Reading the Tea Leaves: 2011 Postmortem Autopsy Edition

Submitted by Eye of the Tiger on

Last May, I read some tea leaves in anticipation of the 2011 football season.  After careful analysis, I concluded that our defense was likely to go from terrible-to-average, and our offense from great-to-good.  In all likelihood, it was thought at the time, that we'd go 8-4 or 9-3, with a signature victory over either Li'l Bro or Ohio.  A dreary, depressing repeat of 2010's 7-5 was considered the second most likely scenario.  All things pointed to "kinda, sorta better...but not really that much better."  In other words, not necessarily better than Rich Rodriguez would have done in a hypothetical year 4, though qualitatively different.  

Then, at midseason, I read some more.  We'd made it to East Lansing undefeated--with 1 more win than we had when we played them in 2010, and 2 more than we had when we played them in 2009.  Things looked pretty good.  Though 9-3/good 8-4 was still considered the most likely scenario, now that gleaming city on the hill, a 10-2 regular season record, seemed attainable.  Imaginable.  Plausible.  

Then we did it: we went 10-2.  Then we did it some more: we beat Virginia Tech in a BCS bowl.  In doing so, we accomplished a few things we hadn't done in a while, such as:

Winning 10 games for the first time since 2006-7.

Winning a bowl game for the first time since 2007-8.

Winning a BCS bowl game for the first time since...1999-2000.

That, deserves a big round of applause, doesn't it?  So I'd like give it up for Team 132, Brady Hoke and the rest of the coaching staff for exceeding my, and most people's, expectations for the 2011-12 football season.  Huzzah!

But...

That Sugar Bowl victory was a funny one, wasn't it?  We didn't look like the better team most of the team, and our opponents looked like, well, they looked like the another team with really fast DEs and LBs and a moving rock at QB who can kinda sorta run and kinda sorta pass, but excels at shredding us for big gains.  That's right, the Mississippi State team that beat us 52-14 in the 2010 Gator Bowl.  Yet, somehow, this time they only scored 20...and we scored 23.  

Nothing, and I mean nothing, captures the difference between 2010 and 2011 like the difference between our bowl performances.  In 2010 we ran all over the field but couldn't score against good defenses when it mattered, while pretty much anyone with a pulse could score on us at will.  In 2011, we sometimes struggled for yards, but scored as much against the good teams as the bad (excepting, of course, Minnesota).  Good teams couldn't really put the ball in the endzone on us either, even when they picked up yards.  We were good when it mattered; no, we were better when it mattered.  

Comparing Performance to Expectations (and 2011 to 2010) 

To finish off the diary series, I thought I'd look back at the previous sets of predictions and see how they fared.  The initial prediction of 9-3/good 8-4 was predicated on certain concrete ideas about how much we'd improve vs. our performance in 2010.  So let's get compare those to what actually happened:

1. Defense.  

Initial Prediction: A major improvement from wretched (ranked in the 100s) to average (ranked in the 60s-40s).  

Midseason Preduction: These guys might be a top 30 defense.   

Postmortem: To put it mildly, the defense exceeded all expectations.  We weren't an average defense, as predicted back in May, or even a somewhat above average defense, as predicted at midseason.  Rather, we were the #17 defense and #6 scoring defense.  That's up from #110 and #107 last year.  

Or, to put it in more objective terms:

  2010    2011    Differential   
Total Defense 450.8 322.2 -128.6
Scoring Defense 35.2 17.4 -17.8

2. Offense.

Initial Prediction: A moderate decline in total yards and scoring.

Midseason Prediction: A moderate decline in total yards, but no decline in scoring.

Postmortem:  We did decline in total yards from #8 to #42.  But, in scoring, which is much more important, we went from #25 to #26.  

In objective terms:

 

  2010    2011    Differential   
Total Offense 488.7 404.7 -84.0
Scoring Offense 32.8 33.3 +0.5

...and there you have it.  We gained fewer yards but scored more points on offense.  We allowed fewer yards and even fewer points.  Oh, and we kicked a few field goals, thanks to the Brunette Girls of the world. 

Conclusions

For one thing, we now know that Mattison is a Defensive God.  He, Hoke and the whole defensive staff pulled off something I previously thought impossible...turning a laughing stock into a top-tier unit in exactly 1 year.  If we doubted that the problem was coaching before, we know it was now.  This unit was the best we've had since 2006-7, and didn't have nearly the talent that defense did.    

For another, we now know that Borges can roll with the spread, and will tailor his schemes to what he has around him.  Looking forward to 2012 and beyond to the Devin Gardner year(s), this will serve us well.  He might not be the offensive genius Rich Rodriguez is, but he's a crafty fella who knows how to win.  Should work even better in the Shane Morris + deadly line of maulers era.  

Finally, we can dig into the stats a bit and see that one of the underlying constrasts was in Time of Possession.  I

t used to be common sense that you tried to dominate ToP, and then the revisionists came around and said that there was no evidence slow offensive teams did better than fast offensive teams.  Now, instead, you were supposed to jettison the possession game and score quickly.  Or not.  Because it didn't matter.  

