[original post] some thoughts on TOP and game pacing

by HumanRobot , Cybertron, Monday, July 26, 2010, 14:17 (5798 days ago)

There's been a lot of concern expressed recently regarding Coach Kelly's offense and it's pacing. I believe the argument goes something along the lines of "Kelly's offense doesn't use enough clock up and his defense will wear down both within a game and over the season. The game's different at this level than in the Big East and unless he changes something, he won't succeed." Now, while I think there is some truth in that, I wonder to what degree it's true. I think we need to keep in mind that football is an funky game to consider from the perspective of the game clock. I think that the thought that "lower Time of Possession means a more tired defense" is a pervasive belief, but is only indirectly true. Allow me to elucidate.

Suppose I went to the gym and you asked me what I did. "I was on the elliptical running program W for an hour". Tells you a lot. "I lifted X, Y, and Z at A, B, and C pounds for about an hour" is partially useful: you know i did a few particular exercises at a particular weight. I even did them for an hour, which seems like a good chunk of time. It doesn't tell you a key piece of information: <i>how many reps of each did I do.</i> Unless there's some new weight regime I'm unfamiliar with, knowing somebody was in the gym "for an hour" doesn't really say all that much about the quality of their work out. Likewise, football is a game more similar to lifting than it is the elliptical workout: the number of reps is far, far more important than the duration. So if you will indulge me, I want to take a look at the numbers through that lens.

Here's something interesting to consider. To everyone's chagrin, our Coach Kelly's offense finished dead last in Time of Possession last season, at 25:46.46 minutes per game. Contrast this to the National Champion Alabama, which finished fifth with 33:31.00 minutes per game. So clearly Nick Saban's offense is crafted to chew up more clock, correct? Let's take a deeper look at those numbers to find out. Alabama accumulated 469:14:00 minutes versus 335:04:00 for Cincy. Keep in mind that Alabama played 14 games to Cincy's 13. More importantly: Alabama ran 947 offensive plays to Cincy's 833 (67.6 versus 64 offense plays/game). The math tells us that Kelly's offense was #106 in Time per Offensive play at 24 seconds/offensive play. By comparison, Alabama was #7 on this metric at 29 seconds/offensive play. So really, the "pace" of offensive plays accounted for 320 seconds of TOP and the "lost" three plays accounted for another 87. So the largest contributor to Alabama's greater TOP is that the offense took an extra five seconds between plays. So why can't Kelly do that?

For one thing, Cincy only used 64 plays per game on offense, which was #94 in the country and a full deviation below the mean. What's really amazing then is that Kelly's offense was still #4 in the country in points per game at 38.6. With so few plays used, Kelly's offense was one of the most efficient on a per play basis: at 0.60 points per play, Cincinnati was second in the country only after BSU.
The remainder in the top ten of that category was rounded out by Arkansas, Nevada, Florida, Stanford, TCU, Oregon, Texas, and BYU. Cincinnati performed two deviations above the mean in this category. While Cincinnati was very efficient with the ball on offense, their relatively low number of opportunities meant they had to work quickly when they did have the ball. Had the number of offensive plays dropped in proportion with an increase in five seconds per play, Cincy's already low offensive play total would have dropped to around 52 plays per game, dropping production to only 31.2 ppg.

So it appears that there is credence to the belief that Kelly's offense reduced TOP by design. I would argue that design was beneficial to Cincinnati, since the faster pace yielded nearly a touchdown more per game in offensive scoring. How did this design impact the Cincinnati defense? Given the low TOP, Cincinnati's 71.9 defensive plays per game (#107) should come as little surprise, although that was little more than one deviation below the mean of 67.4. Truly being on the field must have impacted Cincinnati's ability to keep points off the board, right?

As I previously noted, Cincinnati was outstanding in terms of offensive points per play. While they were not quite as strong on the defensive end, they performed quite admirably in this category: 0.32 points against per play, good for #32 in the country (mean: 0.37, deviation: 0.091). The top ten for this stat was Nebraska, Alabama, Penn State, Ohio State, Florida, TCU, Oklahoma, LSU, Iowa, and Virginia Tech, which I think most would agree were very powerful defensive units. I think that performance is even more impressive when you consider the volume of plays against Cincy and also consider the talent of their defense (it wasn't pretty) relative to a Big East offense. Thus, if it is the case that Cincy's defense was tired in games last season, then reduction of that volume is sufficient to go from good to great.

When you look at the difference between offensive vs defensive points per play, Cincinnati stacks up with the top teams in the country: #4 at +0.28. The top ten for that margin in 2009 was Florida, Boise State, TCU, Cincinnati, Alabama, Texas, Virginia Tech, Nebraska, Penn State, and Ohio State. In my mind, that is very impressive.

Conclusions: First and foremost, I think that Kelly needs to be lauded for his work at Cincinnati. On a play-to-play basis, Cincinnati was amongst the best in the country and I think that bodes well for Notre Dame going forward. I think that some of the TOP concerns raised on this board are appropriate: Kelly's defense was exposed to far too many plays last season. If he can get a 50/50 balance between offensive and defensive plays here, I think that will be a harbringer of excellent things to come.