Some Interesting Facts About Big Ten Scoring Offenses: 2000-Present

SOME INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT BIG TEN SCORING OFFENSES: 2000-PRESENT

I find the things I am uncovering to be interesting (hopefully, you do as well), I am extending this series another week, and this time, we are going to poke around at some of the historic stats on scoring offense in the Big Ten. I even included Nebraska this time.

Since 2000, the conference’s football teams have scored 49,281 points over a stretch of 692,579 yards of total offense, or roughly the distance from Detroit to Springfield, Illinois. The conference has also amassed 5657 PATs to go with 6,168 touchdowns, as well as 2,076 field goals and 4,776 total yards per year.  Actually, here’s a small chart with the four most common scoring types and their relative occurrence:

In the 1,792 games that all this encompasses, the Big Ten has managed to maintain an average rate of 27.5 points per game and 386.5 yards per game, which is not the West Virginia-Baylor game of recent note but is also not bad. It still means an average ranking nationally in the mid-50s, which essentially means there have been about as many terrible offenses in this stretch as there have been good ones, but slightly fewer bad ones. Yes, very technical statement there.

It doesn’t look like it on the field sometimes, but take thirteen years of data and do a table of “percent of total” for a few things and you get this:

Nebraska is, of course, the anomaly here. Illinois and Indiana show their protracted stretches of relative ineptitude even here, as the difference between Wisconsin and Illinois, for example, means a veritable sh*t ton on scoring over 13 years even if the percentage is small. For the most part, things are more even than I would have thought, but again, fractions of a percent here hide off seasons.

Here are the totals / averages by team from 2000 to the present:

It may or may not be the variation you would expect. I sorted the table by average points per game and was not entirely shocked by the order of the teams myself. All things considered, maintaining an average ranking of 42, in our case, which would be the upper reaches of the second quartile of teams, is not that bad at all when compared to the grand mean of 56.

So, similar to the other two diaries that I did recently, I asked myself the question – which of these nearly 150 teams in this spreadsheet were very good at scoring, in relative terms? Using a similar method, I decided to create from the excessively large table a small table of teams which were above average in at least four of the following: Total yards, TDs, FGs, PATs, and Points.

You get 63 teams that compare as follows:

Here, from a historic average of 27.5 points per game, you jump to 31.8 points per game for the teams that fit the criteria for this table. I then did the same thing with the remaining teams, and you see the following from the remaining 23 teams:

These teams were scoring at an average rate of 35.2 points per game, or slightly more than 1 TD per game more than the Big Ten grand mean in this time period.

Not shockingly, being able to actually get the ball across the plane or through the uprights on a consistent basis makes a considerable difference. The Big Ten’s cumulative winning percentage since 2000 has been 0.564, but when I did the first elimination, that jumped to 0.686, and then on the second one, it leapt to 0.753. Essentially, it is the difference, in scoring terms, between 7 and 9 wins in a season based on historic numbers.

TL;DR CONCLUSION:

Once again, this was an exercise conducted under an admittedly arbitrary set of assumptions, but it is interesting to see  the improvements that mere points will bring in numerical terms and give an added dimension – hopefully – to what occurs on the field and how much it means to, well, score.