What I learned this season was that ToP may not matter in many cases, but it sure does when you're exactly the kind of team that has close to zero depth on defense.  Then you really should keep them off the field if you can.  Oregon can do the uptempo thing because they have lots and lots of depth on defense.  They may not be Alabama, but they have a legion of solid dudes they can substitute in and out, and that's exactly what they do.  

In 2010 and 2011, by contrast, we had an uneven group of starters, and wisps of smoke behind that.  Brady Hoke's decision to slow things down paid off for us in 2011, even if it meant losing a little razzle-dazzle in the process.  Going uptempo or playing the possession game is a choice you make based on your personnel, not an ideological question with a "right" and a "wrong" answer.  In 2011, we chose the right course for that roster, and it made a world of difference.  

 

Comments

ST3

January 26th, 2012 at 6:08 PM ^

I think the more relevant statistic is total plays, not time of possession. If you throw three incompletes, you take about 20 seconds off the clock. If you run into the line three times and gain 0 yards, you take almost 2 minutes off the clock. Which is more important? The defense gets the same amount of rest, regardless. However, with the three incompletes, there are more plays in the game and the defense is more likely to wear out later in the game. Would you rather have the defense play 60 plays and 35 minutes of game time, or 80 plays and 25 minutes? Count me in the TOP is an effect, not a cause, camp.

Has Garnett announced yet?

DonAZ

January 27th, 2012 at 6:13 AM ^

He might not be the offensive genius Rich Rodriguez is, but he's a crafty fella who knows how to win.

I'd rather have crafty than genius.  Particularly if the genius is prideful and stubborn.

Eye of the Tiger

January 27th, 2012 at 12:33 PM ^

We'd have a Rodriguez-level OC and a Mattison-level DC under an inspirational HC who can see the big picture, recruit top talent, manage all the interest groups and media, and coordinate the parts into a cohesive whole.  

The problem with the RR years, as I see it, was that, while he did a great job running the offense, pretty much all of the rest of the parts of the equation went badly.  Hardly a controversial position, and yes some of that was due to factors out of his control, but essentially what we traded that for was a staff that does all those other things much better, and runs an offense that may not be record-setting, but still gets it done.  Net win.  Net win. Net win.  

DonAZ

January 27th, 2012 at 5:04 PM ^

In general I'm pretty hard on RR ... maybe I've allowed too much emotion to enter my appraisal of him.  That said, even in the perfect world blending of HC, OC and DC I'm not sure I'd take Rodriguez. 

I agree RR's focus was offense to the exclusion of the other parts.  But I'm not so sure he did a great job with the offense last year.  The final two games of 2010 really stick in my craw -- only 7 points against OSU, and 14 against MSU.  Yeah, only two games ... but still, if the fundamental problem of last year's team was defense I would have expected a high-octane offense to put up more.  They didn't ... and if memory serves, they didn't look very good putting up the few points they did.

I have it in my mind -- and I'm prepared to be persuaded to the contrary -- that RR is a one-trick pony, and he's stubborn about it.  Hence my comment above.  My prediction is he'll look to recreate the White/Slaton years at UofA (I live in Tucson, BTW) and with the changes in defenses since 2007 and the general improvement of the PAC-12 my sense is he'll do "okay" but not "great."  I may be proven wrong.

In one of the Borges pressers earlier in the season someone was on him about offensive yard production being down last year to this, and I recall Borges chiding back that the ultimate key is to find ways to win the game.  That's the crafty part -- if in practice Denard showed some crazy ability to drop-kick the ball through the goal posts I think Borges would find a way to work that into the offense.

"He's got those crazy eyes ... like a gypsy" -- paraphrasing Cher in Moonstruck.  Borges is a crafty dude ... his pressers are entertaining as hell ... and it's clear the guy's mind just simmers football all day long.

Eye of the Tiger

January 28th, 2012 at 11:51 AM ^

Against marquee defenses in 2010.  There's no doubt about that.  But that also had to do with our defense.  Teams like Wisconsin, Ohio and Miss St. were able to just power over us at will, which forced our offense into too many do-or-die moments.  

I do think we'd have taken a step forward on offense, purely speaking, in 2011, given more familiarity with the system and the emergence of Fitz or, say, Dee Hart as a genuine zone-read threat.  Now Fitz' emergence could have had a lot to do with coaching, granted.  But my feeling is we might have averaged over 35pts/game with RR.  That said, I don't see the slightest shred of evidence that we'd have improved significantly on defense, and like I said, the quick-score offensive philosophy just wasn't suited to our defensive personnel, so I'd imagine many of the same do-or-die situations would have emerged against teams with ball control offenses and fast, physical defenses. All speculative, of course.  Besides, we did actually score 33pts/game anyways under Borges, so the whole thing is moot.  We're better off, in my opinion, with the current staff, both in 2011 and long-term.