Staturdays

College Football

  • These are the fastest-starting (and slowest-starting) college football teams

    Every fan, at some point, has complained that their team starts slow at the beginning of football games. It’s one of the cardinal sins of college football — not coming ready to play and finding yourself down early after giving up an easy touchdown at the start of the game. Well, now we can actually put some truth to which teams actually start slow, and which come out of the gates firing.

    As Penn State fans may remember, we embraced the “second-half team” mantra by the end of the 2016 season, but turned things around a bit in the two years since then. So let’s see who’s at the top of the list of the fastest-starting college football teams.

    We used the play-by-play data from the 2018 season to look at which teams scored in the first 5 minutes of games in the 2018 season. This data included both regular-season and playoff data, which, as you’ll see, makes the team at the top all the more impressive.

    Teams Who Get Up For Gameday

    Top 15 teams ranked by points scored in the first 5 minutes of games for all of 2018.

    Alabama is far and away the best team at coming out of the gate early and punishing sleeping teams. This comes as no surprise if you’ve ever turned on an early season Alabama game at 12:05 to find that the score is already 14-0. What is surprising is their margin to the next-closest team. They average nearly a TD a game in the first 5 minutes. As we can see from the upcoming histogram, this is hardly the norm.

    Histogram showing the distribution of teams and their average points scored in the first 5 minutes. Alabama is a clear outlier and the data is skewed right.

    Clearly, this data is not normally distributed about the mean. Most teams are slow starters. The median points per first 5 minutes is 1.58. Since the data is not normal, it wouldn’t make much sense to use a z-score, but you can see from the chart itself that Alabama is in a class all their own.

    Teams Who Do Not Score In The First 5 Minutes

    So let’s look at the other side – does your team take some time to get going? Let’s look at some of the worst teams at scoring early.

    Teams who score the least amount of points in the first 5 minutes of games. Several teams – including Tennessee, Minnesota, and Florida State – didn’t score at all at the start of games last year.

    As you can see, several teams didn’t score at all in the first 5 minutes of games all season long. I really feel bad for those fans. Some big names are at the bottom of the list too, including the Big 10’s Iowa, Michigan State and Minnesota. Also featured in this list are UCLA, Miami, Tennessee, and Florida State. All are brutally slow at being explosive in the beginning of games.

    Teams Who Get Scored On In The First 5 Minutes

    Last, let’s look at the flip-side of the equation. Which are the teams that are allowing these early TDs at the start of the game. Whose defenses, and perhaps, special teams, are sleepy at the start of games?

    These are the teams that get scored on the most early in games. Some big names on the list include Texas and several teams from the SEC, and, most surprising of all, College Football Playoff semi-finalists Oklahoma.

    So a lot of teams here to choose from, but I’m just going to jump right to the most glaring team on the list here, the College Football Playoff semi-finalists. In 2018, the Oklahoma Sooners were 15th in the country in allowing early scores to the other team. This comes as a bit of a surprise given how successful they were last year, but it isn’t as shocking when you think back on how high-powered their offense was as well. When you throw in how soft the Big 12 plays defense, it’s no surprise that early-game points were given out like candy in that conference.

    We’ll make sure to revisit this stat in a few weeks to see how teams like Penn State, who said that they were going to start playing faster this year, do at getting points on the board early.

  • How fast can Penn State’s offense play?

    Sean Clifford has said that his 2019 team is going to be “one of the quickest, fastest Penn State football offenses that you’ve seen in a long time.”

    “In the spring, we were very explosive, but we left a lot on the table. Our offense is really hungry to prove that we can be a 400, 500, 600-yard offense consistently,” he added.

    Now that sounds good to us, but how fast can we expect this Penn State offense to play next year? (more…)

  • Penn State has a Transfer Portal Crisis

    “I don’t think that he’ll be welcome back at this point if he wanted to come back.”

    Tommy Stevens’ dad

    Penn State Football might have a crisis on their hands. This past week, one of their biggest talents over the past 4 years and starting quarterback-in-waiting, Tommy Stevens, put his name into the transfer portal. While some fans rejoiced at the confirmation that the “much better” Sean Clifford – who has reached demigod status for his 5/7, 2 TD statline last season – was solidified in the starting role for 2019, others asked the more important question: Why is your best player leaving the team so suddenly?

    Just the other day after the Blue-White game, James Franklin himself said they were waiting to name a starter until Tommy Stevens was healthy enough to make it a true competition. By Wednesday, Tommy’s name was in the portal and by Thursday his dad was saying “I don’t think that he’ll be welcome back at this point if he wanted to come back.” He also mentioned that the relationship between Tommy and the “Penn State coaching staff” had gradually deteriorated, making him uncomfortable continuing to compete for the starting position.

    So that made me wonder if this was normal for a top program. The transfer portal is in its first full offseason of use this year, so it’s relatively new to all of us. Maybe having 19 transfers in a year is normal for a roster of over 100 players. Especially at a top program like Penn State where the environment is hyper-competitive and starting roles are hard to come by. Sure, plenty of guys would want out of that if they don’t make the cut. But 20-percent?

    So let’s look at a few of the other top schools that we’d like to be in the same sentence with: Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, LSU, Georgia. How’s their transfer situation looking?

    TransferPortalActivity

    Oh no. That’s not good. Penn State has more than 2x the outgoing transfers as the next closest major program. Not a good sign. I would’ve expected a bit more activity from an Ohio State with a new head coach. It turns out all the truly “elite” programs are run that way and don’t have a lot of locker room turnover, aside from graduating players to the NFL.

    I certainly expected more players to leave Pitt. I mean – “Eat Shit Pitt” – right? That’s what we say. You’d think the players would get tired of hearing that. But nope, just two transfers out (offset by two coming in).

    Ok, but Rutgers must have more people trying to jump ship than Penn State, right? No? Seriously? I mean, it’s Rutgers. Only seven people want to leave Rutgers early. Heck, three even said “Sign me up!” this offseason. Now I’m concerned.

    Now granted, we have to take some of these departures with a grain of salt. Manny Bowen has always been a bum and a traitor, going as far as tweeting and making fun of his former teammates as they lost a heartbreaking Citrus Bowl. He’s been suspended longer than my ceiling fan (bad dad joke).

    Then there’s Tommy Stevens. Who can blame him? He’s sat behind one of the most electric QBs in college football for 4 years, patiently waiting his turn, when he could’ve been starting at any Power-5 school. He’s got to do what’s best for him. What is concerning is the quotes above from his dad.

    Then, of course, there’s the wide-receiver corp. 6 of the 19 transfers for Penn State were wide-receivers. This was the biggest position unit, followed by the DBs with 5. Now everyone is well-aware of the drops situation this past year, and these players got a lot of shit for it. This likely affected them a lot more mentally than us fans realize. Pair that with a new wide-receivers coach coming in to shake things up, and you can see why a lot of these guys would want a new environment. 

    So overall, I’d say we have some extenuating circumstances that have driven a high number of guys to part ways with Penn State Football this past season. That being said, every team has their troubles and turnover season-to-season, so that alone isn’t a great excuse. The fact that Penn State is so far out ahead of every other major program is a bit concerning.

    It’s something we should keep an eye on. And it may be something that Franklin may need to address down the road, whether it is with the mental toughness of the team or his locker room management style. 

    For more on the Tommy Stevens transfer, listen to our latest episode of the Staturdays podcast below. 

    https://soundcloud.com/staturdays-blog/blue-white-recap-tommy-stevens-is-out