Saturday's game against the Baylor Bears featured a pair of great offenses operating at high speeds, some questionable officiating, and about two hours of booth reviews. In other words, it was a Big 12 football game.

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.

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

Efficiency and Explosiveness

I use yards per successful 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).

Texas Offense vs. Baylor Defense

The Longhorns were not operating at a peak efficiency against the Bears on Saturday, but they generated enough big plays to produce one of their best offensive performances of the season.

After electing to go with a pass happy approach against a stout Kansas State defense a week ago, Texas returned to their roots against Baylor by pounding the rock early and often on standard downs. Texas ran the ball 71.2% of time on standard downs, and they were extremely efficient with these runs (59.5% Rushing SR on SDs). Texas' efficiency in the ground game forced the Bears to commit more resources to stopping the run, and the Longhorns capitalized with a pair of explosive passes to Armanti Foreman.

The Longhorns were their usual inefficient selves on passing downs, but they were able to offset their inefficiency somewhat by making the most of their successful plays. Texas gained 101 yards on their only two successful passes on passing downs.

A trio of long runs indicated another positive development for the Texas offense. The Longhorns have struggled to generate big plays on the ground in 2016, but D'Onta Foreman rectified that on Saturday with three runs of at least 37 yards.

Baylor Offense vs Texas Defense

The Texas defense was more of a mixed bag than the offense.

The run defense had a predictably atrocious game against one of the best rushing attacks in college football. The Bears gained 444 non-sack rushing yards with a run game that was both efficient (55% SR) and explosive.* Baylor's success on the ground was not surprising given that they entered the game 10th in rushing success rate and 32nd in rushing IsoPPP.

Texas needed their pass defense to pick up the slack created by the rush defense, and they did in a big way. The Longhorns stifled Baylor's passing efficiency with credible coverage by the defensive backs and an incredible pass rush (17.6% sack rate). I was worried that Texas would struggle to generate pressure on the quarterback against a Bears team that entered the game 3rd in adjusted sack rate, but my worries were misplaced. The Longhorns' pass rush is legit and figures to be a team strength for the foreseeable future.

The Texas defense surrendered few more big pass plays than you'd like to see, but at least they did not allow the type of long touchdown passes that plagued them against Cal, Oklahoma State, and OU earlier this season. If you can limit passing efficiency to <40% and prevent back-breaking gains on the successful plays you do give up, you're going to be able to play good enough pass defense to win in the Big 12.

*9.95 yards was the average gain on successful runs in 2015.

Field Position

Texas had better field position than its opponent for the second straight week. This is a new and very welcomed development. Micheal Dickson had another outstanding day punting the ball, with a punting advantage of 9 netyards per kick over his Baylor counterpart.

Turnovers

This table is based off of the back-of-the-envelope turnover luck calculation that I wrote about in a previous review.

Turnover luck was fairly neutral in this game, with the Longhorns suffering from negative turnover luck of just 4 points.

The Texas defense received a large amount of criticism early in the season for their failure to generate turnovers. Turnover generation tends to be pretty random in football, but the one thing that you have some control over is the number of interception opportunities you generate.

Defenses create interception opportunities by sticking to an opponent's receivers and defensing their passes. The Longhorns have done a poor job of defending passes on defense this year, and that is reflected in their low interception total (Texas is 105th in interceptions).

Saturday's game against Baylor represented a nice change of pace for the Longhorns defensive backfield. They defensed a season high 7 passes, and were rewarded with an interception when a first quarter Kris Boyd deflection held up in the air long enough for P.J. Locke to make an incredible play.

Expect more turnovers from this Texas defense if the defensive backfield can continue to get their hands on passes at the same rate they did against the Baylor.

Drive Finishing

Texas could have done a bit more with their scoring opportunities against the Bears, but they did score enough touchdowns to give themselves a decisive drive finishing advantage over the Bears.

The upside of preventing big plays on defense is that it forces your opponents to avoid glitches as they march down the field. Texas has a done a better job of preventing big plays over the last three weeks, and that has helped them limit the number of points opponents have scored with each scoring opportunity. Texas has only given up 3.76 points per scoring opportunity the last three weeks, which is a major improvement over the 5.43 points per scoring opportunity they allowed in their first five games of the season.

Individual Statistics

Baylor

I guess that Seth Russell was pretending to be Lamar Jackson for Halloween.

Props to Kris Boyd and John Bonney for limiting K.D. Cannon to only 6.62 yards per target. They made one of the most talented receivers in college football look pretty average.

Texas

Have a pair of brothers ever had a better game in college football? D'Onta Foreman (deservedly) received a lot of attention from the national media after Saturday's game, but Armanti was just about as impressive. It's pretty hard to top 35.5 yards per target.

*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

This season of Longhorns football has been nothing if not entertaining, and Saturday's installment against Baylor was perhaps the most exciting game of the season.

I think that you can see some defensive improvement over the last three weeks, if you can squint. The pass rush has become a major strength, and the starting defensive backfield appears to at least be on the same page. The run defense is probably destined to struggle against any offense that can run the ball well, but there is a good chance that Baylor is the last good running team that Texas will face this year.

Here is to hoping that the defense really is improving, because Texas still has to face three solid offenses in the last month of the 2016 season.