113: Charting drives
113: Charting drives
Plus some thoughts college coaches and the Rashomon effect.
Georgia beat Texas 30-15 Saturday night in a matchup between two of the top teams in all of college football. The Bulldogs play football in a way that reminds you that the game starts at the line of scrimmage.
It was a dominant first half. Georgia started three consecutive drives in Texas territory while holding the Longhorns’ offense to 1.2 yards per play.
Georgia has put together incredible stretches of play this season. UGA outscored Clemson 28-3 in the second half of its week one win, it stormed back at Alabama outscoring the Tide 27-11 in that second half, and stuffed Texas in a locker with a shutout 23-0 performance in the first half Saturday night.
Let’s take a look at the first half drive chart. This table is aiming to recreate an old baseball box score1.
Texas gained only 11.3 percent of available yards with a average starting field position at their own 22 yard line. Five punts and three turnovers is not a recipe for success.
Georgia gained 170 yards on 42 plays and scored 2.9 points per drive in the first half. The field position made the difference as the Bulldogs started three consecutive drives inside the Texas 40 yard line in that first half.
The Longhorns defense still kept Georgia in check or at least enough to where Texas could try to mount a comeback in the second half. Texas cut the lead to 23-15 after a controversial interception return in the second half, but Georgia’s first half performance and field position was too much.
Using data from Brian Fremeau, a team that starts a drive within its opponent’s 40 yard line scores on average about ~3.5 or more points on that drive.
This was not the case for USC on Saturday at Maryland. The Trojans started a drive on the Maryland 33 yard line and held a six-point lead with two minutes and 48 seconds left in the game.
USC lost the game 29-28.
Here is a closer look at the three pivotal drives at the end of the game.
The Trojans ran three plays to advance the ball to the Maryland 24 before the two minute timeout2.
4th and 1 at the Maryland 24 yard line with two minutes left. Lincoln Riley and USC elected to kick a 41-yard field goal instead of trying to gain a first down and end the game.
In a battle against the clock, the clock won because Maryland blocked the field goal and returned it the USC 47. The Terps ran five plays in 48 seconds to score a touchdown and win the game 29-28.
College coaches
USC is 1-4 in the Big Ten with a +3 point differential. The Trojans have lost nine of its last 14 games under head coach Lincoln Riley.
What is more curious to me is Riley’s former employer. Oklahoma is 21-13 since Riley left the Sooners. Oklahoma lost 35-9 at home Saturday to South Carolina. It was its worst home loss to an unranked opponent since 19983.
Southern Cal is 22-12 since Riley made the trek west from Norman, Oklahoma. Riley signed a 10-year, $110 million contract in 2021. The details of that deal feel fabricated because it’s so irresponsible.
Riley’s successor at Oklahoma, Brent Venables, signed a six-year $51.6 million extension earlier this year after putting together a 16-10 record in just two seasons.
Oklahoma is 4-3 overall this season and 1-3 with a league worst -61 point differential in SEC play. The Sooners’ remaining league schedule includes Ole Miss, Alabama, and LSU.
We're all watching the same college sports drama unfold, but it's like we're seeing completely different movies. Welcome to the Rashomon effect.
This effect explains how we all arrive at different versions of reality. Multiple people can witness the same event and provide significantly different accounts of what happened due to subjective perception, personal biases, and individual experiences.
This brings us to Tony Bennett. The Virginia head men’s basketball coach announced his retirement last week. Bennett is 55 years young and won over 70 percent of his games as a head coach in his career. He could likely coach for another decade at least.
Bennett signed a contract extension in June of this year, and his overall salary was projected to be around $4 million per year. Bennett explained he didn’t retire for health reasons. He did expound on how the game is in an unhealthy place though. The NIL era and the looming House settlement is drastically changing the landscape of college sports.
It’s not surprising that Bennett is being criticized. And I think it’s fair to criticize Bennett, but I’m also curious who we’re all arguing with sometimes?
Some see a privileged coach walking away from a perceived cushy gig because the game's lost its way. Others are calling it quitting on your team and making jokes about his style of play.
It's the same event, but we're all watching it through our own personal lens.
My assumption is there is lot we don’t know and we would all be better off assuming if we knew more, it might actually change our perception.
It's time we acknowledge that there's no one true version of what's happening in college sports. We’re trying to understand running water by catching it in a bucket.
In a world where everyone's seeing something different, how do we move forward?
Maybe it starts with admitting that our perspective, no matter how rock solid it feels, might not be the whole picture.
What if college coaches are actually overvalued?
Anyhow, here is the code to produce the two charts in this post. As for recommendations this week, check out Neil Paine’s Substack. A lot of great analysis, including this latest post about baseball and payrolls.
Plus, the F5 from Owen Phillips is back. This newsletter about the NBA is a huge inspiration for me and many others learning how to better communicate with data. The newsletter shut down in 2021 after Phillips took a job with the New York Knicks, but it’s back now and just as good as before, if not better.
As always, thanks for reading this far and please subscribe if you so choose.
I’ve been reading Edward Tufte’s book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, on and off for the past couple years. Some of the old time box scores do such a good job of presenting information is a quick format, so aiming for less design here and more shorthand of what happened.
Shehan Jeyarajah breaks down what is happening at Oklahoma in this article for CBS. The Sooners coach in 1998? John Blake.