Is it Roof, or the players?

[floridajacket]

1) S&P is MUCH kinder to us than FEI is this year. I looked at something like this a year or two ago, and the results were pretty significant. Looking at a composite of whatever efficiency rating you may choose, all of those teams do much better than us on a yearly basis (like 40-50 spots IIRC). Teams like Vandy, BC, and NW. Why?

One thing I was wondering about was the relative remoteness of teams and how it affects recruiting rankings. In College Football terms, BC is pretty remote. So a lot of BC's class only has offers from UConn, Rutgers, UMass, etc. It's tough to judge those athletes by offers and honestly the only thing recruiting rankings can do is use offers. There's no way any recruiting service could do a good judgment on hundreds of recruits across the nation.

The other thing with BC: their DC last year was hired by Michigan. BC did have a pretty terrible defense before him.

http://www.mlive.com/wolverines/index.ssf/2015/12/michigan_announces_don_brown_a.html

The best direct comparisons to GT are probably Vandy and NW. Here are the FEI and S&P+ ratings for the three schools. Why I spent the time I did on this I have no idea.

FEI:
GT: 74, 77, 70, 62, 109
NW: 55, 50, 43, 6, 30
Vandy: 28, 43, 96, 16, 34

S&P+:
GT: 37, 68, 54, 63, 58
NW: 50, 56, 45, 5, 36
Vandy: 41, 47, 76, 20, 49

I haven't found any data with R-Squared of the two measurements. The eyeball test leaves me with more trust in S&P+. Is GT's defense really 1 spot behind UMass (#108) and 1 ahead of FIU (#110)? Drive results may indicate that, because of things like a tipped pass against Pitt. I think S&P+ has also generally been higher on ACC offenses than FEI.

Anyway, both rankings indicate GT consistently finishing behind both these teams in defense for no honest reason. The only real excuse for Roof is losing all the DL before the 2014 season. Either that or there is something to the fact that 1's vs. 1's is always our defense against the TO. I don't know how much the 1's vs. 1's scrimmages really matter.

 

[johncu]

So I got curious and attempted to look up Navy's FEI ratings to see if the results were similar. Unfortunately, they only go back to 2007 so we're limited to 1 year:

Navy 2007 OFEI - 2nd
Navy 2007 DFEI - 119th (dead last)

Interesting.