Defense Preparing to 'Spend a Lot of Time on the Field'

[Landlord]

Trivia question:  what teams have won a NC when their defense averaged 80-90 plays per game? 

probably none

 

[brophog]

Trivia question:  what teams have won a NC when their defense averaged 80-90 plays per game? 

In the hurry up era, the champs have not been amongst the scoring leaders, and have come from a very small group of teams. That's more a style issue as teams from the SEC, ACC, and Big Ten haven't adapted to this style in the way other conferences have.

It's an alternate possession game, so it's a question of efficiency, not pace. You don't win by being fast or slow, you win by being more productive in your possessions relative to your opponent.

 

[Xmas32]

Trivia question:  what teams have won a NC when their defense averaged 80-90 plays per game? 

I'm not sure if this tongue-in-cheek or not but I had some fun going down the rabbit hole for 15 minutes on Sports Reference to see if I could find the answer to this.  It appears that no team has won a national title with a defense averaging 80+ plays.  The closest I could find was 2003 USC whose defense averaged 76 plays/game.  I was a little surprised to see that since USC under Carroll ran a pretty traditional pro style offense and not a nuclear hurry up.  Granted, that USC team had some bona fide  big plays studs in Bush, White, Mike Williams and Kerry Colbert.

 

[Danimal]

In the hurry up era, the champs have not been amongst the scoring leaders, and have come from a very small group of teams. That's more a style issue as teams from the SEC, ACC, and Big Ten haven't adapted to this style in the way other conferences have.

It's an alternate possession game, so it's a question of efficiency, not pace. You don't win by being fast or slow, you win by being more productive in your possessions relative to your opponent.

Yes, and this is why we really need to look offensive and defensive efficiency stats in terms of gauging their effectiveness. 

As far our pacing goes most college teams don't huddle anymore and UCF was something like 37th in terms of time between plays. So it's not like they were that far from the norm. Multiple factors outside of their offensive time between plays played into UCF having so many snaps towards the end of the season.  

We obviously will have to improve both our depth and conditioning, that should happen with time. UCF had to replace 7 starters on D going into the season,  depth was likely an issue there. Didn't help that they played ten straight weeks to finish the season either.  Their D likely was worn-down towards the end of the season, they looked like a different team after having a few weeks off to recoup for Auburn.  

 

[Mavric]

Here is the actual data on number of plays faced.  

As you can see, there isn't any big drop off based on number of plays faced.  There is a steady decline - which is what you'd expect - but no big breaking point.  The difference between the 76th play and the 90th is maybe 2% in efficiency.  And it would stand to reason that if you substituted more than the average team, the difference would be less.  

There is basically no difference in the Big Play Rate all the way through.

 

[Redux]

I trust our coaches, but this honestly makes me nervous.

The Defense preparing to weather 90 Offensive plays VS actually having to do it are totally different.  I highly doubt that our Defense ever does more than 80 MAX this season, and that's a high estimate.