Point Per Yard - The New Statistic No One Wants You To See (Updated)

Updated to take out defensive scores****

One thing that always peeves me about college football fans and announcers that say LSU has a terrible offense, is that they never look at the numbers. You ask, how is that possible? They pull stats showing how far behind OSU and Oreogn we are. While that is true, the reason is because they don’t look at the right stats. Now I know that you can pull stats to make almost any team in the nation look great, but there is a statistic that no one ever points out. It’s seen more as an intangible to most teams, but to LSU it is our style of play. It is called the “field position” stat.

Let me break it down this way:

Scenario 1 (LSU style)

• LSU punts the ball and pins an opponent on their 5 (Thanks Wing).
• The opposing team drives the ball a grand total of 5 yards on a 3 and out.
• LSU receives the punt and brings it back to the 50 yard line where they start their next drive.
• LSU drives 50 yards for the touchdown.

Scenario 2 (NON-SEC Style – save Arkansas)

• Okie Lite punts the ball and pins an opponent on their 5 (they got lucky)
• Okie’s shitty defense allows the other team to drive 80 yards for a field goal.
• Okie Lite receives the kickoff and brings it out to the 20 yard line.
• Okie Lites offense shreds up the shitty Big 12 defense and goes 80 yards for the touchdown.
Okie Lites total yards: 80
LSU’s total yards: 50

This is a scenario that plays out a lot in college football. LSU and other SEC teams are said to have bad offensive stats, when in reality, the defenses are so good that it makes the offenses look bad. That is why I decided to do a break down where instead of looking at the number of yards total in a game, you look at the number of points scored for each yard gained. Similarly, you can look at the defensive stats for points given up per yard.

Lets start with Offense. For time purposes, I only ranked the top 10 teams in the BCS. The following is a chart showing the points scored per yard gained. This is calculated by taking the total number of points scored on the year, divided by the total number of yards gained.

Points Scored Per Yard Gained



UPDATED WITH ALL DEFENSIVE SCORES TAKEN OUT BELOW


As could be expected, LSU is actually ahead of the pack by a very large margin averaging over one tenth of a point for every hard we have gained. This means that for every first down LSU makes, it is the same as putting one point on the board. Not to mention that Alabama is actually ranked 8th in this statistic as far as scoring per yard even though their defense is so good. Why is that? Lets take a look at the second stat. Points Given up per yard. This takes the same concept, but applies it to the defense by taking the total number of yards allowed and dividing it by the total number of points given up.

Points Allowed Per Yard Given Up



To many peoples surprise, even though Bama is ranked #1 in almost every defensive category, they still fall behind LSU by allowing more points per yard given up. While these two stats are great to look at separately, it is really more interesting to combine them and look at the difference between the number of points gained per yard and the number of points given up per yard.

Difference between points gained and points given up per yard



In this model, LSU has quite a lead on the entire competition.
As a summary, I decided to redo the rankings based upon how each team would be ranked according to each of these models. The summary is actually pretty interesting.

Ranking according to each statistic



The point is, people look at stats and interpret them the wrong way. LSU’s defense is so good, that it makes our offense look inept, when in reality, when looking at offense by the number of points scored per yard…..

LSU has the BEST OFFENSE IN ALL OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL

According to this stat.

*Disclaimer: I am aware that is not taking into account strength of schedule, but believe me, that wouldn’t hurt LSU one bit.