ZachTheZip Posted November 22, 2012 Report Share Posted November 22, 2012 While the record is the same as last year, the football team has taken some significant steps forward this year in many areas, while also taking some steps backwards in others. Overall, the team improved their average point margin by 14.75 points per game. The offense was 12 points better and the defense about 3 points better. That's an enormous difference. You usually see a decent-sized bump in the win total with such an improvement, but we were coming from so deep a hole that that didn't happen. The most obvious changes came on offense. Here are how things break down compared to last year. I'm going to bold a few of the things that stood out to me: We improved from 277.8 yards per game to 427.2 We improved from 14.2 points per game to 26.1 The passing game was improved in almost every measurable category, except for INTs. We gave up 14 fewer sacks in 2012, despite over 200 more pass attempts. We gained exactly the same rushing yards as last season (1373), but did it using 48 fewer attempts. We actually averaged 1.3 fewer yards per pass than last season. We were significantly more penalized than last season. We went from 63 penalties for 523 yards to 196 penalties for 1552 yards. On third down, we went 50/180 for 27.8% in 2011. In 2012, we went 75/189 for 39.7%. On fourth downs conversion attempts, we went 11/24 for 45.8% in 2011. In 2012 we were 9/20 for 45%. On defense we had 5 INTs last year, compared to 2 in 2011. We improved from 10 sacks in 2011 to 16 in 2012. We tallied 31 passes defended this year compared to 25 in 2011 On special teams, we went 9/12 on FGs, compared to 11/13 in 2011. We attempted three fewer long FGs (40+ yards). We punted 16 fewer times this year (68 compared to 84), but gave up an average of 2.6 more yards per return. However, opponents tried to return the ball 24 times in 2012, compared to only 11 in 2011. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave in Green Posted November 23, 2012 Report Share Posted November 23, 2012 Zach, really appreciate your good work on this. Having compiled a few stat posts such as yours, I understand that it takes time and effort to put it all together. The only thing that didn't really look right to me was penalties, as 196 penalties for 1,552 yards this season seemed way out of line in comparison with last season's 63 for 523. Sure enough, when I looked at this season's stats on GoZips.com, they showed 101 penalties for 797 yards against the Zips. Maybe the increase came from installing a whole new system. But at least it was not such a massive magnitude as the numbers you had. Perhaps you accidentally pulled penalty numbers from the wrong place. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZachTheZip Posted November 23, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 23, 2012 Zach, really appreciate your good work on this. Having compiled a few stat posts such as yours, I understand that it takes time and effort to put it all together. The only thing that didn't really look right to me was penalties, as 196 penalties for 1,552 yards this season seemed way out of line in comparison with last season's 63 for 523. Sure enough, when I looked at this season's stats on GoZips.com, they showed 101 penalties for 797 yards against the Zips. Maybe the increase came from installing a whole new system. But at least it was not such a massive magnitude as the numbers you had. Perhaps you accidentally pulled penalty numbers from the wrong place. I pulled the info from ESPN's stats page. I'll give it a second look. Edit: Here's where I saw the penalty numbers. Edit #2: Now that I think about it, maybe that's penalties for, not against? I would guess that a significant number of our penalty yards came from false starts called on our Center (seems like it happened at least twice per game) and from dumb personal fouls (remember the Miami game?) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave in Green Posted November 23, 2012 Report Share Posted November 23, 2012 The ESPN numbers database must have gotten garbled. If you look at 2011, only one team in the country had more than 1,000 yards in penalties. In 2012, it shows dozens of teams with more than 1,000 yards in penalties. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zippy5 Posted November 23, 2012 Report Share Posted November 23, 2012 that's over 100 penalty yards per game. i feel confident in saying that is definitely false. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr Z Posted November 23, 2012 Report Share Posted November 23, 2012 Speaking with TB before the season started, the one "stat" (phase of the game) he was most concerned about was his defense creating turnovers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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