College Football's Most Important Stats - VT Edition

A few days ago, someone else posted an article on here but I cant seem to find the OP. I did however take the article and try to calculate or compile each of the stats that the article discusses. There were a couple of his stats that I either could not delineate his equation from the SB Nation definition or would require me to review every play from every game for the last three years. All that said, here is how the Hokies fared in 2011, 2012, and 2013 in most of this articles stats. I don't think that most of these statistics will come as a big surprise.

This first area confirms what many people probably expected to see, our yards per play average from 2011 to 2013 was down almost an entire yard per play. It also shows that the Points Per Play is down significantly as well. The Points Per Play + statistic was a calculation that I could not determine but skewed the PPP by accounting for "big plays" in the offense.

The first statistic here regarding success rate would have required reviewing the outcome of every play to determine if it was a success, and while stats are fun for me, this was a yard too far. It would be interesting if French or one of the other commentators on here could evaluate the success rate of games in the future while they process their other evaluations.

In one of the more telling statistics from this analysis, our third down conversions were down a whopping 13% from 2011 to 2013, showing how clutch our team was in continuing drives. I would be interested to see what the typical third down conversion rate is in college football is, but it appears to be somewhere in the 40-42% range.

Of note, according to this ranking, we were 103rd in third down conversions per game in 2013.
http://www.teamrankings.com/college-football/stat/third-down-conversions...

The NCAA shows that we were 110th in third down conversion percentage in 2013
http://www.ncaa.com/stats/football/fbs/current/team/699/p3

The field position battle again was more in our favor in 2011 rather than 2013, and I would attribute this primarily to where on the field that our defense created turnovers from year to year. This statistic was actually the hardest to compile as I had to put every drive summary from each game from the last three years into excel and then calculate out because this is not tracked by the NCAA, HokieSports, or ESPN. It was rather interesting to look back at each game and see how much field position played a role, especially in losses.

This portion might be the most indicative of the woes of our offense for 2013 compared to 2011, as our Points per Trip Inside the 40 was down almost an entire point during this time frame. And while the Red Zone scoring percentage wasn't very definitive, I wanted to include the statistics of how many trips inside the Red Zone occurred as that shows especially why were more successful in 2011 with almost thirty more attempts in the Red Zone.

The Turnover evaluation showed that there wasn't an especially significant difference for the Hokies during this time frame. A lot of that has to do with the ability of our defense to create turnovers more so than the offense protecting the football. As I discussed above, the biggest difference I noted with turnovers was that in 2011 the defense seemed to create many more chances in our opponents side of the field than they did in 2012 or 2013.

All in all, not a lot of surprises here other than maybe the actual percentages or numbers being as high as they were.