More than one week to prepare: myth or reality?

cajunjacket

cajunjacket

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After the UVA loss I wanted to see what our record was against FBS teams that had one week or less to prepare vs more than one week to prepare.

Our records against FBS teams in the regular season and bowl games under CPJ are:

22-6 (0.79) when a team has one week or less to prepare against us.
4-9 (0.31) when a team has more than one week to prepare against us.


The details for those who are interested, and so that you can check my data for any possible fat finger errors:
2008:
With one week or less to prepare (4-2):
BC - W
VT - L
MSU - W
Duke - W
UVA - L
FSU - W
Miami - W
With more than one week to prepare (2-2):
Clemson - W
UNC - L
UGA - W
LSU - L

2009:
With one week or less to prepare (10-1):
Clemson - W
UNC - W
MSU - W
FSU - W
VT - W
UVA - W
Vandy - W
WF - W
Duke - W
UGA - L
Clemson (ACC CG) - W
With more than one week to prepare (0-2):
Miami - L
Iowa - L

2010:
With one week or less to prepare (4-3) :
Kansas - L
UNC - W
WF - W
UVA - W
Clemson - L
Miami - L
Duke - W
With more than one week to prepare (1-4):
NCSU - L
MTSU - W
VT - L
UGA - L
AFA - L

2011:
With one week or less to prepare (4-0):
MTSU - W
Kansas - W
UNC - W
UMD - W
With more than one week to prepare(1-1):
NCSU - W
UVA - L
 
I guess the good thing about this is we don't have to worry about this the rest of the regular season.
 
I have no doubt that having an extra week to prepare against us will help opposing teams, but I'm willing to bet that numbers are similar in regards to every team and not just us.
 
I think that the bowl games are a different animal than the regular season games where the opponent got their off week and we didn't.

In the bowls we look like our timing stinks on offense. In the regular games we look like we're running through quicksand and they look like they're bouncing off trampolines, on both sides of the ball.
 
I hope you didn't work all this out from scratch, because this record has been posted every couple months. Recently I looked at how our offense does when faced with a team that had extra time:


cyptomcat said:
I have looked at Yards per Play (YPP) for games where opponents had 7 days to prepare vs. more than 7 days to prepare.

This comparison is only for FBS opponents and we do worse against teams with more preparation. I do not know for sure if this comparison is meaningful or if it is statistically significant data. I have put in all the data in google docs (check out all 3 sheets) and shared it online here: <Link>

The stat I am actually looking at is the ratio of YPP GT got against a team to YPP that team's defense had for the whole season.

In other words the ratio I am looking at:
Ratio=
(YPP GT had in game against team X) /
(YPP team X's defense had all season)

The average of these ratios for 2008-2010:
Teams with 7 or less: 1.15
Teams with more than 7: 1.06

The same analysis done on Yards per Carry Ratio and Yards per Pass Attempt Ratio is as follows:
Teams with 7 or less: 1.37 (YPC) 1.27 (YPPAR)
Teams with more than 7: 1.33 (YPC) 1.03 (YPPAR)

It's also important to know how good the defenses are on average:
Teams with 7 or less: 5.16 yards per play
Teams with more than 7: 5.05 yards per play

The difference in defenses is not big enough to explain the ratios, but still good to know.
Click to expand...
 
Chuck Smith said:
I have no doubt that having an extra week to prepare against us will help opposing teams, but I'm willing to bet that numbers are similar in regards to every team and not just us.
Click to expand...

Run them. I ran them when I did a similar analysis last year and some teams actually do better when the opponent has more time to prepare. We were by far and away the largest outlyer.
 
Chuck Smith said:
I have no doubt that having an extra week to prepare against us will help opposing teams, but I'm willing to bet that numbers are similar in regards to every team and not just us.
Click to expand...


Interesting point. How do we compare when both teams have more time to prepare?

But it may be worse as bowls would be the primary example.
 
Chuck Smith said:
I have no doubt that having an extra week to prepare against us will help opposing teams, but I'm willing to bet that numbers are similar in regards to every team and not just us.
Click to expand...

That has been looked at too:
haywire83 said:
So I had some more time today to look at the win% of opponents of these ACC teams during 2008-09. Results are average full season win % of opponents with one week to prepare and more than one week to prepare. Here's what I found:

Team: W% of Opp. <=7 days Prep / W% of Opp. >7 days Prep
Boston College: 0.529 / 0.517
Clemson: 0.555 / 0.621
Duke: 0.519 / 0.626
Florida St: 0.618 / 0.519
Georgia Tech: 0.506 / 0.691
Maryland: 0.544 / 0.543
Miami: 0.581 / 0.590
North Carolina: 0.544 / 0.605
North Carolina St: 0.588 / 0.504
Virginia: 0.595 / 0.704
Virginia Tech: 0.477 / 0.672
Wake Forest: 0.558 / 0.513

Here's my earlier spreadsheet updated with this data:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc...GR5LVR6Mkx0ajZydG5YcEE&hl=en&authkey=CNftmbQK

Based on this data, it's pretty clear to me that our drop in win % against teams with extra preparation time has more to do with the fact that the teams we've played with more prep time have happened to be "better" teams over the past two years. Here's a plot:

plot.jpg
Click to expand...



