Chalk Talk: Year by Year by the Numbers

[KDawg]

Feel free to comment in this post. TK is working on getting a sub forum up to put each post without comments

There are some minor things to clean up on this post, I know. But I've been working on this in my free time for the last few days, forgive me

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This is a post reviewing our yearly averages in Rush Yards Per Game, Rush Yards Per Carry, Pass Yards Per Game, Pass Yards Per Attempt, Pass Yards Per Completion, Completion Percentage, Total Yards Per Game, Total Yards Per Play, 3rd Down Conversions, Fourth Down Conversions and Turnover Ratio.

These charts are strictly on a by the numbers basis and not analyzed further than what they are. Take from them what you will.

The charts provided will graph the offensive numbers versus the defensive numbers in order to show if there's any correlation between our "winning" seasons and "losing" seasons based strictly on the statistics, which admittedly don't always tell the entire story, but it's a start.

Rush Yards Per Game. Pretty self explanatory here. Every season for the past five seasons, our offense has rushed for more yards per game than our defense allowed. That is very good news and encouraging. Our running game and rush defense, as a whole, appear to be doing quite well. Yards per game were actually quite low in 2004, though.

Once again, every season in the past five years has been even or tilted more towards the offense in rushing yards per carry. In 2004 the defense actually only allowed 3.1 rush yards per game. That's ridiculous on many levels. Our offense averaged UNDER four yards a carry twice (2004 and 2007) and our defense only allowed OVER four yards a carry twice (2005 and 2006).

Our offense only averaged more yards per game in two seasons (2005 and 2007). For the most part, we were pretty even here, though, with the exception of 2004 and 2006 where we were outgained by quite a few yards per game in the air.

Okay, this is where it got interesting. According to the stats on nfl.com we had a higher number as far as average per COMPLETION, which likely means we'd have a higher number in average per ATTEMPT here. However, I took from our TOTAL pass yards, that includes sacks for loss, the stats on nfl.com do NOT account for sacks.

Yards per Attempt take into consideration every pass thrown for us and against us. Incomplete or completed doesn't make a difference. How ever many times we threw or they threw, this is the amount of yards they got per play. This is an area that both our offense and defense can seemingly use improvement on.

This is the same story as the yards per attempt above. I took sacks into consideration.

We allowed almost a first down PER completion defensively every single year the past five seasons. Ouch. In turn, offensively, we averaged over ten yards per completion in three years. Not bad, but that stat needs to be over ten each and every season.

Self explanatory. 2004 and 2006 are the only years where our defense allowed a higher completion percentage than the offense.

Our offense got more yards per game than our defense allowed in every season except in 2006. That's an encouraging stat based on our defensive output. Alot of our total yards are dependent on our rushing game, which is great, but we could use more production from our passing game (not that this chart tells us that, just sayin'

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More self explanatory charts. Our offense was over or at five yards per play in four of the five seasons. Our defense only allowed over five yards per play twice. Not bad for either unit.

3rd Down Conversions. The defensive stat is how often they allowed a conversion on third down, obviously, the offensive stat is how often we got a first down on third down. I think we could use improvement offensively, and we need to stay below 35% every season defensively as well. Allowing a team a first down on third down once every three attempts isn't too bad statistically. We should aim there.

We allow an absolutely alarming rate of fourth down conversions. I don't have the exact numbers here, but I'd imagine these are pretty much mostly all short yardage situations with the occasional exception here and there. We allow too many and we definitely don't convert enough of them. This needs to improve. Last season appeared to be a step in the right direction offensively, but not so much defensively.

We've had a positive turnover ratio ONCE in the past five seasons and it was at +1. That's no good. We had a -5 TWICE. We need to force more turnovers and take better care of the ball.

Stay tuned, next Chalk Talk thread will be a breakdown game by game of the 2008 season where I measure our average with our peaks and valleys throughout the season.

Then we'll get in to the real X and O talk

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