I made a comment about Hale's tweet that had best Passer Rating since Oct 1. I was amazed to see Hooker on the list and I've got literally nothing to do at work so I dove into stats since that date for both UVA and VT offense and defense. I don't want to steal BTAN's thunder and I shouldn't because those big picture and adjusted stats are extremly important but the question of "AD what do we look like" always comes up and this is a quick way to compare.
Let's start with Defense.
Passer Rating - Defense
Teams seemingly wanted to air the ball out on us with 100 more passing attempts. Those extra 100 attempts only lead to about 90 more yards. We're managing to let up a couple more touchdowns but more importantly doubling up on the INT category. The VT defense on the Wake, GT, Pitt games shines here.
Rushing Defense.
There's not too much to look at here. I mean you can again see that trend from Miami through Pitt with how our defense has been getting better. Miami's numbers are going to be skewed a bit here as they ended up having to go air raid vs VT. The number I was most impressed with was rushing TDs our defense has scored as much as they've allowed teams to score on the ground.
Now to flip the coin over to offense.
Passer Rating - Offense
There are significant discrepancies when comparing these two. Obviously the Passer Rating but Hooker has 1 more touchdown and 4 less INTs on 148 less attempts. ND game isn't listed there and I know that add 2 INTs to Perkins total but it actually improved his Passer Rating from 129.45 to 131.44
Rush Offense
There are two things that jump out at you when you go through the box scores of these games. 1 Perkins was almost always the leading rusher. 2 we have a ton of ball carriers every game. The ND game really sticks out for UVA, these are non-sack rush yards and they had Perkins and -26 yards, UVA's completion percentage was the only thing that made that game close. For VT we've been steady you can see we struggled against the two noteable D-Lines we've faced in ND and Pitt.
Obviously take all of this with a hunk of salt. UVA has a very good set of Linebackers and a deep set of WR threats. Their special teams especially on the return game has also been great. I hope you enjoyed my random ramblings, this is how I spent my morning of work.
**Notes:
I added Notre Dame for UVA as they were a game short and it was a common opponent.
For Passer Rating- Offense I only used starting QB.
There's a decent chance I fat fingered a number somewhere but I've yet to find it.
Sorry that UVA over time trends are hard to read. With a shared static table I needed to pick between trend or common opponents.
Comments
This is great. Thanks for all the hard work putting this together.
This is the goods I can get behind interesting on how much uvas run game struggled against ND hopefully we can do the same
Yeah as much as their run game was mashed Perkins still had an insane completion percentage. Without those 2 picks they might have won that game. ND put up fairly pedestrian numbers vs them but its hard to tell if it was because of short fields.
This is awesome!
When you look at all those stats and begin to compare common opponents, you could see this game getting out of hand (not saying it will) for the Hoos.
The key to beating UVA is to contain Perkins, no two-way about it. He's what makes the Hoos' offense go. With the way the defense has been playing of late - gap integrity, containing and harassing the quarterbacks - and the secondary playing much better, I think this will be a close, slobber knocker game.
Offensively, they need to keep UVA's defense on the field for as long as they can. Fuente and Cornelsen have clearly borrowed a page from Beamer's offensive philosophy by controlling time of possession.
Yeah you really don't have to sack Perkins. I would much rather gamble on his arm not beating us. If we can create pressure with 4, which really shouldn't impossible given thei inconsistent line play, and keep him contained with that pressure we're fine.
What I'd rather not see is someone come free and Perkins slip out of the pocket he's incredibly dangerous there.
Agreed, and I suspect we will see Bud mixing up blitz package to include some fire-zone and dropping DTs (like Hewitt batting down Pickett's 4th down attempt) while trusting the secondary to play. Ashby and Hollifield are going to have to be hawkish about Perkins.
The key passing Stat is yards per attempt. It is one of the two most consistently important stats in football IMO (the other being turnovers). Based on the above numbers:
On Defense:
VT: 6.4 - Top 20
UVa: 7.7 - Below Avg
On offense:
VT: 10.4 - Elite / Top 10
UVa: 7.0 - Below avg
Granted, the numbers have been cherry-picked a little bit, but VT's appreciably better on both sides of the ball. And VT's differential +4.0 vs UVa's of -0.7 is massive.
If these numbers hold relatively true and the TO margin is close (two big IFs), VT almost certainly wins and it won't be particularly close.
That 2.7 and 2.3 against the best run defenses we have faced is a little concerning. ND and Pitt. And UVA has similar defensive strength in it's front and top 25 against the Rush.
Yes but both of those lines are far better than UVA. French covered Snowden well in his post. They utilize they're long athletic line backers in the run game much more than ND and Pitt who rely on studs at tackle.
Again agreeing with French we bode well if we can punch it up the middle and release a blocker to the lb before the can shoot gaps. I don't see the edge running working well and we'll have to rely on quick outside passes to stretch the defense imo.
The other thing to consider is coverage. With how balanced our attack has been if they're going to sell out line backers on run and pass pressure we should be able to expose their inexperience at DB.