Thank you for the timely stats but what is "S&P"? Is Standard and Poor now rating college football defenses? TIC. I knew special teams were substandard last year but my goodness that is shocking. Longest Day pretty much confirms my suspicions: If the offense did not move the ball on pretty much every possession, did not score touchdowns consistently, we were in a world of hurt. The question remains: will this year see more of the same? I am praying for significant improvement on both special teams and defense because I am not confident the offense is capable of 2016 or 2014 type numbers. I think we can move the ball and score but easy touchdowns will be hard to come by.
I know you’re just giving him a hard time, but it’s useful to know where to find these metrics. S&P and F+ are two of the better aggregate predictors out there (plus ELO and some others).
Bill Connolly explains S&P at
https://www.sbnation.com/college-fo...ge-football-advanced-stats-analytics-rankings and a little more at
https://www.footballstudyhall.com/2015/2/9/8001137/college-football-advanced-stats-glossary
It stands for Success and Points
On offense, it’s a combination of factors, adjusted for the opponent and factoring out garbage time. Some of those things are how often you get at least 5 yards on first down (or, on defense, give up less than that). On special teams, pinning the other team back is good and worth points.
Here is how he describes it:
FIVE FACTORS
The Five Factors are the basis for the new S&P+ ratings. They stem from the work done in this post.
But over time, I've come to realize that the sport comes down to five basic things, four of which you can mostly control. You make more big plays than your opponent, you stay on schedule, you tilt the field, you finish drives, and you fall on the ball. Explosiveness, efficiency, field position, finishing drives, and turnovers are the five factors to winning football games.
If you win the explosiveness battle (using PPP), you win 86 percent of the time.
If you win the efficiency battle (using Success Rate), you win 83 percent of the time.
If you win the drive-finishing battle (using points per trip inside the 40), you win 75 percent of the time.
If you win the field position battle (using average starting field position), you win 72 percent of the time.
If you win the turnover battle (using turnover margin), you win 73 percent of the time.
This is from 2013 college football game data. It's very, very similar from year to year.
These are good odds. And they speak to the fundamentals of football itself. You want to be efficient when you've got the ball, because if you fall behind schedule and into passing downs, you're far less likely to make a good play. You want to eat up chunks of yardage with big plays, because big plays mean both points and fewer opportunities to make mistakes. When you get the opportunity to score, you want to score. And when you give the ball back to your opponent, you want to give them to have to go as far as possible.
Aside from their impact on the new S&P+ ratings, the Five Factors will be accounted for in the 2015 season previews in 10 ways -- five adjusted for opponent, five not, and all interrelated:
Efficiency. Success Rate (unadjusted) and Success Rate+ (adjusted). As defined above, success rates examine your efficiency and consistency in staying on schedule and putting yourself in position to move the chains.
Explosiveness. IsoPPP (unadjusted) and IsoPPP+ (adjusted). IsoPPP is the Equivalent Points Per Play (PPP) average on only successful plays. This allows us to look at offense in two steps: How consistently successful were you, and when you were successful, how potent were you?
Field Position. Average Starting Field Position (unadjusted) and FP+ (adjusted). This is mostly self-explanatory, with one important note: An offense is measured by its defense's starting field position, and vice versa. Special teams obviously play a large role in field position, but so do the effectiveness of your offense and defense. So in the team profiles, you'll find Defensive Starting FP in the offensive section and Offensive Starting FP in the defensive section.
Finishing Drives. Points Per Trip Inside the 40 (unadjusted) and Redzone S&P+ (adjusted). Also mostly self-explanatory. These measures look not at how frequently you create scoring opportunities, but how you finish the ones you create. And yes, for the purposes of these stats, the "red zone" starts at the 40, not the 20.
Turnovers. Using both Turnover Margin and Adjusted Turnover Margin (as defined above), we can take a look at both how many turnovers you should have committed (on offense) or forced (on defense) and how many you actually did. This tells us a little bit about quality and a lot about the Turnovers Luck idea defined above.
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