by youngterrier on Wed Oct 04, 2017 10:04 am
I think I've figured out why our offense is so frustrating to watch this year (beyond the playcalling) and why we haven't blown anyone too bad.
Let's think of a hypothetical game in which each team holds the ball for 6 minutes a possession and there are no turnovers or blocked kicks. That means that there are 10 total possessions, with each team getting the ball 5 times. The maximum amount of points a team can score in that situation is 35 points. It's not the offense's fault they can only score that much, it's a limit of the game. Even then, unless it's a really good offense that can score 100% of the time (which is unlikely for even the best offenses), it's not going to score 35 points. It's probably more likely to score 17-27.
Right now, our offense is at 45% efficiency and we average 10 possessions a game (or so). That means, at this rate, we can only hope to score on 4.5 possessions or 32ish points at maximum. Again, that's an average, not an absolute (we haven't scored that much yet on anyone). Meanwhile, our defense is more efficient, holding opposing offenses to scores on 14 of 42 possessions (30%). That means we can expect about 9-21 points by the other team defensively. All of this is without turnovers.
So it's not too surprising if we have a so-so half one half and in the same game come out firing on all cylinders (PC is a good example of us doing that offensively, Furman defensively). It's certainly not surprising, at that efficiency level, going into the fourth quarter against anyone (good, bad, ugly) that we have a maximum of 23 points and our opponents a maximum of 16 or so points (aka a close game).
So how do we remedy this? Well, the problem comes down to offensive efficiency. We need to be more efficient than that 45%. How do we do that? Obviously, score more. How do we do that? We don't turn the ball over and we have better playcalling or execution.
The first of those is random. I think the second is more of a problem than the third, because in my opinion the third often bails out the second.
If we can get our scoring efficiency up to 60% we will be unstoppable
Study hard, Work Hard, Party Hard, Go Terriers!