jimmystats

Oh man, this is not gonna help our IsoPPP+ [Patrick Barron]

I will get back on the UFR horse soon, promise, but every January/February I like to grab all of the year's play-by-play data, painstakingly repair the damaged bits, and recreate the information that (other) internet nerds used to. This all goes into those stat boxes I make for HTTV, which I've started working on in earnest the last few weeks.

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While I'm at it I thought it might be useful to put together a companion piece to discuss the statistical profile of Michigan and other teams of interest. I also figured I could make it a reference point for those boxes in the future, and also explain some of my decisions.

Feedback is most welcome; I took Stats 404 in college and have been trying to figure out the rest as I go.

Resources:

  • College Football Data (CFBD). A good starting point. Free. You can download tons of raw stuff from them, including play-by-play and drive data. A lot of it's in admittedly rough shape, but they've done the hard part of scouring NCAA box scores.
  • Football Outsiders. Most stuff free. Home of FEI and its NFL equivalent, DVOA. Fremeau's Efficiency Index is based on drive efficiency.
  • 247 Database. Compare against rosters to see who's coming and going.
  • Pro Football Focus. Their grading is suspect but they have all kinds of useful snap data.
  • Bill Connelly. SP+ rankings remain the most predictive of all fancystats.

Also I did a data dump on Tempo.

[Hit THE JUMP for the deep nerding.]

[Marc-Grégor Campredon]

I did this with the defense previously, and finally got around to the offense. Bear with me, Excel Geniuses, as I struggle to make the vlookup to index(match) transition. A lot of the lessons were discussed so often in the UFRs that it's not worth going over them again. Split Zone was their base running play, and they struggled all season to find appropriate counters for what defenses prepared against it because the natural counter for it—QB keeper on zone read—was not something they could get/were coaching(?) McNamara to do. The officiating got me all house-stompy again. Hassan Haskins was a steely-eyed missile man. Anyway this exercise is about finding things that were new.

Favorite Plays?

They were a Power and West Coast sorta team, which is to say, pretty Harbaugh.

Type of Play Plays YPP EPA/P EPA(T)
Power Run 255 5.3 +0.2 +55
Pass Short 219 5.9 +0.2 +41
Inside Zone 163 5.1 +0.2 +26
Pass Deep+Sack 114 10.8 +0.5 +59
Screen/RSO 33 4.3 -0.2 -6
Speed to the edge 33 9.8 +0.5 +16
Play-Action 31 7.2 +0.3 +9
Outside Zone 28 7.7 +0.3 +8
QB Run/Keeper 17 7.0 +0.4 +6
Scramble 12 8.8 +0.4 +5
Trick Play 10 20.4 +1.6 +16
Total 915 6.6 +0.3 +236

From the above alone you might say they probably didn't go to their counters enough. Later in the season they started taking more shots downfield at Roman Wilson, who rewarded them for it. Their RB and TE deep routes were also astonishingly effective for how little they were deployed. Even adding all the sacks, dropback passing was one of the most effective tools in their bag. Play-action wasn't used very often—Gattis seemed to prefer working RPOs into the short passing game rather than just fake something.

They were evenly split between power and zone running earlier in the season but leaned on power more as it went on, and mostly ran off their tight ends regardless of what the offensive line was doing. That wasn't a bad plan.

I tried to identify individual heroes but the OL winning their battles varied game by game. Haskins was the constant, rarely getting less than half a point on any carry, and often hurdling fools downfield.

All told the breakdown was 50% called runs (for 5.65 YPC, +0.2 EPA/play), 37% called passes (7.94 YPA, +0.3 EPA/play), and then 6% play-action, 6% run-pass options, and 2% screens.

[After THE JUMP: You won't believe which player was super duper clutch on passing downs, except you will because you read the UFRs.]

[Patrick Barron]

UPDATE: A version of this published without the 2nd half of it and I didn't notice because I posted then ran out to pick up the kids.

A conversation in the last MGoPodcast on Rayshaun Benny's weird number (26) got me thinking that nobody has really put into words what certain jersey numbers mean in college football. I started working on a guide to what various numbers mean on various types of players, but 100 numbers is quite the undertaking, so I thought in the meantime I'd nerd out with some of the information I've picked up about jersey number assignment at Michigan.

[After THE JUMP: Max nerd]

According to my charting Hutchinson was the best player of the MGoBlog era, and Turner is going to be up there with the best of the cornerbacks.

LET'S NERD TF OUT

Stare at the chart.

Go up, gasballs

We're tracking how recruiting rankings of Michigan's commits move over the course of the recruiting cycle, because it's useful to have a record of this stuff, and because the way the rankings change often tell us more about the player's prospects than the rankings themselves.

Wherein I credit receivers for getting interfered, as is just.

My kingdom for a Renes.

Michigan has three defensive commits in the 2021 class, none of whom's ranked in the top 750. Can this work?

Beilein's rosters were filled with Not Just a Shooters, and this remains a Beilein roster. Also Franz gets screwed.

I like to check in quarterly to see the movement in recruiting rankings of Michigan's longtime commits. This is because how much they move and when can tell us things about a guy.