“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?
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.
Let’s all collectively pour one out for Trace. He is no longer the FBS leader in consecutive games with a touchdown pass. You could just tell that he wanted to throw the ball in one of the two red zone trips where he ended up practically jogging it into the end zone. We all wanted him to throw it too, but the gaps were too wide open and the game too close to care about some meaningless streak. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter, and Trace didn’t really care.
That’s why we love him: he has a win at all costs attitude.
It also showed earlier in the game when he gave up another passing touchdown opportunity to Tommy Stevens, who – in his first attempt of the season – slipped one into the corner like he’d been the starting quarterback all season. Our backup QB’s are now a combined 6/6 with 3 TD’s – talk about depth. Unfortunately for Sean Clifford, you usually need a larger body of work to warrant votes from actual Heisman voters. But hey, he still has mine.
Trace, on the other hand, does have a large body of work, and that body just hit the gym and worked on its glamour muscles in the win against Indiana. Trace put in work, despite not having a passing TD, and he saw a big jump in our QB rankings for Week 8. Up into the top 10 for Power 5 QB’s, and up 9 spots to 18 in the FBS rankings. It wasn’t pretty at times, and McSorley came away with another lackluster completion rate, partly due to the drops that continue to plague the PSU wide receivers. McSorley walked away with a 52.8% completion rate, but if we factor out the drops (which I painstakingly counted by hand, and then debated over who was at fault with my dad), he comes out to 68.1% on the day – a much more respectable number. If the Penn State receivers can somehow get out of their own heads and use their super-sticky gloves to catch the ball (which, as anyone who has used them will tell you, make it nearly impossible to drop a ball), then Trace could see a second half comeback and at least be in those stupid ESPN Heisman voting tweets.
That would be a worthy accomplishment after this season, because I don’t see any of the top quarterbacks regressing so much that McSorley has a chance to win the Heisman. Kyler Murray is playing out of his mind against stupid-bad defenses, at 3 standard deviations above the average QB level. That’s insane. Now I didn’t do research on this, but it may be the first time we see back-to-back Heisman-winners from the same school and position ever (I know, I know, this is a stats website, but we don’t do stupid shit like that historical records crap).
After some brief half-assed research, I can confirm that this is an accurate statement by me. You heard it hear first on Staturdays blog. Tell your friends.
Will Grier is also playing ridiculously well, and he’s responsible for almost 90% of West Virginia’s TDs, while Trace is only responsible for half. Kinda hard to argue with that. But hey, Trace still had a good week!
Finally, football is back. After an earlier-than-expected playoff bid scare for Penn State, our heart rates have collectively settled and we can get back to the business of what has become an annual tradition of crushing Pitt (2016 excluded. Wiping it from my memory).
The other week I talked about Trace McSorley’s upcoming Heisman campaign, but I also talked about the defensive efficiency of each conference. This week, with the college football season in full swing, I’m going to take a look at the offensive side of the ball. We’ll also find out who is the most balanced on both sides. This data is from the 2017 season, so keep checking back here as I will be updating these rankings for each week of the 2018 season.
Now, Big Ten fans: shield your eyes. This one isn’t pretty. When I found the offensive efficiency scores of every team and averaged them out by conference, the Big 10 was dead last. Make sure to check the appendix at the bottom to see in detail where these stats came from.
Worst Offensive Conferences in College Football?
The Big 10 has 11 and 8 teams below the mean offensive efficiency score for the FBS (my version of the FBS – the Power 5 conferences and the American) on offense and defense respectively, where the PAC 12 has 8 teams above the mean on both offense and defense, which leaves only 4 teams under the mean. The Big 10 particularly struggles on offense. Intuitively this would make sense if the Big 10 is the strongest defensive conference; you would expect their offenses to struggle with tougher opposition. However, with the new version of defensive efficiency or DAD’s, the PAC 12 is actually the conference with the highest average ranking on defense too!
So now I’m really thrown off. The Big 10 is actually just the 2nd best defense, and their offense is last by a mile. So what’s going on? The Big 10 is brought down by a lot of teams being under the mean, but also by a few outliers that are dramatically worse at offense than the rest of college football. Illinois falls 2 standard deviations below the average, and Rutgers is close behind (ahead? Not sure how to phrase this) at 1.93 standard deviations, also known as the bottom two teams in college football in offensive production. You could’ve guessed this if you watched any of their games: they combined for a hard-to-watch 15 passing touchdowns last year, each with a completion percentage under .500. On the other side of the ball, Nebraska is also 1.8 standard deviations below the mean on defense. The Pac 12 doesn’t have as drastic of outliers. The standard deviation for each conference backs this up. The Big 10 is the 2nd most spread out conference on offense behind the Big 12, while the Pac 12 has the lowest standard deviation, meaning all of their offenses are similarly balanced.
The average Z score for offenses and defenses of each conference
Most balanced teams
To figure out who the most balanced teams were on both sides of the ball, I took the Z score of their offense and subtracted it from the Z score of the defense to find the range, then took the absolute value so they were all positive. This results in what I’m calling Offensive/Defensive Balance. A low score is *sometimes better (note: a team can be balanced by being great on offense and defense, but they can also be equally crappy on both sides of the ball). So who were the most balanced teams? Well, bad news Penn Staters:
The most balanced teams in the FBS
The good news is, as indicated by red, Pittsburgh (and others) are the bad kind of balanced, meaning both their offense and defense are equally bad (within .001 for Pitt), which is an accomplishment in itself. Notice that Clemson and ‘Bama come in at number 3 and number 17 (the good kind of balanced). Penn State is down at number 29: just about average. Now for the bottom 20:
The least balanced teams in the FBS
Now, this one isn’t color coded because it’s all bad. And who’s on top, none other than Oklahoma straight outta the “defense optional” Big 12. Also rounding out the top 10 is Georgia, who beat the slightly more unbalanced Oklahoma but went on to lose to the much more balanced Alabama. Now anybody who watched that game knows it was Georgia who looked the better team for most of it, so I’m not saying that balance wins games. But, it is an interesting trend and definitely looks like it pays off down the stretch to have strength on both sides of the ball. For you Eagles fans, think how vital it was to have that wild-dog defense in the playoffs when the offense sputtered against the Falcons. And then how key it was to have the offense pick up the slack when Tom Brady tried (and failed) to play receiver.
