Tracking the Offense: Week 5

Brace yourselves.

2014 Opponents: William & Mary, Ohio State, ECU, GT, Western Michigan
2015 Opponents; Ohio State, Furman, Purdue, ECU, Pitt

THE BIG TWO: TOTAL OFFENSE AND SCORING OFFENSE

Just look at that chart. LOOK. AT. IT. I feel obligated to remind you, these aren't the totals from each game, they are the cumulative average through that game. To see a nosedive like this five games into the season means you have just suffered through one hell of an outlier. Delta percentage: -16.6%. Result: due to a season-high performance against Western Michigan in 2014, the 2014 offense is outperforming this year's counterpart by an average of 39.6 yards per game. This, one week after the 2015 offense was outgaining last year's offense by 47 yards per game. There is no overstating how monumental a shift this is.

The word of the day is regression. At a delta percentage of -13%, the dropoff in scoring was nearly as precipitous as the dropoff in yardage. (Note it doesn't look quite as bad because the scoring offense has a Y-axis that starts at zero, while the total offense Y-axis starts at 370.) With this week's performance, the 2015 offense is outscoring 2014 by 1.8 points per game, after a season high delta of +9.0 ppg.

THIRD DOWN CONVERSION PERCENTAGE

The 2015 offense continues a slow slide in converting third downs, dipping below 40% for the first time on the season. The 2014 offense is far outpacing this year's in this metric.

RED ZONE EFFICIENCY

The one thing this offense continues to do better than last year's counterpart is put points on the board in the red zone. Granted, VT had only one red zone opportunity against Pitt, but Motley managed to convert it into 7 points, contributing to a continued upward trend to this stat and further distancing this year's offense from last year's in this metric. If there is one remaining bright spot to this offense, it might be this.

YARDS PER

Switching up the order from previous weeks, we lead with yards per play. And lookie here. Convergence. 2015 and 2014 are now managing to both produce 5.4 yards per play. How the two offenses got here is very different, though. The 2014 offense started off a 5.4, dipped in weeks 3 and 4, then rebounded to their original total. the 2015 offense, on the other hand, has exhibited a perpetual slide since I began tracking this stat. It might be unsettling to hear, but although the yards per play are equivalent last year to this, trending has the two offenses heading in opposite directions. How did we come to this? Keep reading.

After some ridiculous consistency in the passing game, yards per attempt took a big hit. A delta percentage of -8.2% certainly played into the regression of the offense. And yet even after a day in which Motley completed only 45% of his passes for a paltry 91 yards, the 2015 offense is still outpacing 2014 by 1.5 YPA. So the passing game remains improved on average over last year, yet yards per play have converged. So the culprit must be...

...the running game. That's it. Any improvement last year to this by the running backs has been erased. The 2014 running backs are now outgaining the 2015 backs by 0.1 yards per carry. It should also be noted, this delta percentage of -8% occured in a week when the running backs only attempted 15 combined carries. Had Lefty had any semblance of commitment to an RB-led ground game, the dive would have likely been more severe.

SUMMARY
There is no overstating the statistical magnitude of the dropoff we witness this week. The nature of means is that they become more stable as the data set grows, so to see this large a delta (in either direction) as we approach midseason indicates how big of a deviation we have just witnessed. In one week, the offense managed to give up practically all discernible improvements it had made over last season, after significantly outpacing last year's offense almost across the board.

It would be one thing if the 2015 offense had been consistently bad to this point. Not that what we saw against Pitt would ever be easy to swallow, but perhaps had there been some forewarning of it, the impact to our psyches would not have been so severe.

This is strictly personal opinion, but the culprit is clear: our running game is a disaster. Over the last two games, the running backs have averaged 2.3 yards per carry. There is absolutely no contribution to the offense coming from the young men receiving the handoffs. And while the regression of the offensive line plays a part in it, the bulk of the blame falls upon one pair of shoulders. When Shane Beamer came to Virginia Tech in 2011, he had never been a running backs coach. Today, in 2015, he still hasn't.

Shane has had two promising recruits come up under him in JC Coleman and Trey Edmunds. Both showed promise out of high school, and both have shown flashed of brilliance. And yet now, in their fourth years with Shane as their positions coach, it remains just that: flashes. While both players have undoubtedly benefited from a very good strength and conditioning program at VT, their development as running backs has remained stagnant for four years. This is a hallmark of bad coaching. It is time for Shane to leave the program. He has failed the running backs he has coached.

Furthermore, it must be restated: despite all the Loeffler criticism that has deservedly been posted since the final gun of the Pitt game, the offense we have seen thus far gave us no indication heading into conference play that such a spectacular collapse was imminent. This is not to say that Loeffler does not deserve the blame, nor an appeal for understanding that any coordinator can have one bad game. When that "one bad game" is the worst offensive performance in the tenure of a 29-year head coach, the mere possibility of that happening is sufficient to dismiss a coordinator.

(As an asside, yes, I understand the 100 yards of total offense was the second-worst output under Frank, better than only Frank's first game as a head coach. The circumstances under which Frank coached his first game make me confident in asserting that the offensive effort we saw against Pitt was a worse offensive performance. I'd be happy to discuss that with anyone who disagrees.)

But beyond it simply being unacceptable that the offense on any give Saturday can render a 100 yard effort, the Pitt collapse is indicative of a far deeper problem with our program. We saw it last week when the defense gave up 410 yards and 35 points to ECU, and we saw it this week when Loeffler's offense gained 353.3 fewer yards than it had been averaging coming into the game. While we can analyze the specific plays, players and matchups that contributed to such poor performances, that level of analysis, I believe, misses the forest for the trees. There is a much deeper issue with the program right now, and it is an issue that affects the offense, the defense and the special teams:

In the post-Tyrod era, Frank Beamer has fostered a culture of inconsistency.

We can call it "playing down to our opponents," or whatever else we like. But it has become the norm. Virginia Tech football has indeed become like a box of chocolates, in that going into any given game, we haven't clue one about what the hell we're going to get. It would not surprise me whatsoever to see us come out and drop 500 yards and 50 points on NC State, just like it would not surprise me to watch us struggle to put a touchdown on the board. The offense is capable of either, and the determinants of which we see in a given game seem completely random.

Those who are saying that our problems lie in a bad offense, or a bad defense, are missing the point. The problem lies in the fact that we have become a bad program. And responsibility for that goes all the way to the top.