Compiled some interesting stats on our offense and the offenses of the SEC teams that finished above us in the standings (except Mizzou because I forgot about them)


Terms and definitions:

-a "regular drive" is any drive which the offense starts anywhere between their own 15 and 35 yard lines, and has 2+ minutes to drive. (I believe this is about the most standard/basic thing an offense can be asked to do, so your stats revolving around these drives go a long way to showing us how good an offense is)

-"pprd" stands for "points per regular drive"

-"trpd" stands for "turnovers per regular drive"

-a "turnover" is defined as having occurred if the possession DOES NOT end in a kick, excepting 2pt tries (failed 4th down conversion = turnover. Missed FG, failed 2pt try != turnovers)




A game-by-game look at our offensive performance against other P4 teams:



vs ND:
-8 reg. drives / 11 total drives (72.7%)
-76.6 avg. yrds to go
-23.6 avg. yrds gained
-1.25 pprd
-0.25 trpd

Terrible showing right out of the gate. I guess ND had a really good defense, but you'd expect us to have some kind of offensive game plan that would at least kinda work.


@FL:
-4 reg. drives / 8 total drives (50.0%)
-74.0 avg. yrds to go
-51.5 avg. yrds gained
-2.50 pprd
-0.00 trpd

Pretty good showing against a completely hapless FL team (at least at that point in the season). The missed FGs hurt our scoring efficiency. Whiplash for sure, but we went from playing one of the best defenses in the nation to one of the worst (at that time)


vs ARK:
-8 reg. drives / 12 total drives (66.7%)
-72.6 avg. yrds to go
-29.0 avg. yrds gained
-1.75 pprd
-0.00 trpd

Awful game for our offense. We were lucky to escape with a win this year, and that's made even more embarrassing because of what an objectively bad OK St. team did to this Arky team the week before


vs MIZZ:
-5 reg. drives / 10 total drives (50%)
-73.6 avg. yrds to go
-41.4 avg. yrds gained
-3.40 pprd
-0.00 trpd

This game and the next are why people clamored for Conner to get more chances. He can lead the offense to this kind of output and scoring efficiency (2nd highest of the year)


@MSST:
-6 reg. drives / 10 total drives (60%)
-75.8 avg. yrds to go
-44.2 avg. yrds gained
-3.33 pprd
-0.17 trpd

A second good-to-great game for Conner and the offense. 3rd highest scoring efficiency all year, maybe could've been higher if not for the turnovers.


vs LSU:
-8 reg. drives / 13 total drives (61.5%)
-73.0 avg. yrds to go
-26.4 avg. yrds gained
-1.75 pprd
-0.25 trpd

Big fool's gold game here. We feasted on Nussmeier's mistakes and resulting short fields. There was no noticeable difference on regular drives between the two QBs.


@SCAR:
-8 reg. drives / 13 total drives (61.5%)
-74.9 avg. yrds to go
-24.4 avg. yrds gained
-1.25 pprd
-0.50 trpd

Terrible game. Turned it over a bunch, couldn't really move the ball. We had the same offensive problems as we did against LSU, only nobody cared to notice since we won that game


@AUB:
-8 reg. drives / 12 total drives (66.7%)
-75.9 avg. yrds to go
-52.0 avg. yrds gained
-3.50 pprd
-0.125 trpd

This performance was like Cotton-Eyed Joe: where'd it come from, where'd it go? Best scoring efficiency all year. Could it be because we game planned for this one 2 weeks in a row? (Bye week + NMSU week?)


vs TEX:
-5 reg. drives / 9 total drives (55.6%)
-76.2 avg. yrds to go
-32.2 avg. yrds gained
-0.00 pprd
-0.40 trpd

Absolutely atrocious. Worst scoring efficiency all year, and we all remember the goal line fiasco. Even with 7 points there, our efficiency goes to 1.4 pprd, which is still pretty terrible. Evidently we weren't looking ahead to this game, we probably were focused on Auburn the last week.


vs USC (bowl):
-9 reg. drives / 12 total drives (75.0%)
-76.0 avg. yrds to go
-43.3 avg. yrds gained
-2.67 pprd
-0.11 trpd

Moved the ball well but couldn't score. Kind of hard to excuse since it was our 1st team offense vs their 2nd and 3rd string defense. Really should've dominated this one on offense, but we couldn't. Puzzling.


SEASON AVG for A&M (9th SEC):
-avg. 6.9 reg. drives / 11 total drives per P4 game (62.73%)
-74.879 avg. yrds to go
-35.818 avg. yrds gained
-2.13 pprd
-0.188 tprd


Alabama (6th SEC)
-avg. 6.8 reg drives / 11.0 total drives per game (61.8%)
-75.324 avg yrds to go
-38.485 avg yrds gained
-2.735 pprd
-0.221 tprd


Ole Miss (5th SEC):
-avg. 8.33 reg drives / 12.33 total drives per P4 game avg. (67.56%)
-74.99 avg. yrds to go
-45.44 avg. yrds gained
-2.53 pprd
-0.147 tprd


Texas (2nd SEC):
-avg. 6.58 reg. drives / 10.75 total drives per P4 game (61.2%)
-75.29 avg. yrds to go
-41.16 avg. yrds gained
-2.43 pprd
-0.177 tprd


LSU (7th SEC):
-avg. 6.36 reg drives / 10.36 total drives per game (61.4%)
-76.64 avg yrds to go
-43.91 avg yrds gained
-2.328 pprd
-0.257 tprd


