data dump

This is just a data dump.

To include tempo information in my HTTV previews I needed to reproduce good adjusted tempo data from last year's play-by-play information. This meant a TON of cleanup on the drive data the schools report to the NCAA (and which gets republished by, e.g. ESPN, in the box scores). Special thank you to Fox Sports for producing some of their own drive data to check against, and several schools that went back and repaired mistakes. No thanks to teams like Virginia Tech and various barely-FBS Sun Belters who routinely screw up their data and cause people like me all kinds of extra work.

I've removed Garbage Drives, using Fremeau's definition, plus two-minute drill situations were excised. Punts are also removed, mostly (by the schools themselves). Hopefully the college football world finds this useful. Unsurprisingly you won't have to scroll far up from the bottom to find Michigan. I've also bolded Michigan and their 2023 opponents.

Big table of data after THE JUMP.

I put all the UFR charting from this year into a single spreadsheet. Many Pivot Tables later there are things we can see.

4-3 versus 5-2: Fight!

The first thing I looked at was how often Michigan was in each of their usual personnel groups. The exact personnel was subject to change, but generally if they were in a 4-3 it was Michael Barrett playing the SAM, and both Ojabo and Hutchinson were on the field; if they were in a 5-2 they would have Jaylen Harrell out there as a hybrid DE/OLB instead of Ojabo, and one or two of Morris, Jenkins, and Welschof on the field.

As you might expect, defensive personnel was highly reactive to what personnel the offense was using, though not precisely. Michigan treated extra running backs (but not fullbacks) as wide receivers, so that’s how I counted 2RB sets.

Down and distance mattered too; usually if Michigan was in a nickel set versus multiple tight ends it was a passing down. But whether they broke out the 5-1, or if they used a 5-2 versus a 4-3 against multiple TE sets often depended most on what part of the season we’re talking about. Here’s a breakdown by game:

That tells a story: when they faced heavier sets, Michigan was a 5-2 team through MSU, a 4-3 team for two games, then a mix the rest of the way. In the games they used both the only pattern I thought I could see is they seemed to run with whichever was working until it didn’t.

In the Defense vs Georgia UFR I asserted that I liked the 4-3 (with Barrett as a hybrid S/LB) better than the 5-2 as a response to multi-TE personnel. With sampling error warnings abound, that bore out in the statistics:

The 5-1 worked against Wisconsin and emphatically did not against Michigan State. We discussed it at the time, but I thought that too was a tactical blunder. The idea was to clog up zone running lanes at the line of scrimmage at the risk of allowing a few bigger chunks if the runner made it through.

Think of it in battle terms: if you put 5 units at the front with one in reserve, there are fewer places they can break through, but you’re less able to react when they do so. If you put 4 units at the front and hold two in reserve, you’re less likely to stonewall them, but can be more reactive. Terrain or defensive obstacles can make a lot of these decisions for you, especially if stopping the enemy’s momentum for a moment will screw up their whole offensive. The enemy’s deployment matters too; if they’re probing the line for weaknesses you don’t want to give them any, whereas if they’re hitting one spot in force you’d like to have to agility to react to where it hits.

Going heavy at the front is a good tactic you’re facing a good stretch zone (probing for weaknesses, the run play) offense, a 5-man front can frustrate them. Heavy fronts are also effective against a team that’s guaranteed to move the ball on 3rd and 2 but can’t pass out of a 2nd and 8. The tactic worked perfectly for Wisconsin, since passing downs were death. Against MSU it backfired; State got away with an excessive amount of holding, which meant they were winning those battles up front more often than they should have been, and then there was nobody to stop Kenneth Walker III.

Michigan scrapped the five-man lines after the MSU game, in part because they realized they had two 4-3ish DEs they wanted on the field in David Ojabo and Aidan Hutchinson, but also I think because Michael Barrett was available again. Barrett was an every-down hybrid LB for Indiana, and since the rest of the schedule was spread teams Michigan barely touched the 5-2 again until the postseason. It did its job in the Big Ten CG, frustrating the Hawkeyes’ plans to stretch zone Michigan to death. But the 5-2 was beat up pretty badly by Georgia, which was able to take advantage of the Harrell-vs-Brock Bowers and 5-star OTs versus Julius Welschof mismatches.

Data ho. Current four-year rates for eligibility and retention plus squad sizes and overall APRs for all of I-A, organized by conference. This was always hard to get out of the PDFs and prevented wide-scale comparisons without enormous amounts of grunt work.

Conference Comparison

The ACC is your APR champion by a healthy margin; the rest of the BCS is virtually indistinguishable from another (and the Mountain West) save for the Big 12, which lags. The MAC, WAC, and Sun Belt bring up the rear, with the Sun Belt's appalling eligibility rate standing as yet another reason that conference is a blight on I-A.

Individual conference numbers after the jump.