ulukinatme
Carr for QB 2025!
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I thought the stats made it self evident, but I will spell it out. If PPG are nearly flat, yet points per drive is down, what do you think would allow that to happen? It's either a) more drives, b) non-offensive scores.
Does that answer it for you?
Sigh...okay, I'll break it down by game just to answer this once and for all. We'll go through 10 games for last season and this season for consistency. I'm using the play-by-play breakdown from ESPN's site to tabulate:
2020 Offensive Drives
Duke - 13 drives
South Florida - 10 drives
Florida State - 12 drives
Louisville - 7 drives (Wow, super low count, 232 rushing yards and an extra 6 minutes ToP. Both teams had scoring drives that went over 7 minutes eating up a whole quarter together)
Pitt - 12 drives
GT - 10 drives
Clemson - 13 drives
BC - 12 drives
North Carolina - 12 drives
Syracuse - 15 drives
Avg drives a game: 11.6
2021 Offensive Drives
Florida State - 15 drives
Toledo - 14 drives
Purdue - 13 drives
Wisconsin - 15 drives
Cincinnati - 12 drives
VT - 13 drives
USC - 9 drives
North Carolina - 11 drives
Navy - 10 drives
Virginia - 11 drives
Avg drives a game: 12.3
So...we're seeing not even 1 extra drive per game here. Clearly .7 more drives is not enough of a change to suggest the defense is getting us a bunch of extra possessions. I think what the data is showing is we're seeing is a lot of offensive struggles in the beginning of the year that led to drives stalling, so point b.) is certainly viable. We can see after the Bye when the offense switched to tempo and we stabilized the OL a bit that we were able to utilize the running game a bit more. That likely led to longer drives and more time getting eaten up.
Bottom line, we're not seeing a substantial change in extra drives per game, so the claim the defense is generating a bunch of extra opportunities is unsubstantiated. We're not getting that many 3 and outs overall, and we're only up 3 turnovers from this point last year.
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