I did a double take when I saw this post this morning.
https://bsky.app/profile/espnbillc.bsky.social/post/3lcd6yjg3m223
Should we be encouraged or furious?
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I did a double take when I saw this post this morning.
https://bsky.app/profile/espnbillc.bsky.social/post/3lcd6yjg3m223
Should we be encouraged or furious?
Comments
One score losses will get after ya.
umm..neither?
I'm not encouraged - our team was a .500 team this year, which is what it has been for over a decade and what it will continue to be if nothing major changes. That's our reality right now and I don't think there is any reason to expect that to change anytime soon.
I'm not furious - mostly for the above reason. We're a .500 team right now and getting mad about that helps no one. Do I wish we were better than this? Absolutely. Am I disappointed? Yes. Has the decade and half of mediocrity made me numb? Also yes. I don't really care enough to be furious.
Top 25 used to be an achievement - a goal to aspire to - it used to come with a reward. Most of the top 25 teams would play in respectable bowl games against other top 25 teams. We're in a new era of football now, though. Bowl games are seriously diminished and there's no real achievement associated with simply being in the top 25. Nowadays, it's top 12 or bust. If you're not in the playoff, or sniffing it, you don't matter. And at 26, you're not sniffing the playoff. We don't matter. We haven't mattered in over a decade. Nothing to be encouraged by or mad about. It just is what it is.
VT is rated higher than every team on it's schedule other than Miami and Clemson. They lost to four teams with a lower rating:
Duke (40)
Syracuse (50)
Rutgers (53)
Vanderbilt (58)
This is what happens when you "outplay" but lose to your opponents, which I think they did for each of these games plus the Miami game.
Where in the SP can I find Dukes receivers running free with no one around them? Where can I find Kyle McCord looking like Mahomes in the 4th quarter? Where can I find Diego Pavia dominating us?
The S in SP+ stands for Success Rate. A play is considered successful if it meets the following conditions:
The Vanderbilt offense had 47% success rate overall, including a 60% success rate and 59% success rate in the 2nd and 4th quarters, respectively. That's absurdly bad for the VT defense. Pulled this from the advanced box score on collegefootballdata.com
So that's where you can find that one.
I assume this is in reference to us giving up explosive plays?
The P in SP+ stands for PPA, which is a measure of explosiveness basically based on EPA (If your Expected Points Added is way above the regular Expected Points, then an explosive play happened).
So, when you look at the advanced box score for the duke game, you can see that in the first two quarters they had an EPA of 3.79 and 3.5 points (respectively) - which is insanely high. That means that the typical play in each of those quarters was resulting in 3.5 points more than it would for other teams. Another trash performance by VT.
So that's where you can find that one in SP+.
The advanced box score shows that VT got destroyed in Q3 of syracuse, not Q4. I didn't watch that game, so I'm unsure of what 'looking like Mahomes in the 4th quarter' means, but if you're referring to the third quarter, and your referring to explosive plays being given up, well, that too is captured in the Q3 EPA that can be found in... the advanced box score.
McCord never looked like Mahomes. That game was lost due to a defense collapse:
To be fair, two of whatsisfuck's long receptions were when the VT defender fell down. That's why he was open so much.
Best Ocho Cinco quote ever... "I'm not discussing DeAngelo Fall" .... lolololol
We should be Upset:
SP+ measures how good you are at things that correlate to winning games (Efficiency, Explosive Plays, Turnovers, Field Position, and Finishing Drives). We're basically top 25 in the things that correlate to winning games, but we aren't winning games.
That means that either (a) we're getting unlucky, or (b) we're losing on the margins.
You've watched our games. Every loss except one has been by one score or less.
The data is confirming what our eyes see: This team is good enough to be a top 25 team, but we (AKA the coaches) find ways to lose.
Bingo, this is the correct interpretation. Our players make lots of good plays, but the handful of bad ones killed us. That coupled with boneheaded coaching decisions are why we are 6-6 and not 10-2. All those close losses were, by definition, very nearly wins. However there are no moral victories. This was supposed the be the year we made the transition from "lose small" to "win small", and we did not. If the coaching staff is good enough they'll identify why we didn't take that step and identify what changes need to be made to correct it. If they can't do that, then it's time to find someone else who can come up with a realistic plan to improve the team's performance.
One could argue we made the positive transition from "lose big" (which we did against good teams last year) to "lose small" across the board. Even the Clemson game was only a 10 point loss that was also a "winnable" game.
We moved to a place of being capable of winning every game we played - and then f'd up too often.
Fair enough, but I think a lot of people thought this would be the year to take that step. And sure, being close is better than being far away. Last year we wouldn't have been close at all against Miami and Clemson. But we should have won some close games against the average to below average teams on our schedule.
If we're 9-3 with close losses to Clemson, UM, and let's say Syracuse we might not be ecstatic, but we're feeling a lot better about the future.
I hear ya, but watching the games, it feels like the offense is doing enough, but the defense has inexplicable meltdowns where they seem sorta lost and it bites us big. Yes, there have been clock mismanagement problems, but I still feel like the defense collapsing is making those clock management issues bigger deals than they could/should have been.
I... don't disagree.
If that's the story Pry wants to tell, then fix the defense. He's had 5ish top 10 defenses in his career? Fix it.
Oh, I agree - and even on offense, I think Bowen would be helped tremendously by a better line. I said somewhere else I hope Pry isn't afraid of making tough staffing decisions, because we definitely need to do better on defense.
Bowen is not a top 10 OC by any stretch, but he's better than Corn and Stiney, IMO. He's OK. He will get better over time. This season our defense couldn't get off the field when they needed to in several games. I think we can certainly upgrade from Marve. Especially coaching LB's.
A decent OL and a defense that doesn't spend the third quarter of every game wetting its pants would help Bowen out a lot.
Most advanced stats have liked us all year. We're like 27 in kford ratings and 1 or 2 in the what if rankings which flip every single possession and OT result.
The problem with advanced stats is they don't take into context timing of blunders or horrible coaching decisions. We had a really good defense in the redzone on paper....but if you watched the games you know that's because we lucked into a ton of turnovers in the redzone resulting in 0 points after the offense just did whatever they wanted for the last 70 yards. Most analytical stats will eat that up as a bend don't break defense but that was not what we had.
They also treat every play/game the same- which is my issue with it. Aaron Judge rips the cover off the ball - except for the post season when it matters. Dak Prescott puts up good numbers- in small games, not big ones. A third down conversion against VT in the first quarter is not the same as the countless back breaking ones we give up when we absolutely need a stop. Lamar Jackson puts up insane numbers against the Bengals in Septemeber. Not so much in January. Etc.
I think the advanced metrics are just one side of the coin: i.e., we had more good plays than bad plays over the course of the season.
The flip side of the coin was that we lost a bunch of games for exactly the reasons you've stated: untimely mistakes, some questionable play calls, and inability to get stops/scores with the game on the line.
It all adds up to what this season was: a wasted opportunity to make meaningful progress for the program.
It's almost like they need to bake in the concept of leverage into their numbers. MLB (or the stats nerds, really) has a numerical "leverage" value that they can trot out to show how much a reliever is used in low, medium, or high leverage situations. That might be good to factor in for 3rd down stop rate, or things like that.
you don't have an issue with analytics, you just (rightly) believe that small sample size results often don't match the takeaways from a large sample of data -- which is actually a core tenet of analytics.