Before you pontificate, look at some actual data.

I posted this on the Score Board just before it shut down, so thought I would re-post it here.

I know it's against the religion of some of the morons on this board to look at and think about actual facts before spouting off about any subject under the sun, but for those who would like to base their opinions on real live data, here are some of our more important offensive stats from 2005-2011. I wish I could put this all in the form of a chart, but I'm limited by the format.

points per game
2005 29.5
2006 33.7
2007 38.6
2008 30.9
2009 24.8
2010 29.7
2011 35.7

first downs rushing passing penalty
2005 118 119 18
2006 129 138 16
2007 153 146 17
2008 122 114 18
2009 100 109 17
2010 132 84 12
2011 164 97 26

attempts per game rushes passes
2005 869 509(59%) 360(41%)
2006 818 450(55) 368(45)
2007 1054 612(58) 442(42)
2008 886 495(56) 391(44)
2009 771 435(56) 336(44)
2010 839 538(64) 301(36)
2011 870 591(68) 279(32)

yardage per game rushing passing
2005 374.1 150.1 224
2006 417.5 165.8 251.7
2007 439.4 214.1 225.3
2008 368.1 166.8 201.3
2009 304.5 122.8 181.8
2010 341.3 185.7 155.6
2011 355.1 202.6 152.5

There are a lot of things one can glean from such information, but the big take-away for me is that, until 2010, our passing and running game were relatively balanced. It is only in 2010 and 2011 that we have skewed so heavily to the running game.

So those who accuse Miles of being one-dimensional in his offensive thinking are ignoring history. The big problem over the past two years has simply been that we have not had a QB that we could trust enough to pass for 40% or more of our plays.

Now, these stats don't say much about the types of passing plays we are running, the number of short, medium, and long plays, etc. But they do confirm what I had suspected, based on my memories of the LSU offense during the first several years of Miles's tenure: we generally run an offense that is more or less 60% rushing and 40% passing, which is a pretty good percentage.