106: A different drive chart

An attempt at visualizing a drive chart, FBS vs FBS records, double-digit dogs, and some recommendations.

The majority of college football games feature around 24 total drives or about 12 per team. There are lots of advanced stats to measure how effective each team is when it possesses the ball: yards per play, EPA, points per drive, Eckel rate, and more.

A drive chart is still useful to understand how each team performed when it had the ball. It’s hard to visualize possessions in a lot of the traditional drive charts, so let’s try to put together a different drive chart.

I’ve tried this last year (see here) and even attempted it for basketball possessions (see here). In this example, I'm trying to use a tabular format instead of a grammar of graphics format where we plot the drives.

USC beat LSU 27-20 on Sunday night. The Trojans put together five scoring drives and the Tigers managed four scoring drives. It was a competitive game where finishing drives remains important.

Below is the drive chart for the game and here is how to read it:

• A green dot indicates the start of a drive

• The green arrows indicate the duration or length of the drive

• A red dot indicates the end of the drive

• A scoring drive is highlighted with its result and points scored

• LSU is traveling left to right and USC right to left

LSU's seven-play, 74-yard opening drive finished on the USC three-yard-line without any points. Ultimately, this felt like the difference in the game. As head coach Brian Kelly¹ put it, the Tigers did not play complementary football.

You can find the code for this chart and other charts here². If you have any ideas or recommendations to improve this chart, please subscribe below or let me know in the comments.

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Head-to-head conference records so far

Conference pride discourse is back and it’s a race to the bottom. I still think one thing worth tracking is head-to-head conference records between FBS conferences this season.

The early return is a small sample size of games, given lots of FCS opponents are excluded³. Below is a chart showing the head-to-head records for the 11 FBS conferences, including independents, through Week 0 and Week 1 of the season.

The “Power 4” conferences are highlighted. A few notes as this only includes out-of-conference games:

• While the Big Ten went 17-1 this past week, 12 of those 18 games were against FBS competition (11-1 in those games)

• SEC teams played 10 games against FBS opponents, going 7-3 overall and 2-2 against the "Power 4," which was really the ACC and Big Ten.⁴

• The 16 teams in the Big 12 played five games against FBS teams

• The ACC went 6-3 against FBS conferences this past week, including 2-3 against the “Power 4”

Double-digit dogs are winning

Using TeamRankings data, there have been 25 games so far this season where a team is favored by 10 or more points. Four of those teams have lost outright as a double-digit favorite⁵:

• Georgia Tech 24, Florida State 21 (FSU -10.5)

• Sam Houston State 34, Rice 14 (Rice -10)

• Vanderbilt 34, Virginia Tech 27 (VT -7)

• Boston College 28, Florida State 13 (FSU -16.5)

16 percent of double-digit favorites have lost so far. Last season, TeamRankings shows 331 games featuring a spread of 10 or more. 33 of those favorites lost outright or about 10 percent.

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Random recommendations

Given the start of football season or fall sports in general, here are a few random recommendations from sites I’ve found interesting lately:

• collegefootballinsiders.com: the team uses data from Sports Info Solutions to provide power ratings and matchup previews. Parker Fleming is behind a lot of the useful stats like Eckel Rate.

• evollve.net: data analysis for collegiate volleyball. I’ve shared this in the past, but with the new season underway, I’m reminded of how well it’s put together - the percentiles and ranks toggle is nifty.

• plusevbets.com: this site tries to find value for any bets across the NFL, college football, and MLB. The aggregation of odds across sportsbooks feels like a valuable idea.

Anyhow, happy September.

1. The amount of memes out of the postgame was a lot to take in.

2. This code is industrious sloppy and the chart isn’t easily reproducible. I started out by drawing this by hand, and then tried to put it together a tabular format by programmatically and manually manipulating the data. I might try to production-ize it in the future. I wanted to see how it would look, not sure it’s the best, but an idea I’ve had for awhile. Don’t worry, I have other bad ideas too.

3. A better or more useful comparison might be to compare these records against the spread as a level of expectation. The raw results can be used to make hollow arguments.

4. The Big Ten and SEC or the “Power 2” play only four games against each other this season. USC beat LSU Sunday. The next three games are all this month: Texas at Michigan on Saturday, Alabama at Wisconsin (September 14), and LSU at UCLA (September 21).

5. #AccomplishGreatness - three of the four games involve ACC teams!