College Football Matrix - Defensive Per Play Efficiency

[Mavric]

In order to quantify efficiency for a defense I measure the efficiency at the most basic level of football, each play called. Check out these rankings to see how efficient the defensive play caller for your team has been this year and also see how their performance this season compares to what he’s averaged throughout his career.

A little explanation of the headers:

Diff from Career Ave is the improvement or regression from the play caller’s career average. A positive number means his efficiency this season is up from his career average; a negative number means his efficiency is down from his career average.

PPG (Plays Per Game) what pace is the playcaller facing each game on average.

Performance what grade the efficiency merits compared to the rest of College Football.

RTD Grade Roster Talent Discrepancy Grade. What is the talent gap between the playcaller’s roster and that of his opponents. The better the grade, the bigger the gap in talent in the playcaller’s favor.

TAG Talent Adjusted Grade. How good of a coaching job is the playcaller doing? If he has a large talent gap in his favor then his results should reflect that. If he has a large talent gap and his performance is poor; then his TAG grade will reflect that with a poor grade and vice versa.

CFM

 

[NUinID]

I thought are defense was only marginally better?

 

[Mavric]

Depends on what it's being compared to and how the metric is calculated. On the raw performance metric above, we got a B+. On the raw numbers, that's probably about right as we've been pretty decent. But that doesn't appear to be taking into account the relative strength of the offenses we've faced, which has been pretty poor.

Last year we were decent against the run (on a per play basis) and terrible against the pass. This year we're below average against the run and pretty decent against the pass. So I would say that's a marginal improvement. I give the coaches credit for almost completely changing our defensive scheme which has definitely made a difference. But we've also played a lot of offenses that are almost totally lacking legit play-makers. Oregon has some and we had trouble stopping them. Ohio State had a lot and .... well......