Michigan scoring, relying on two guys (a little statistical history/trivia)
With this year's tremendous performances by Jake Moody and Blake Corum (long may they reign!), I found it striking that so many of our points have been scored by just two players. I decided to go back and see how much of an outlier this is. Short answer: highly unusual; only one other year with a higher percentage.
Not sure what it means about our program--probably nothing--but I thought folks here might find these numbers interesting anyway:
2022 (so far)
Moody and Corum account for 236 of our 430 points, or 54.9% of the total.
The percentages from Harbaugh's previous years are:
2021 Moody and Haskins, 245/497, 49.3%
2020 Haskins and C. Johnson, 54/168, 32.1%
2019 Charbonnet and Nordin, 124/386, 32.1%
2018 Nordin and Higdon, 137/416, 32.9%
2017 Nordin and Higdon, 158/320, 49.4%
2016 Allen and Hill, 188/496, 37.9%
2015 Allen and Chesson, 172/406, 42.4%
In the more distant past, I could only find stats that included kickers going back to 1976. There were a few years where the top two scorers accounted for 50% or more of the points:
2008 Minor and Lopata, 123/243, 50.6%
1998 Feely and Thomas, 145/308, 50.0%
1996 Hamilton and C. Howard, 137/263, 52.1%
1994 Hamilton and Wheatley, 185/323, 57.3%
1991 D. Howard and Carlson, 216/408, 52.9%
1987 Morris and Gillette, 163/325, 50.2%
So 1994 was the only year where we ever had two players account for a higher percentage of our points than Moody and Corum have so far this year.
November 20th, 2022 at 3:58 PM ^
That's a pretty neat historical tidbit. Thanks for doing that research!
November 20th, 2022 at 4:07 PM ^
Nice work and very interesting.
November 20th, 2022 at 4:16 PM ^
Those overall point totals from earlier. Oof! These two might outscore 2008 and 1996 team totals by the time this season is done.
November 20th, 2022 at 6:35 PM ^
1996 Michigan was a slightly richer man's Iowa. Amazing defense and brutal offense.
November 20th, 2022 at 4:28 PM ^
History doesn't always repeat, but it often rhymes.
Being that 1991 was close in percentage share to this year, and Desmond won the Heisman that year, then maybe, just maybe...
November 20th, 2022 at 5:16 PM ^
I thought to myself before opening the post, is this going to be Corum/Moody or Dickinson/Jett.
November 20th, 2022 at 5:46 PM ^
Didn’t Wheatley miss a fair amount of time due to injury in ‘94? If so, all the more impressive. But we’ve never really had anyone more impressive than Tyronne Wheatley, so not surprising. (A handful at his level - not trying to start an argument. “You don’t compare great to great.”)
This data overall feels very anecdotal because one of the two players seems to always be a kicker. A stacked bar chart with the kicker one color and RB or WR the others would be interesting to look at.
November 20th, 2022 at 6:27 PM ^
Well, I don't have any charts like that, but here is my data set: all of the Harbaugh years up top, and then the 50%+ years between 1976 and 2014. Some of these names bring back a lot of memories!