Offensive Powerhouses
The top of this one should come as no surprise:
The top 20 teams on offense
What is a bit surprising is lower down the list. Navy, a rushing powerhouse, sneaks in at #13. They are right above Wake Forest, an underrated team in the ACC. Clemson and Washington show up a bit lower than we’d expect, but they make up for it in having really balanced teams as we saw above. We’ll have to see how the ACC looks this year as the season progresses. Virginia Tech, who came in at #39 for 2017, looked pretty good against Florida State.
Also need to shout out PSU for being #9 in the FBS. Anybody that lived through the Hackenberg years knows that our current offense is looks about as different as possible from the one John Donovan and guys before him ran. When I look back on those years, I think of grey clouds, muddy fields, and WR screens being thrown into the dirt. Now I think of sunny skies and T-McSorley guns-out, heaving bombs that only our guys can get to. We’ve come a long way.
Best all-around teams
So who are the best overall teams, determined by summing up each team’s offensive and defensive Z scores? Penn Staters can finally rejoice for once during this article. Here’s the top 20:
The top 20 teams on offense and defense in the FBS
Surprisingly, the least represented conference here is the SEC, followed by the Big 10. Penn State comes in at a solid #6, right next to their Big 10 East rivals “The” Ohio State. UCF and Memphis are helped by their inflated numbers by playing some truly god-awful teams. I talked about unbalance in the Big 10 with Rutgers and Illinois… well the American conference has two even worse teams in East Carolina and Cincinnati, both 2 standard deviations below the FBS mean total team Z score. UConn is also 1.7 standard deviations below average. They’re reflected in the bottom 20:
The bottom 20 teams on offense and defense in the FBS
The Big 10 isn’t as good as people say it is
I mean, seriously, look how many Big 10 teams are in the bottom 20. SEVEN! Some of them you expect, but Michigan has seriously got to pick up the slack. They were plagued by seriously bad quarterback play this past year (9 passing TD’s, 10 INT’s). Hopefully it gets better for all of our sakes.
This paints a different picture than what you will hear in the media: that the Big 10 is the strongest conference out there; they may be ONE of the strongest defensively, but overall having half of your conference in the bottom 20 of teams is not a good look. I think the Big 10 gets its reputation from its low scoring games (in part due to good defense, in larger part due to bad offense), which football savants respect as “better, hard-nosed, how-the-game-is-meant-to-be-played” football. In reality, it’s PSU, OSU, and Wisconsin that are lifting up the conference. Now, these are 2017 numbers. Like I said, I’ll be updating this as the 2018 season goes on. Hopefully some influx of new talent and quality coaches will start to see a shift. We already have some hope with Maryland taking down Texas yet again in their season opener. Should we Penn State fans start to *gasp*… root for Rutgers and Maryland to get better? Time will tell.
Appendix
Here is a list of the stats I used to find offensive and defensive efficiency ratings, as well as explanations for other metrics that I reference:
Offensive Efficiency Score Per Game
This is similar to the QB score I had last week, except at a team level. It looks at the following stats (if it is scaled that is in parentheses):
First Downs
Penalty Yds (-1)
Pass Yards
Completion Pct
Pass TD (7)
INT (-4.35)
Sacks
Rush Yards
Rushing Yards Per Attempt
Rush TD (7)
FG Made (3)
FG Pct
XP Made
XP Pct
It is summed up for the season and divided by the number of games that the team played, to control for different season lengths.
Defensive Efficiency – DADs Per Game
Defensive Actions Distressing QB’s, the stat you know and love from my last article, is back and better than ever. It is now improved to provide a raw score rather than just comparing conferences to the top conference. I also calculated it for every team individually instead of on a conference level. Once again, controlled for games played. Stats included with scales in parentheses are:
Total Tackles (0.1)
Sacks
Passes Defensed
Interceptions (4.35)
Fumbles Recovered (4.65)
I will continue to tweak this as the season goes on to include more variables like yards allowed, points allowed, etc. Right now this is all ESPN offers.
Converting Raw Scores to Z Scores
In order to be able to add, subtract, and otherwise compare these offensive and defensive efficiency scores, they have to be standardized. This is because the average offensive score per game was 408 while the average defensive score per game was 19.5. To compensate for this, I used a Z score. This takes each raw score, subtracts the average score of the entire FBS from it (so 408 or 19.5), and then divides that by the standard deviation of the FBS scores. This normalizes the scale so that the most average team will have a score of 0. The entire league will be distributed on a normal curve with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. Now, we can add a team’s defense that scores a 1 (meaning 1 standard deviation above the average team) and their offense that scores a -2 (meaning 2 standard deviations below the average team) to say that their total team Z score is a -1.
Off/Def Balance
Takes the absolute value of the range of offensive and defensive Z scores. This tells you who is the most balanced between offense or defense. Low score is *sometimes better (note: a team can be balanced by being great on offense and defense, but they can also be equally crappy on both sides of the ball).
Team Total Z Score
Sum of offensive and defensive Z scores. Tells you who is the best on both sides of the ball. Higher is better, meaning they are above the mean on both offense and defense.
Staturdays 