[BostonCard]

You missed the key element of what happened at the end of 2014. 

The issue all season long was that the run game wasn't all that much worse than other years, but the coaches abandoned it. The pass game was good enough to succeed against bad teams (big numbers vs OSU, WSU) but not against good teams with a particular issues of "mistakes" like holding, interceptions, sacks, etc.

Over the final three games Stanford ran the ball a ton more - and not just with McCaffrey. Wright remained our main back and had 48 carries in the three games, including his two highest workload games of the year. [McCaffrey had 19 carries in those three games, never as many as Wright]. The key was that they ran a ton more and the per carry numbers maintained. That allowed the pass game to flourish. The pass  numbers became WAY better: 10.7, 12.3, and 9.7 yds per attempt with 1 sack and 1 INT over three games, PER=186.

But that was 2014, its not the situation today. Our run game is not working at all at the moment. The pass game hasn't collapsed upon ramping up the number of plays, but there have been issues of "mistakes", interceptions and sacks, that have killed us. While we need to keep running enough to support the pass game, clearly the best mixture right now involves a lot more passing than it did in 2014.

First off, I completely agree with you that the situation is this year is different, and I agree that the optimum run pass mix right now favors passing more frequently.

With regards to 2014, I finally decided to look at the data.  I am a bit reluctant to buy into the narrative that the team inexplicably passed more than it ran, because you have all sorts of confounding factors happening at the same time, including different amounts of running/passing, increasing use of McCaffrey, Hogan's father's illness, etc, and teasing these things apart with only 13 games to do so with is fraught.

For example, it would be tempting to think that the coaches finally realized that the team was built to run after the Utah game.  And, in fact, we ran it a bit more than 2/3 of the time in those last three games (because I'm lazy, I am not reclassifying sacks).  And/but we also ran it more than we passed for the first 4 games, against Davis, USC, Army, and UW.  But then there is a middle portion of the season, where we seem to abandon the run (Notre Dame, UW, and ASU) and we lost two out of three games.  We seem to rediscover the run in a three game stretch that included OSU, Oregon, and Utah (we beat the Oregons but lost to Utah), running about 55% of the time.  So, yes, we ran a lot more than we passed in the final three games of the season, but there were stretches where we ran reasonable amount.  I think you and I may have been colored unduly by that horrible stretch and especially by that ASU game, where we ran only 36% of the time.

There is a trend towards higher pass efficiency rating the more we run (p = 0.06 if you run a simple regression), though it is heavily influenced by the two the two ends (the UCLA game where we ran 70% of the time and Hogan had a PER of 222, and the ASU game where we ran 36% of the time and Hogan had his second lowest PER (94).  Between those two bookends, there is no correlation between PER and percent of plays that are runs (and, in fact, between 50 and 60%, the correlation appears negative).  In addition, determining causality is hard, since we were more likely to get a lead when Hogan was passing well, and thus run the ball to kill the clock, whereas when Hogan was throwing poorly, we were more likely to fall behind and have to throw more.  You could use cfbstats' situational stats to get around that, but I don't have the time.

I think a lot of things played a role, but I don't think the season lends itself to as well-defined a narrative as I had believed.

BC

[BostonCard]

You missed the key element of what happened at the end of 2014. 

The issue all season long was that the run game wasn't all that much worse than other years, but the coaches abandoned it. The pass game was good enough to succeed against bad teams (big numbers vs OSU, WSU) but not against good teams with a particular issues of "mistakes" like holding, interceptions, sacks, etc.

Over the final three games Stanford ran the ball a ton more - and not just with McCaffrey. Wright remained our main back and had 48 carries in the three games, including his two highest workload games of the year. [McCaffrey had 19 carries in those three games, never as many as Wright]. The key was that they ran a ton more and the per carry numbers maintained. That allowed the pass game to flourish. The pass  numbers became WAY better: 10.7, 12.3, and 9.7 yds per attempt with 1 sack and 1 INT over three games, PER=186.

But that was 2014, its not the situation today. Our run game is not working at all at the moment. The pass game hasn't collapsed upon ramping up the number of plays, but there have been issues of "mistakes", interceptions and sacks, that have killed us. While we need to keep running enough to support the pass game, clearly the best mixture right now involves a lot more passing than it did in 2014.

First off, I completely agree with you that the situation is this year is different, and I agree that the optimum run pass mix right now favors passing more frequently.

With regards to 2014, I finally decided to look at the data.  I am a bit reluctant to buy into the narrative that the team inexplicably passed more than it ran, because you have all sorts of confounding factors happening at the same time, including different amounts of running/passing, increasing use of McCaffrey, Hogan's father's illness, etc, and teasing these things apart with only 13 games to do so with is fraught.

For example, it would be tempting to think that the coaches finally realized that the team was built to run after the Utah game.  And, in fact, we ran it a bit more than 2/3 of the time in those last three games (because I'm lazy, I am not reclassifying sacks).  And/but we also ran it more than we passed for the first 4 games, against Davis, USC, Army, and UW.  But then there is a middle portion of the season, where we seem to abandon the run (Notre Dame, UW, and ASU) and we lost two out of three games.  We seem to rediscover the run in a three game stretch that included OSU, Oregon, and Utah (we beat the Oregons but lost to Utah), running about 55% of the time.  So, yes, we ran a lot more than we passed in the final three games of the season, but there were stretches where we ran reasonable amount.  I think you and I may have been colored unduly by that horrible stretch and especially by that ASU game, where we ran only 36% of the time.

There is a trend towards higher pass efficiency rating the more we run (p = 0.06 if you run a simple regression), though it is heavily influenced by the two the two ends (the UCLA game where we ran 70% of the time and Hogan had a PER of 222, and the ASU game where we ran 36% of the time and Hogan had his second lowest PER (94).  Between those two bookends, there is no correlation between PER and percent of plays that are runs (and, in fact, between 50 and 60%, the correlation appears negative).  In addition, determining causality is hard, since we were more likely to get a lead when Hogan was passing well, and thus run the ball to kill the clock, whereas when Hogan was throwing poorly, we were more likely to fall behind and have to throw more.  You could use cfbstats' situational stats to get around that, but I don't have the time.

I think a lot of things played a role, but I don't think the season lends itself to as well-defined a narrative as I had believed.

BC