[stupac2]

With all the sturm und drang about our offense, I thought I'd take a look at some numbers. To that end I looked at Football Outsider's F+ metrics for every year from 2009 on, and isolated the PAC-12 (or 10, but Utah and Colorado don't really change this much in those early years). Specifically I wanted to see if teams were improving over this timespan, since we've seen a large infusion of money (from the PAC-12 deal) to coaching talent in that timespan.

So here's the median performance of the PAC on every F+ metric (Overall, Offense, Defense, and Special Teams):



It looks pretty clear to me that the conference as a whole has gotten better over this timespan. Special Teams bounce all over the place, but all 3 of the highest overall and defensive rankings are in the last 3 years, and 2/3 highest offensive rankings (and the one that missed didn't miss by much).

I think you have to keep this in mind when you're thinking about our seasons, the average defense we're playing now is just much better than it used to be, and these past two years we didn't even get the boost of playing Colorado, the 2nd-worst team both years.


Since I can do a lot of stuff with this dataset, here are Stanford's rankings through the years:



I'm not sure how much stock we want to put into the 2014 numbers since the season isn't over yet, but the offensive issues show up. Also notable is that the defense has shown a drop too, down to #14 from #4 last year and #8 the year before. This is a 2011-level defense with a 2007-level offense (not plotted, I just looked it up). But, like I said, there's more football to play so I wouldn't read a lot into it.

What I find interesting is that F+ thinks that 2013, not 2010, was our best team (relative to other teams that year). I doubt many people would agree given the difference in outcomes.

[stupac2]

With all the sturm und drang about our offense, I thought I'd take a look at some numbers. To that end I looked at Football Outsider's F+ metrics for every year from 2009 on, and isolated the PAC-12 (or 10, but Utah and Colorado don't really change this much in those early years). Specifically I wanted to see if teams were improving over this timespan, since we've seen a large infusion of money (from the PAC-12 deal) to coaching talent in that timespan.

So here's the median performance of the PAC on every F+ metric (Overall, Offense, Defense, and Special Teams):



It looks pretty clear to me that the conference as a whole has gotten better over this timespan. Special Teams bounce all over the place, but all 3 of the highest overall and defensive rankings are in the last 3 years, and 2/3 highest offensive rankings (and the one that missed didn't miss by much).

I think you have to keep this in mind when you're thinking about our seasons, the average defense we're playing now is just much better than it used to be, and these past two years we didn't even get the boost of playing Colorado, the 2nd-worst team both years.


Since I can do a lot of stuff with this dataset, here are Stanford's rankings through the years:



I'm not sure how much stock we want to put into the 2014 numbers since the season isn't over yet, but the offensive issues show up. Also notable is that the defense has shown a drop too, down to #14 from #4 last year and #8 the year before. This is a 2011-level defense with a 2007-level offense (not plotted, I just looked it up). But, like I said, there's more football to play so I wouldn't read a lot into it.

What I find interesting is that F+ thinks that 2013, not 2010, was our best team (relative to other teams that year). I doubt many people would agree given the difference in outcomes.