Numbers tell us quite a bit about Jayhawks after Week 1

By Staff     Sep 12, 2009

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to take from a blowout victory over a I-AA opponent like Northern Colorado.

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Is KU’s offense that good or is UNC’s defense that bad? How well did the Jayhawks’ offensive line play? And so on.

Evaluating early-season blowouts can be tough. That’s why I called on Friend-of-the-Blog Bill Connelly to help me further breakdown KU’s victory.

Connelly, as you probably know by now, is one of the leaders in college football statistical analysis. He writes for both FootballOutsiders.com and his own personal blog, Rock M Nation.

In his Rock M Nation blog* this week, Connelly used his advanced statistics to break down every Big 12 football game of Week One. The Kansas game is shown about three-fourths of the way down the page if you want to take a look.

* — I mentioned this in my blog last week, but I feel like I need to keep mentioning it just so people aren’t surprised. Connelly, himself, is a Missouri fan, and he blogs about the Tigers at his site Rock M Nation. This is actually somewhat good news for KU fans if you like statistical analysis, because he does lots of analysis of the Big 12.

I asked Connelly to break down what he thought stood out most from the KU-Northern Colorado game last week based on his statistics.

Here are three of his observations.

1. KU was ruthlessly efficient.

Connelly has a statistic called leverage percentage that simply gives the “percentage of a college football team’s plays that take place on Non-Passing Downs, defined as all first downs, second down with 1-7 yards to go, or third/fourth down with 1-4 yards to go.”

The lower a team’s leverage percentage, the more tough situations it was in. Conversely, the higher a team’s percentage, the less tough situations it was in.

KU’s leverage percentage last week was 78.3 percent — the best of any Big 12 school in Week One.

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As Connelly says, “Any Leverage percentage over about 75 percent means they very much stayed out of passing downs and in favorable down-and-distance situations. Occasionally this can be a red flag against cupcakes, but KU didn’t mess around.”

So why is this important? Let’s take the Texas Tech game as an example.

Against North Dakota, TTU’s leverage percentage was just 67.2 — fifth-worst in the Big 12. That forced the Red Raiders into lots of second- and third-and-long situations.

So what happened? Quarterback Taylor Potts had three interceptions. And, as Connelly points out in his Rock M Nation blog, Potts’ three interceptions came on a third-and-15, a second-and-13 and a third-and-15.

Tough situations oftentimes cause mistakes and turnovers. What we can take from KU’s high leverage percentage is that the Jayhawks took care of business on first and second downs, and that made Todd Reesing’s job on second and third downs much easier.

2. Sample sizes are a problem when talking about one-game sack rates, but that said, the sack rates were right where KU would want them.

Of course, KU didn’t allow any sacks against UNC, making for an ideal sack rate of 0 percent.

Perhaps most important for KU, though, was getting pressure on defense. The Jayhawks had a Standard-Down* sack rate of 5.9 percent and a Passing Down sack rate of 11.8 percent.

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* — Standard (non-passing) downs are first downs, second down with 1-7 yards to go, or third/fourth down with 1-4 yards to go. Passing downs are second downs with 8 or more yards to go or third/fourth downs with 5 or more yards to go.

“Reesing wasn’t touched, except for when he ran it himself, of course,” Connelly says, “and (KU) got to the QB in both Standard and Passing Downs.”

3. 4.52 line yards per carry is really high.

Let’s explain line yards per carry before we go any further. The Football Outsiders glossary defines it as a “statistic which attempts to, even to a small extent, separate the ability of a running back from the ability of the offensive line.”

For a more detailed explanation of line yards, click here.

So line yards is one way to measure how successful KU’s offensive linemen were run-blocking against Northern Colorado. To put the line yards per carry number in perspective, Nevada was No. 1 in the nation last season in line yards per carry with a 3.66.

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KU, against UNC, was a 4.52, again tops in the Big 12 for Week One.

“That means the running backs really didn’t have to do any work whatsoever in picking up yards,” Connelly says. “Again, this was Northern Colorado, so everything should be taken with a grain of salt, but that’s still really good.”

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