TDG Football Seminar: Charting the Offense

Welcome back to Week 2 of TDG’s football seminar. This week we are stepping away from learning about the game to learn a little bit about how the Gophers are actually playing offense. For the last two games, I have charted every single offensive play that the Gophers have ran and plan on continuing to do this for the rest of the season.**

They embedded in the table below and also available on Github. I will update this going forward in the football seminar posts. Anyone who also feels like being another set of eyes, or wants to take a crack at the defense should feel free to post about it in the comments.

Why Track?

A reasonable question is to why even track this to begin with. There are three reasons. First is cost. Currently, it costs money to get this information, which is annoying. Second is for depth. When we say that Rodney Smith average 4 yards a carry, it’s unclear how meaningful that average is in understanding his performance. We do not just want the top line. We also want to know how he was in certain situations. The same holds true for the team at large. Are there certain formations that the Gophers do better in than others? Finally, we want to be able to track change over time. If the Gophers line up and run the same four plays over and over again, we can see that.

What is Being Tracked?

Each row includes information on the drive, the play of the drive, the down, the personnel on the field, whether or not the offense lined up in the shotgun, what kind of play was ran, a basic and occasionally opinionated description of the play, the player responsible for the yardage, the amount of yardage gained, the ultimate result of the drive, and the opponent.

Have you made the requisite basic exploratory bar graphs to show that there is some potential way to visually examine the data to extract tangential and not at all causal meaning?

Yep!

The short version is that the Gophers tend to run the ball a lot (which we knew), pass rarely (which we knew), have long passing plays on average (YAC natch), and never line up in a four wide receiver set on first or second down. Scroll down for graphical evidence in the form of sweet sweet basic bar graphs.

What’s on tap for next week?

Next week we are going to cover offensive line play. We will go through some terminology as well as ways to identify what the play is based on what the offensive line is doing.

**while also watching the game, watching other games, chatting on slack, and doing work. It’s possible I missed a play. Please let me know.