by youngterrier on Wed Dec 06, 2017 10:16 am
Here's part of the reason I'm cautiously optimistic about this one from an offensive perspective. I did some number crunching comparing the 2012 and 2017 statistics because it's indicative of our tendencies and strengths. I posted this on AGS, but it deserves a hearing here:
It's an understatement how much EB carried us in 2012. Of the 4546 rush yards we had, EB had 2035, of 766 carries, he had 290. One player had 45% of our production on the ground and 37% of the carries. He had a bigger proportion of our offense when you factor in the fact that that we only had about 663 yards passing that year (153 against a D2 opponent). Eric Breitenstein was quite literally 40% of our offense. A solid 1/3 of the plays we had entailed him touching the ball. That was unsustainable, but I digress.
Compare that with this year. We don't have as much yardage rushing. Going into this one, we have about 3048 yards on the ground, but we have twice the passing yards (1294). It worth noting that Wofford had a weirdly efficient time passing the ball going 6/7 for 64 yards in 2012 against NDSU. So we're passing the ball twice as well as we did back then. We averaged about 7 pass attempts per game in 2012 (wow), but now that number is 12.
When it comes to carries, Andre Stoddard has about 27% of the carries with 170, accounting for about 25% of the production with over 800 yards. The following 4 rushers differ from 11% of the carries to 15%. The second and third rushers have similar production. Our top 2nd and 3rd rushers account for about 44% of the production, while in 2012 it was about 19%.
If you're going to break this down into position, in 2012 the starting fullback accounted for 45% of our substantive production (Donovan Johnson was a hybrid player between FB/HB but for the purposes of this post I'm counting him as a HB). By substantive production I mean "not in garbage time," which I'm defining by eyeballing and using memory to determine whether a player actually saw PT. Running backs accounted for about 30% and QBs at about 15%. It would note, the number with HBs is probably inflated because Donovan Johnson played both HB and FB.
In 2017, fullbacks have accounted for about 38%. Halfbacks have accounted for about 44%. QBs, about 15%. If you take the lead rusher out #2-6 have about 2,127 yards rushing in 2017. In 2012, that number was 1535 (note: we've played one less game than that year; we also played a division 2 team and whalloped them 82-0 that year).
Really, if you take out the D2 game and the NDSU game, our offense is only averaging about 30-50 ypg less than we did back then, but the kicker is that we were much more dependent on Eric Breitenstein and the fullback than now. There were lots of games that year where we threw for less than 40 yards. Outside of one outlier game, UTC, we've pretty much out-passed every game, sans the D2 game in 2012.
So I think we're a lot more balanced, and with respect to the 2012 team, I think we're better this year, even though the 2012 team didn't squeak by as many people. We're just more balanced on offense.
Study hard, Work Hard, Party Hard, Go Terriers!