Total points scored against UW

Utah’s offense sucks you just need to shut your yapper. 😉

I agree it’s exciting to put up the most points a team has seen all year, and to do it twice so far, but I’m not sure those numbers are actually saying Utah has a great offense.

Running down the list

Michigan – our rank (3) – their total losses  (2)

USU – us (4) – total losses (4)

FSU – us (4) – total losses (7)

OU – us (1) – total losses (3)

Cal – us (4) – total losses (4)

ASU – us (5) – total losses (5)

OSU – us (6) – total losses (7)

Washington – us (1) total losses (5)

Those numbers tell me our offense is generally not as potent as other teams that beat teams we have beaten. If 4 teams have beaten Cal and we’ve scored the 4th most points against them then 3 teams have scored more than us, and 2 of them also won the game. 4 teams have beaten USU and 3 teams have scored more than we did. Or in Michigan’s case there’s a team that scored more points than we did against them, but that Michigan still beat.

Also against the 2 teams that we scored the most points on Oregon and Washington – we had substantial scoring contributions from Defense and special teams. 14 of our points Saturday were very directly attributable to defense.

Those numbers tell me we have a great defense that keeps teams scoring low and our offense is just good enough to beat them. That’s fine that’s all that really matters.

Our offense is obviously ok, and many fans, myself included, are probably harder on it than we should be, and I’ll take winning in the final drive the way we do it over the way TCU has been doing it any day of the week. I just don’t think the massive score against Oregon, and Saturday’s score indicate we have some great under-rated offense.

We have a human cannonball at RB, an O-line that can play great when they want/need to, a badass freshman slot receiver, and a QB that is a gamer but not especially good at going through his progressions or making very accurate long throws. Its OK. It’s who we are and who we’ve been the last 2 years. I honestly hope over the next few years we add a slightly more potent passing game to what we’ve got. 200-250 yards passing in P12 play would make this team really really difficult to beat.

Just did a bit more digging to see if my belief that our defense seems to contribute more to us outscoring and winning than our offense. I don’t think that’s controversial to say, but in case there is any doubt this is what I found.

Our avg. margin of victory is 12 points.

When you look at how many points most teams we play score (avg points for) and compare that with how many points they score against us I think you get a feel for how much better our defense is than the average defense they face and how much our defense contributes to the victory. On average opponents score 8.4 fewer points against our defense than they do on average. Basically our D prevents at least 1 TD per game that our opponents would be expected to score.

To look at offense I compared the avg. points against our opponents against how many points we scored. I think this is a reasonable measure of how much better our offense did compared to their other opponents. We score 4.8 points more than would be expected.

Not surprisingly when you add these together you get 13 which is basically our average margin of victory (12).

It seems to me that our offense is helping more than hurting. This is actually a pleasant surprise to me. However our D contributes twice as much of our margin of victory. At least 2/3 of the fact that we win is that our D is just 1 TD better than our opponent’s offense.

If you account for how many points our defense has scored directly (21) this year, then the offense is actually only scoring 2.4 (less than a field goal) more points than our opponent’s average.

If you then account for special teams direct contribution to either scoring for us or giving up points, and how many points another team’s defense has scored on our offense the numbers get even more unbalanced.

For Defense contribution to margin of victory – If you take out the pick 6 by SC, and the KO return and  safety for ASU (both not in any way the Defense’s fault) then the defensive contribution to margin of victory goes up to  10.1 points Our defense basically prevents 1 TD and FG per game. They spot our offense 10 freaking points. That is amazing.

For offense – The special teams  have scored 21 points directly on punt and kick returns. This actually drops our offense’s contribution to margin of victory to 0.1 points per game. Basically our offense doesn’t score more points than other teams against our opponents. They are average. This is still a pleasant surprise. Our offense isn’t below average against pretty good competition who also play good competition. They may not be scoring a bunch, but they are NOT hurting us either. I guess I should stop complaining.

I don’t think TW’s struggles are any one thing. There are many contributing factors, including injury or fear of injury.

I do think that the upper end QB’s have instincts which can’t be taught, like stepping up at just the right time, sensing a blindside blitz, looking off the defense to make them move then dumping it elsewhere… Those seem to be things TW doesn’t do, except perhaps in the ASU game. He did those things often. I just can’t figure out why THAT game he did, and others he doesn’t.