Stats Corner: Four Years of UNM and SJS Football Advanced Stats.

Football spring camps have started, along with spring games and scrimmages. Recruits have been signed, early admittance athletes are practicing with teams, and everyone is convinced that this season their team is going to win the conference and make the playoffs, or at least a New Year’s Day Bowl. For the next few weeks, Stats Corner is going to break down the last four years of Advanced Stats for the Mountain West and identify where teams are consistently good, consistently bad, and consistently inconsistent.

Hall of Fame Coach Bill Walsh created the advanced statistics as a way to measure his team’s strengths and weaknesses. Walsh felt the most important statistics were down and distance, backed-up, third downs, red-zone, and blitzing. Click for a refresher course on an overview, offenses stats, or defense stats. This week we are looking at New Mexico, and San Jose state.

New Mexico

One important battle that is repeatedly mentioned from the booth during a football game is field position. While New Mexico consistently fall behind their opponent, the gap is closing from 4.7 yards behind in 2015 to just .7 yards in 2018. That equates to 4 less yards per drive that New Mexico need to make up, it may not seem like much, but if each team has 10 drives, that’s 40 yards a game they are no longer giving up. Another improvement related to field position for the Lobos is the percentage of drives starting inside the 20 yard line. In 2015 25% of their drives and only 17.4% of opponent’s drives starting more than 80 yards from pay dirt. By 2018, their drives had dropped to 18.3% and opponents’ were up to 20.8%, after peaking to 25.4% in 2017.

Not starting backed-up is a good start, but the Lobos need to finish. The offense is stalling on drives and evidenced by the low number of 3^rd downs which have been dropping over the last few years. Coupled with the low percentage of 3^rd down conversions, this means really short drives. The defense isn’t helping, allowing 15 3^rd downs twice and over 40% conversion rate. Leading to long drives, clock control, a tired New Mexico defense, and an offense trying to play catch-up.

If the offensive drives are short, then reason states that there will not be a lot of red-zone opportunities, only 2-3 per game. Add to that a well below average red-zone scoring rate, 68% and 126^th ranked in 2017 to marginally improved 82.35% ranked 77^th in 2018, and not a lot of points are being scored. And those long drives the opponents were putting together? 4.5 in 2018 found the red-zone and way too many are resulting in points, 94% in 2018 ranked 128^th and 96.97% in 2017 raked 129^th.

While New Mexico has done better in the field position game, that has been completely nullified by the offense stalling, not getting into the red-zone, and not scoring any points much less enough points. The defense needs to make 3^rd down stops and prevent teams from entering and scoring in the red-zone. When the only teams worse at defense are Georgia Teach and East Carolina something has to change.

San Jose State

The Spartans may have problems, but field position isn’t one of them. A plus 2 advantage over their opponents, only 15.2% of the time starting pinned back, while pinning their opponent’s back 25.7% of the time. All of those numbers have improved over the last 4 years. The number of 3^rd downs have also improved, implying that the Spartans are starting to put together longer drives.

But getting more 3^rd downs only really helps when you convert them into first downs. And while San Jose State used to boast a 46.15% conversion rate, good for 18^th in the country, that was 2015. They regressed to 28.9% in 2017, ranked 123^rd, and 32.12% in 2018, ranked 121^st. Similar in 2015 the defense only allowed 13 3^rd down a game 12^th best, improving to 12.4 and 5^th best in 2016, while keeping a respectable 37% conversion rate both years. But that skyrockets to 15+ the last couple years and peaked to 46.56% allowance in 2017, all triple digit rankings.

A 6-7 record plus a bowl win in 2015 seems so long ago for the Spartans, which was when they could also claim a top 10 ranking in red-zone offense at 91.89% scoring, which was slightly offset by only 3.1 red-zone trips a game. Then came those triple digit rankings during 2016, 2017, and 2018 with only Kent State being worse in 2017. With the number of trips to the red-zone decrease to 2.1, another 120+ ranking, not a lot of points were being scored. The defense has been fairly steady in their red-zone percentages at mid-80’s level, but 3.2 allowed trips has ballooned to 5.3 trip in 2017, only behind UCLA, and 4.6 in 2018.

If San Jose State was to be successful, 3^rd down conversion and red-zone offense and defense must be improved. Field position is important, but if you cannot go anywhere, it does not matter where you start. The objective in football is not to start in a better location than your opponent but to score more points than the other team. When both your red-zone offense and red-zone defense can count the number of teams with worse statistics than them on two hands and have fingers left over, you aren’t going to win many games.