Podcast #15: The One Where Huck Explains We May Be Archimedes Screwed

This is a podcast that needs to be listened to if you want to be the smartest guy or gal in the room discussing football.
 
Some fascinating stuff. Give it a listen, for sure.

If you told me I could listen to one and only one source for discussion of UT football, it would be this recent series of BC podcasts, hands down. Just knockout stuff on a weekly basis, with Huck’s contribution this week being perhaps the best in a sterling lineup.

Very well done, Huckleberry. This is a true gem of a resource you’re providing, and trust me, it’s much appreciated.

This podcast will one day be outlawed by the Geneva Convention, imo.

Only when they pry it from my cold dead fingers

Great stuff, guys. The part of my brain that rewards conceptual confirmation with a steady flow of endorphins is firing on all cylinders right now. That almost makes up for the month-long sputtering of the neural center responsible for feelings of satisfaction when watching a competent offensive scheme.

Huck – you mentioned the disconnect between the total yardage and points scored statistics for Texas this season. I’m still interested in putting together some way to track expected value of a drive based on initial field position. This could demonstrate how much special teams and defense contribute to an offense’s scoring – if an offense scores on a lot of short drives, but is relatively unsuccessful on long drives, then a lot of the team’s supposedly-offensive points were generated in part by the other units.

Oops. Gotta run. I hear three billy goats approaching.

wow, great stuff guys, excellent work Huck. Can’t believe I listened to all of that. Is it just me or do Scip and Sailor sound like the same person? Interesting…Is it a Trips/Kevin thing? ha.

Has anybody doublechecked these numbers?

Just wondering before I drowned myself in a bathtub of vodka.

Nice work, Huck. I’ll explain it all to HenryJames later.

Brick -

All it would take would be someone that tracks the starting field position of every drive and the resulting offensive points from that drive. When I did that short study on just a few teams I intentionally removed any drives that ended due to a half.

Then it’s not tough from there to take the data and separate it by team, calculate their expected points based on the number of drives and starting position of those drives for the season to date, and compare to their actual offensive output. Because you’ve tracked the actual drive results you don’t have to worry about removing defensive and special teams scores because they’re not in the data.

It’s just a data collection issue. Are you volunteering?

“Has anybody doublechecked these numbers?”

Greg’s on it.

That was refreshing. After listening with newfound perspective, it’s hard for me not to feel optimistic about the chances to surpass expectations the rest of the way.

Wow, reverb! We’re podcasting today from inside Greg Davis’ scrotum. Lotta space in here.

Reverb is the new black.

Huck – You say that things get very confident half way through the conference games. You also said you know you are missing a lot of data because of the D2 opponents. How much faster do you think things would fall into line much faster if we didn’t have ~30-40 games against random D2 opponents? Besides hating the ranking system in general, I always hated when people put out rankings in week 2 or 3 because I never thought the ‘connectivity’ was there due to having to analyze not just 121 teams, but also another subset of the D2 teams.

By the way, thanks for depressing me.

A&M is really better than us in adjusted defensive yards per play?

Maybe I missed it in the podcast, but what does your data say about NU vs KSU?

Huck, getting the Texas drives only shouldn’t be hard. I could get that from ESPN or the Mack Brown website I think.

Great work by the way

My brain is full, may I be excused?

Sorry to spam the thread.

The defense is obviously very good, but it is interesting to note 1) the lack of ints, it really hurts losing ET, and 2) our ranking in fumbles per play versus our turnovers.

If I’m reading the numbers correctly, we are 55th in interceptions, 19th in caused fumbles, yet we manage to only be 72nd in turnovers. To me that says we are just really fucking unlucky when it comes to how the ball bounces. Maybe I’m reading it wrong though.

ut 06
 
You’re reading it right.

Hi!

Huck – I was hoping you had access to some database of statistics of which I am unaware. The only sources I’ve found make compiling this information rather tedious.

That was simultaneously outstanding and depressing. Any season where I agree with both Huck and Scally on virtually the same topic is fertile ground for existential crisis. I’m going to reread ‘Collapse’ by Jared Diamond and cheer myself up.

Hahaha

That wasn’t reverb. That was an issue with my human voice simulator.

Why did you have the simulator set to ‘dedfischer’?

I heard some twang?

Huck:

That’s a hell of a lot of deep analysis that you’re doing. I appreciate that you’re putting the data & conclusions in context, e.g. projected results assume that the players & coaches don’t pull their heads out.

It was an enlightening and sobering discussion.

I have different settings depending on the company and circumstance.

I was talking with a couple of effete California dilletantes to a target audience of Texas football fans. Twang seemed like a solid choice.

It occurs to me that our defense is underperforming expectations because our coaches made a qualitative assessment after viewing it in practice against our offense. They thought it was an all-time great defense, the D-1A equicalent of the 2000 Ravens, when it was just a very good college defense.

I finally got around to listening to this one and looking at some of the adjusted data. I think that Huckleberry summed it up best when he said something about how a fan’s expectation goes faulty.

It was a logical expectation that the defense would have to bail the offense out to have a successful season. As Huck said, it was a widely held assumption that this would be a requirement. As he went on to explain, the disagreement is basically in degree, not in kind.

“If your offense can’t help the (adjusted) number 13 defense in the nation to a more successful season, then that is not on the defense.” Or something to that effect. For me, that really says it all in terms of where we have to improve in order to, for instance, reach a ten win season.

What I wonder is, if the defense remains in it’s current ranking of around 13, how much better would the offense have to get in order to reach a double digit winning record? From rank 90 to rank 50 in adjusted offense? Is a jump to the upper half good enough, or do we have to wake a giant that can reach the upper quartile once he stands up from slumber?