South Carolina (8th SEC):
-avg. 6.78 reg drives / 10.56 total drives per P4 game (64.2%)
-76 avg. yrds to go
-42.93 avg. yrds gained
-2.213 pprd
-0.328 tprd


Georgia (1st SEC):
-avg. 7.75 reg drives / 10.5 total drives per P4 game (73.8%)
-74.63 avg. yrds to go
-36.55 yrds gained
-2.118 pprd
-0.237 tprd


Tennessee (3rd SEC):
-avg. 6.8 reg drives / 11.6 total drives per P4 game (58.6%)
-75.63 avg. yrds to go
-33.15 avg. yrds gained
-1.5588 pprd
-0.22 tprd



Overall, some weird stuff in the SEC this year. I might expect Georgia and Tennessee to regress record-wise if they stay the course with Mike Bobo and Nico I. respectively.

Bama might get even better than they were this year and be on top of the SEC in 2025. If SC and LSU can fix their turnover problems, they'll probably be really dangerous next year too. Not looking super likely we'll win either game against them in 2025.

Looks like we need to average at least one more 1st down per regular drive to put us in a position to kick more FGs, and we'll fit nicely in this pack of teams next year. Also, Elko needs to have a better feel for when to go for it on 4th down, or we have to have better plays for those situations. Those comprise the majority of our turnovers from this season, failed 4th down conversions. Comparatively, we were good in the TO category, but we could be even better.

Very interesting. It's no secret Klein has some work to do. I won't sit here and make the same excuses that have been recycled over the last few months even though I do agree with most of them.

Bottom line is he has to get us more explosive and efficient. We cannot be a team that relies on 10-12 play drives consistently. Too much can go wrong, and when your offense is built like that you simply cannot overcome negative plays, penalties, etc. consistently enough to be effective.

They've done the right things so far by grabbing WRs in the transfer portal. Hopefully Reed and that group take a huge step forward in 2025. The run game should be there if we can stay healthy, but we need more through the air to even have a chance.

The perfect world with Reed is a combination of Weigman's performance against Mizzou and Reed's second half against LSU in the run game. That would be Heisman level stuff. I don't think we'll get that, but one can dream. Weigman's final stat line against Mizzou wasn't incredible, but man he made some throws and had a command of the offense through the air that we never saw again from either guy.

TX_Aggie37 said:

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Bottom line is he has to get us more explosive and efficient. We cannot be a team that relies on 10-12 play drives consistently. Too much can go wrong, and when your offense is built like that you simply cannot overcome negative plays, penalties, etc. consistently enough to be effective.

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Definitely agree with you here. My theory is that other teams are much better passing the ball than we are, so when the time comes for them to handle a 1st and 20 or a 2nd and 15, they're much better equipped to convert due to them being comfortable with pass plays.

Seems like we're never super comfortable with them, even when the defense doesn't know they're coming. Why would we expect to all of the sudden step it up when the defense is keyed in on it?

I'll have to look into the stats around drive-killing penalties. My suspicion is that we are appreciably worse than most teams.

Yep, we certainly SEEMED extremely susceptible to the drive killing penalty because we lacked the playmakers to overcome them. Whether the stats bear that out remains to be seen but I would lay money on it.

They pass better age we defended pass worse which left us vulnerable to big pass gains and first downs. When they didn't just run it that is.

TX_Aggie37 said:

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Very interesting. It's no secret Klein has some work to do. I won't sit here and make the same excuses that have been recycled over the last few months even though I do agree with most of them.

Bottom line is he has to get us more explosive and efficient. We cannot be a team that relies on 10-12 play drives consistently. Too much can go wrong, and when your offense is built like that you simply cannot overcome negative plays, penalties, etc. consistently enough to be effective.

They've done the right things so far by grabbing WRs in the transfer portal. Hopefully Reed and that group take a huge step forward in 2025. The run game should be there if we can stay healthy, but we need more through the air to even have a chance.

The perfect world with Reed is a combination of Weigman's performance against Mizzou and Reed's second half against LSU in the run game. That would be Heisman level stuff. I don't think we'll get that, but one can dream. Weigman's final stat line against Mizzou wasn't incredible, but man he made some throws and had a command of the offense through the air that we never saw again from either guy.

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I'd just like to see more creativity with some of the critical plays. Those 4&1 lacked any real imagination and were too easy to predict/stop.

Another thing that definitely factors into our scoring efficiency and could be clouding our judgement on Klein's play calling (although the two can go hand in hand here) was our futility in short yardage situations.

How many times did we have to settle for field goals because we couldn't pick up a 3rd and 1?
How many times did we not score at all because we couldn't pick up a 4th and 1?

Better Oline, Big Power Back, Philly Tush Push, or better/more creative play calls, any one of these for short yardage could have changed the results significantly without the overall game play calling really changing much.

Sure, there were some games that were just awful but there were a lot of games that were exercises in futility and frustration where we could have and should have scored a ton of points and didn't.

Don't need stats to recognize our offense sucks.

Quote:

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-a "turnover" is defined as having occurred if the possession DOES NOT end in a kick

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What if we go for 2?

Didn't count 2pt tries as turnovers. I'll update the language in that section

Interesting analysis. We were terrible in both the games we won and the games we lost.

great data

the offense was all over the place -- which makes it hard to evaluate

and yes, the LSU game was an example of winning by just letting your opponent make one killer mistake after another...and simply taking advantage

the talent on the squad never matched the 7-1 record at the time