Red zone defense
weighted percentage = (red zone TDs + 0.5 * red zone FGs) / total red zone trips
Yes, I know that a TD usually winds up being worth 7 points, but a 2:1 value for TDs vs. FGs seemed like a good starting point. Why did I bother doing this? Well, mostly just to see if numbers justified my perception that regardless of how the defense as a whole plays, it's really tightened up inside the 20s. How do we measure up? Well, I put the whole Big 10 on a...
Chart:
School | Drives | Red zone % | Rank | Weighted red zone % | Weighted rank | PPT |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Penn State | 8 | 63% | 7 | 44% | 3 | 2.88 |
Indiana | 10 | 70% | 20 | 55% | 17 | 3.80 |
Michigan | 15 | 73% | 27 | 57% | 21 | 3.87 |
Iowa | 7 | 100% | 111(t) | 64% | 42 | 4.14 |
Minnesota | 12 | 83% | 63 | 67% | 51 | 4.50 |
Purdue | 16 | 81% | 58 | 75% | 89 | 5.19 |
Illinois | 10 | 90% | 93 | 80% | 106 | 5.50 |
Northwestern | 15 | 87% | 79 | 80 % | 108 | 5.53 |
Wisconsin | 13 | 92 % | 102 | 81 % | 110 | 5.46 |
Michigan State | 12 | 100 % | 111(t) | 88 % | 113 | 5.92 |
Ohio State | 5 | 100 % | 111(t) | 90 % | 118 | 6.40 |
Note - "Red zone %" and "Rank" are the defensive numbers straight from the NCAA website, and the weighted numbers are mine.
So what does this mean?
It's still early in the season, but we can start to see a few things.
- First, I was right - Michigan is near the top of the conference, and has done a pretty good job of keeping folks out of the endzone when they get inside the 20.
- Holy hell, MSU. If we get in the red zone, we should get points - probably 6 of them.
- Iowa's interesting - every red zone trip, they've given up a score. However, they've done a damn god job of limiting people to field goals. (Admittedly, that's on only 7 drives.)
- Penn State's been pretty darn good, allowing a TD on only 25% of their red zone trips.
- Before you start gloating about OSU being at the bottom of the list, look at the number of drives. That's right, they're allowing an average of 1.25 red zone drives per game. Of course, they gave up touchdowns on almost every trip, but small sample size blah blah.
- Virginia Tech checks in at #4 nationally, allowing TDs on only 4 of their 17 defensive red zone trips. They must put something in the water in Blacksburg, cause that's ridiculous.
- Oklahoma and Florida are #2 and 5, respectively. It's just not fair to put defenses that tough opposite offenses with the kind of firepower they have (assuming their QBs are healthy, anyway.)
EDIT - I added in the "PPT" column. This is the "points per red zone trip" metric discussed in the comments, and it's what I used for my red zone offense post here. This didn't change the rankings too much - if I reranked based on the new metric, Wisconsin would leapfrog Northwestern and Illinois by a slim margin, but that's it. Also of interest is that using the PPT metric, OSU gets jumped by Arizona and Louisiana-Monroe, leaving the Bucks dead last in NCAA D1A. That makes me smile inside, even if it is just an artifact of a small sample size.
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