.474) and the win at North Carolina State (0.558) were our two most efficient games according to FEI. Our abysmal GE (-0.036) against Boise is bumped up significantly because of the high relevancy. Both of those games were our closest, down-to-the-wire games. Note that our GEs for them are close to zero.
• You might wonder how our DFEI against Boston College, a team we shutout, is so bad. Remember, BC had three long drives: 9 plays 63 yards that ended in an interception, 8 plays 69 yards then they missed a field goal and 13 plays 84 yards that got Shinskie'd. Also their relevancy score is low.
• Four of our offensive efficiencies rank in the top 70, while our highest defensive efficiency is 148.
• We haven't played many good teams.

I hope this has provided you an additional perspective on how the first half of our season has played out. Now let's take a look at some aggregate statistics (through 10/16/2010).

• We are ranked 9th in the FEI, the next highest ACC team is North Carolina State at 18.
• Our OFEI rank is 6th.
• We rank 4th (25%) in Explosive Drives (the percentage of each team's drives that average at least 10 yards per play). However, we rank 113th (6.1%) in Methodical Drives (the percentage of each team's drives that have 10 or more plays). More big plays were a focus of the offense during the offseason, and they're leading to explosive drives, but if we can't control the clock when we need to, we'll lose games (e.g. Boise State).
• Defensively (DFEI) we rank 32nd against the 63rd similarly ranked set of offenses.
• We're only forcing three-and-outs 1/3 of the time (65th best).
• We're predicted to win 4.1 of our remaining 5 games.

A huge thanks to Brian for all of his help putting this together, and I encourage you to check his work at both BCF Toys and Football Outsiders. If you have questions or comments, leave them below and I'll do my best to follow up.

There's no guarantee that Hawaii Five-0 will stay on the air longer than the mascot mock stays undefeated.

The cutout is here (1).

My full ballot is after the jump. Here's a quick justification of the movers, shakers and frozen.

• Oregon remains at number one for now, but there will be a reshuffling next week after Oklahoma-Mizzou and Auburn-LSU.
• Should Ohio State be lower? They got whipped by Whiskey and the Miami victory isn't much to brag about.
• Nebraska: K-State made them look like world beaters, Texas made them look like doormats. Will the real Nebraska please stand up? They'll need quality wins to move up in my poll.
• I was waiting to see if West Virginia stumbled against USF like they've done 3 of the last 4 years. They did not, so welcome.
• K-State is here because they're 5-1, but they got clobbered by Nebraska and their best win is versus UCLA. Should they stay on?
• Should Virginia Tech be ranked? I slotted in UNC over the Hokies. The Heels are missing a quality win, but they don't have a bad loss (cough JMU, cough).

As you can see, I need your help. Let me know how I should reorder this mess before I submit my final ballot Wednesday morning.