floridajacket
The Real DB Cooper
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2005
- Messages
- 17,799
Because they're not predictive measures...they don't take into account anything that would be necessary to be predictive of future success such as matchups, the way in which the yards were gained, the relative tendencies of the teams on which the yards were gained, the correlation between yards/first downs/points, propensity to sustain drives, the list goes on. I'll repeat, it's an asinine measure that has a tendency of over predicting our success against teams with good athletes.
Literally no one is arguing that we should move the ball at will against UGA like we do against BGSU, but the football outsider measures don't explain why we didn't move the ball against UGA this year, but did in previous seasons with comparable rankings for our offense and their defense. In order to explain that, it requires understanding schemes, being able to look at tape, and ultimately being able to do more than look at a statistic and draw broad conclusions. OFEI doesn't win games.
You started out saying confidently that "haha, you nerds said we had a top 25 offense," and now it's "you have to be a college football coach in order to say anything about offensive or defensive performance."
I guess what rubs me the wrong way is you started out with an extremely simple, narrow statistic (number of offensive touchdowns versus some teams but not others). Then you shoot down any advanced stats.
FEI looks at drives, while S&P+ looks play-by-play at both whether a play was success (such as gaining five yards on 1st down or 1 yard on 3rd and 1) and also on explosiveness. It may not "do more than look at a statistic," but shit a team always has to gain yards and score points in order to beat another team.
Regardless, the #100 defense seems accurate if nothing else. We gave up five TDs in five possessions against UGA. Alabama or Oklahoma couldn't keep up with that.