As far as I know, there's only one stat that's 100% aligned with winning--point differential. If you score more than the other guy, you win all the time.
The other stats are there to be predictive and explanatory.
This chart is mostly for fun, and I think it probably got invented because the author kept hearing people say "we were really in this game, but the score doesn't really show it".
So, what he did was take the percentage of plays that each team did something net positive and calculate the difference. It's not scientific, but when you take out acts of god, gusts of wind blowing the ball to the side of the upright, bounces off of someone's helmet for an interception and a pick six, the team that consistently does more things right tends to win. There were 14 games there where the team that consistently won each down still lost the game--because when they did lose the down, they lost it bigtime.
In our case, you could say on offense or defense we won about 42% of the plays, and Notre Dame won about 58% of them--that's a pretty solid win.
That's back of the napkin kinda math, though.
But again, this is mostly "Hey, fan. Yeah, I know that you thought you were in it, but nah, you really weren't".
More scientifically, you can look at post-game win expectancy -- we're at 0.4%. The Notre Dame game wasn't close. Neither were Syracuse or Louisville.
264 | 19-Oct | Non | 0 | Georgia Tech | H | Notre Dame | 13 | 31 | 0 | -18 | 0.4% | -21.3 |
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The games we won, we won solidly. The games we lost, we lost solidly.
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Now, there's some real stats work here:
https://www.footballstudyhall.com/2014/1/24/5337968/college-football-five-factors
The SP+ stats are based on it (and that's explained at
https://www.sbnation.com/college-fo...ge-football-advanced-stats-analytics-rankings)
Success rate is what I listed above. I've seen some different definitions, but here are a couple:
Success Rate
A common Football Outsiders tool used to measure efficiency by determining whether every play of a given game was successful or not. The terms of success in college football: 50 percent of necessary yardage on first down, 70 percent on second down, and 100 percent on third and fourth down.
Success Rate+
An opponent-adjusted version of Success Rate. As with most other "+" measures, it is built around a baseline of 100.0. Anything over 100.0 is better than average, anything below 100.0 is worse than average.
If you win the
Success Rate battle, you win 83% of the time. So, it's a really good predictor of whether you deserved to win (and it doesn't include a lot of the miraculous or "lucky" stuff)
If you win the
Explosive Plays battle, you win 86% of the time (but it does include the "lucky" plays that people say "if they hadn't had that pick six, we would have won")
If you win the
Finishing the Drive battle, you win 75% of the time (i.e. when you get more points per trip inside the opposing 40)
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.
We didn't win any of those--especially not "Finishing the Drive". The first is being consistent and efficient. The second is getting quick wins. The third is closing the deal.
And, crap, we've been pretty lucky this year, and looking back at it the Syracuse, ND, and Louisville games really show it. As good as our offense is--and it's good--it's not doing as well in success, explosiveness, or finishing as it needs to (it's been good at finishing EXCEPT in three games). Special teams has been losing field position battles for us.
The bad news is, we have a lot of room to improve. The good news is that we can get a LOT better.
Right on, brother.