Texas finally won a football game! The Longhorns broke their losing streak in the same fashion that many a month long dry spell has been broken- with a big finish preceded by a timid and awkward start.

This review is based off of Bill Connelly's Five Factors to winning football games. The five factors are efficiency, explosiveness, field position, turnovers, and finishing drives.

End of half drives and garbage time situations are not included in any of the efficiency, explosiveness, drive finishing, or field position calculations. A game is considered to be in garbage time if the scoring margin is greater than 28 points in the 1st quarter, 24 points in the 2nd, 21 points in the 3rd, or 16 points in the 4th. This game entered garbage time at the beginning of the 4th quarter.

This advanced stat glossary will come handy to those of you who are less familiar with the five factors.

Efficiency

Last week, the Oklahoma Sooners revealed the simple (but theoretically difficult to execute) game plan for slowing down the Texas offense.

The Longhorns are efficient on standard downs due to the strength of their running game, but they are very poor when forced into obvious passing situations. Teams that have a good run defense (like the Sooners) should be able to fare reasonably well against Texas by getting the Longhorns off schedule on offense. Meanwhile, teams with average (or worse) run defenses will likely struggle against a Texas squad that is reliant on their methodical rushing attack.

Iowa State did not look like the type of team that would have a prayer of slowing down the Texas offense. The Cyclones entered the contest ranking 84th in Standard Downs S&P+, 108th in Rushing S&P+, and 127th in Rushing Success Rate. There might not be a better match up for this Texas offense in the Big 12* than Iowa State. I fully expected the Longhorns to run all over the Cyclones and score a ton of points.

The Texas offense managed to meet my expectations for about one quarter of the game, but they spent the entire first half looking more like last year's Halloween shit show in Ames than the offense that we have come to expect given their play in the first half of the 2016 season.

The Longhorns managed a first half success rate of 35.1%, and their first half rushing success rate was only 34.8%. When one considers the ability of the competition, this first half performance by the offense was roughly equal to worst level of suck produced by the Texas defense in 2016**.

Unlike the defense (or Texas offenses of the recent past), the offense was able to rebound and dominate an inferior opponent after struggling through long portions of a game. The Longhorns did pretty much whatever they wanted to do in the second half before the game entered into garbage time, with a passing success rate of 80% and a rushing success rate of 70%.

Thankfully, Texas only needed one excellent quarter of play from their offense, because the defense was fantastic for the entire game.

Iowa State appeared to be as good of a match-up for this Texas defense as they are likely to find on the rest of their Big 12 schedule. The Cyclones' offense is not particularly good at anything, and they are very poor at doing the things that Texas has struggled with the most in 2016 (ISU entered the game ranking 78th in Passing S&P+, 91st in Passing IsoPPP, and 113th in Passing Downs S&P+).

It was reasonable to expect for the Texas defense to play much better than they had in recent weeks, but nobody thought that they would have played as outstanding as they did on Saturday.

The Longhorns gave us a preview of what this defense should look like in the not-too-distant future. They controlled the Cyclones' rushing attach with a solid (but not spectacular) run defense, and then employed a ferocious pass rush to get the Cyclones off the field when they were forced into obvious passing situations.

The Texas defense still has a long way to go in order to demonstrate meaningful and sufficient improvement, but Saturday night was undoubtedly a step in the right direction.

*Excluding Texas Tech, of course.

**Either the Cal, Oklahoma State, or Oklahoma game. Take your pick.

Explosiveness

I am going to continue to use yards per explosive play to measure explosiveness. I like this statistic because it isolates efficiency from explosiveness by looking at how explosive a team is on successful plays only. I am also including the percentage of success plays that qualify as explosive plays under Tom Herman's big play definition (runs of at least 12 yards and passes of at least 16 yards).

Neither team was very explosive*, which was perfectly fine for Texas given their massive efficiency advantage.

The Texas rushing game failed to produce much in the way of explosiveness for the second consecutive week, and the passing game didn't add many big plays outside of Shane Buechele's two touchdown passes. A lack of explosiveness is tolerable as long as you can produce >50% success rates while your defense is limiting the opponent to success rates <35%, but Texas is not going to be able to count on that kind of efficiency advantage in the future. The Longhorns will have to add some explosiveness going forward in order to deaden the blow of drive killing glitches that plagued them in the first half.

Iowa State was basically as explosive as Texas, and that represents a huge step forward by Texas' pass defense. The Longhorns only allowed a handful of successful passing plays to begin with, and the ones that they did allow were not nearly as harmful as the successful plays that opponents had been generating against Texas in their previous three games.

*Both teams were below average across the yards-per-explosive-play spectrum, per the 2015 PBP data that I was able to find.

Field Position

The Cyclones held a slim field position advantage in this game, almost entirely due to their first quarter fumble recovery deep in Texas territory.

Turnovers

This table is based off of the back-of-the-envelope turnover luck calculation that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

Texas has had poor turnover luck throughout the 2016 season. They had negative turnover luck again against the Cyclones, although turnovers played a negligible role in the outcome of this football game.

Drive Finishing

The Texas offense did a good job of finishing scoring chances once they got rolling in the second half. The Longhorns used explosive plays to score all three of their touchdowns.

Perhaps the most encouraging development for this game was the ability of the Texas defense to limit Iowa State when the Cyclones generated scoring opportunities. It turns out that forcing field goals is a lot easier to do when you are not giving up several long passing plays that can only be stopped by the goal line.

Individual Statistics

Iowa State

Just look at those passing success rates and passing yards per attempt!

Texas

Shane Buechele, Devin Duvernay, and Jerrod Heard were Texas' best players on offense against Iowa State. The future is very bright for the Texas offense.

*Notes: Sacks are counted as passing attempts and are factored into the yards per attempt figure presented with the passing stats.

Opportunity Rate is the percentage of a runner's carries that gains at least 5 yards. It is a measure of a runner's efficiency, although I also like to use success rate to judge a runner's efficiency.

Highlight Yards per Opportunity is a measure of a running back's explosiveness. You can find its definition in the advanced stats glossary that I linked earlier in this post. The national average for highlight yards per carry is about 5 yards. For more context on these rushing stats, I encourage you to check out 2015's rushing stats.

Final Thoughts

Iowa State is a poor football team, and Texas beat them like they should beat a poor football team. The offense was a mixed bag and will probably be fine going forward, but the real story from Saturday's game was the performance of the defense.

The Longhorns' defense has struggled to limit efficiency and prevent big plays in the passing game all season. They fixed those issues in a big way against Iowa State. It is impossible to know if these issues are really getting fixed from only one game of data, but the Texas defense did play as well as they possibly could have against the Cyclones.

Here's to hoping that this performance is not a blip on the radar, but instead a new trend for this Texas defense.