Football Outsiders Stats and GT 2013 prediction

AE 87

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http://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2013/8/9/4587334/2013-georgia-tech-schedule-roster-preview

Bill Connelly who does a lot with the S&P stats at Football Outsiders -- maybe he developed them?--ranks us at 32 as his 2013 projection. I've given his projected ACC rankings below. A few things stand out: (1) FSU and CU are both over-ranked in comparison to his projection of 19 and 20. (2) The top five coastal contenders all fall within 23-35. His statistical analysis supports our supposition that the coastal race will be tight.

A few interesting insights:
1) He quantifies the confidence we have in our secondary by noting that we had a top 25 pass defense (PPP+) while having only a top 60 opponent-adjusted sack rate.

2) He quantifies the confidence we've had in our offense, noting that apart from the 2010 debacle, our offense has consistently ranked between 6 and 29 in F/+ (a Football Outsiders combined ranking): 29, 6, 49, 16, 22 from 2008 to 2012.

3) We have the potential for having a very good D. Building on the observation noted in (1) above, one of the comments that made me raise an eyebrow was this one:
"Roof's Penn State defense in 2012 had the opposite problem as Tech: outstanding on standard downs, unable to get off the field on passing downs."
From my own look at the stats, I can say that 3rd Down conversion stood-out as an area of improvement after the first six games. I suspect that this improvement affected the stats he was looking at. Also Roof did have a very young and inexperienced secondary last year at Penn State. If he can get us to outstanding on standard downs and keep us very good on passing downs, our D could be pretty special.

Projected ACC rankings:
FSU 19
CU 20
VPI 23
d'oh U 25
UNC 29
GT 32
Pitt 35
Syracuse 54
NC St 61
BC 69
Virginia 71
WF 81
Maryland 83
Duke 88
 
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