With our recent success, there has been a lot of skepticism from opposing fan bases about how good our team actually is. While they admit we have been impressive, they say that we haven't played any good teams yet and cite our opponent's offensive and defensive stats as proof. I wanted to look into this further, so that's what this diary is.

To start, I wanted to put together a table showing the national ranks of the opponents we've played in some key overall stats.

The total defense/offense stats are in YPG and the scoring stats are in PPG

This next table shows these same stats for our opponents with the totals from each team's Michigan game removed.

Read this table as follows: If the national rank of a team decreased with Michigan's game removed, than Michigan underperformed against this team in that stat. The opposite goes for a national rank increasing.

For example: Utah's Total Defense rank fell from 66 to 77 without the Michigan game stats in there. This means that Michigan's offense had less than 392 yards of offense against Utah. The same logic follows for all stats.

The third and final table shows the differences between Michigan's totals against these teams and their averages with the Michigan game removed.

Read this table as follows: If there's a negative sign in front of the number, it means Michigan performed that much below average against a team in that categorie. The same logic follows for the positive numbers.

For example: In the Utah game, Michigan has a -44.4 for total defense. That means Michigan gained 44.4 yards less than Utah's defense gives up a game on average.

The average total shows how much Michigan out performs or under performs in a categorie each game. So according to this table, Michigan will gain 1.78 yards more a game than the opposing defense normally gives up. So if a team normally gives up 300 yards a game, you can expect Michigan to gain 301.78 yards.

Similarly, Michigan will score 5.36 more points a game than the opposing defense allows, allow 224 yards less than what the opposing team normally gains, and allow 24.1 points less than what the opposing team normally scores.

If I had more time/motivation, I could put more time into the analysis of these stats. Instead of doing a raw average total in the last table, I would much rather see the percent difference between Michigan yards gained and average yards allowed by a team, etc. So there is some more analysis that can be done and some stuff that's left to be desired, but it does paint the general picture pretty well.

The reason I did this is because I think this paints a better picture of how good a team is. If a team averages 500 YPG that looks great in terms of stats, but to me a team that averages 400 YPG while playing defenses that allow 300 YPG is a better offense than one that averages 500 YPG while playing teams that allow 475 YPG. An average offense isn't one that is ranked 65/130 in YPG, but one that gains as many yards against a team as that team normally lets up.

So that being said, the results in the third table above show pretty much what we expected. Michigan has an average to slightly above average offense. Michigan will gain as many yards as their opponent normally allows. The scoring stats are higher than you might expect as we score almost 5.5 more points a game than our opponents allow, but some of that comes from our non offensive scores against NW. Similarly, because of our great special teams and defense we generally have good field position, increasing our point output while decreasing our yard output.

Defensively however, we are great. Teams gain 224 less yards agains us than they normally average, and 24.1 points less per a game. That's incredible. This is a great defense, arguably the best in the country, and the stats back it up in any scenario.