It has also been looked at in general:
http://www.teamspeedkills.com/2010/4/15/1424019/how-much-do-bye-weeks-matter
http://sportsgambling.about.com/od/ncaafootballbetting/a/ncaafbbyes.htm
 
beej67 said:
Run them. I ran them when I did a similar analysis last year and some teams actually do better when the opponent has more time to prepare. We were by far and away the largest outlyer.
Click to expand...


I may run the numbers if I get the time but I would like to see what you came up with though.

My statement was made on pure assumption and no actual facts. Logically it just seems like if you have more time to prepare for a specific team you will fare better than you would with less time. Like you said there are exceptions but I just can't see if being that big of a gap between us and other teams.

Thanks for the post Cyp.
 
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beej67 said:
Run them. I ran them when I did a similar analysis last year and some teams actually do better when the opponent has more time to prepare. We were by far and away the largest outlyer.
Click to expand...

I keep saying this but it's too much work for me to fit into my schedule:

You also have to take into account the quality of the opponent that gets the bye week, whether or not both teams got a bye week, any game affecting injuries, weather, home/away, alignment of officiating crew, and a billion other things.

In addition to the first mark, you have to take into account how much of a performance boost the other team gets against other, other teams when it has a bye week. If it gets a 50% performance boost versus a team that runs the pro set, it would need to be getting a 55% performance boost versus us (once everything else is taken into account) to really be getting a special advantage against our offense.

In addition to these marks, you have to take into account whether or not the performance increase is really defensive. If a team comes into the game with the offensive plan "run the ball - dominate the clock" the resulting lower TOP for our offense will lower our stats without lowering the overall effectiveness of our offense.

And finally, you have to account for the familiarity with the offense of each player and coach. A team that has played in a league with the offense for 4 seasons is going to have a higher familiarity with it and require less special preparation than an OOC team with no exposure to it. Likewise, a team that RUNS it will be especially well prepared to defend it, comparatively.

There's not enough data to come to a conclusion, and even if there were, it'd take a team of 10 guys a whole month to go through if it was their 9-5 to do so. I started this a while back with the last 10 years of game-by-game data for CPJ coached teams and I'm certain I didn't have enough data for any real statistics. There are just too many independent variables. All we're ever going to be able to come up with is statistics that suggest one way or another.
 
Funny, just last week there was a thread saying that an extra week doesn't help a team, and backed up by the stats that cyp quoted above.

As I said before, how could it NOT help a team prepare? And even more so in the case of our offense.
 
coit said:
Funny, just last week there was a thread saying that an extra week doesn't help a team, and backed up by the stats that cyp quoted above.

As I said before, how could it NOT help a team prepare? And even more so in the case of our offense.
Click to expand...
Of course it helps...but it should help any team prepare for any other team or their coaches are idiots. The real point is to look at the teams we lost to, who had more than 1 week to prepare. For the most part, they were better than us to start with, so the odds of us losing to them was higher to begin with.
 
ncjacket said:
Of course it helps...but it should help any team prepare for any other team or their coaches are idiots. The real point is to look at the teams we lost to, who had more than 1 week to prepare. For the most part, they were better than us to start with, so the odds of us losing to them was higher to begin with.
Click to expand...


Did you see the links cyp posted? Basically used point spreads versus results to say that teams with more time to prepare actually did worse against the spread than those without a bye week. Just goes to prove the old cliche about statistics...
 
Chuck Smith said:
I have no doubt that having an extra week to prepare against us will help opposing teams, but I'm willing to bet that numbers are similar in regards to every team and not just us.
Click to expand...

I think that teams hit diminishing returns with regard to practice time earlier when preparing for other teams (due to familiarity with what they are prepping for) than they do with our team (whose offense is completely foreign to most of them.)

For example, it may be that after a week of practice time for a different opponent they all feel confident about the film of that opponent's quirks, and the next week of practice is just to stay sharp and, well, practice.

However, after a week against us there's no way that they've mastered all the quirks of our offense, and they continue learning and getting better/more skilled the next week, rather than just practicing what they already feel confident about.

I also don't think that anyone on here is going to come up with a meaningful statistics-based answer...there's too many variables to account for and not enough data for a layman to do anything.
 
For GT under CPJ, you only have a 13 game sample, or one season. So the sample size may be too small. A better analysis might be to look at Navy starting with CPJ's second season and going through last year.

The GT bowl record has been dismal for so long that I don't know what the reason is there. As much as I hate to say it, maybe the ACC is as terrible as everyone outside of the ACC says it is and hence GT is never as good as its record or poll ranking suggest.
 
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