[BostonCard]

Yeah, I guess it depends on what your expectations were, and how much more heavily you weigh the first half in the game, when the game was still somewhat in doubt.  I think this game confirms, rather than updates our priors; we are a bad FBS team, but we are not so dreadful that we can't put away a middle-of-the-road FCS team.  To the extent that you use the results to extrapolate forward, which is what I think the goal of your analysis generally is, it provides us some hope that there may be another win left in the team against the weaker back-half schedule, but I would expect to be underdogs in our remaining games.

My point about the 80 yard outliers are that they are not necessarily repeatable.  If you are pulling 8 yards per carry by consistently getting 5 - 12 yard runs (in the way we could do with the tunnel workers), then you know that you are going to be able to grind down the opposition and impose your will with the run game.  If you get 8 yards per carry with one 80 yard run and 9 stuffs at the line of scrimmage, that means that you are going to get one touchdown and 3 three-and-outs, which is certainly much worse than your first situation.  Variance matters as much as averages.

Reminds me of the days of Bryce Love when he would have 150 yards running with 2 touchdown runs of 50 and 70 yards, and 30 carries that didn't go anywhere.

BC

[BostonCard]

Yeah, I guess it depends on what your expectations were, and how much more heavily you weigh the first half in the game, when the game was still somewhat in doubt.  I think this game confirms, rather than updates our priors; we are a bad FBS team, but we are not so dreadful that we can't put away a middle-of-the-road FCS team.  To the extent that you use the results to extrapolate forward, which is what I think the goal of your analysis generally is, it provides us some hope that there may be another win left in the team against the weaker back-half schedule, but I would expect to be underdogs in our remaining games.

My point about the 80 yard outliers are that they are not necessarily repeatable.  If you are pulling 8 yards per carry by consistently getting 5 - 12 yard runs (in the way we could do with the tunnel workers), then you know that you are going to be able to grind down the opposition and impose your will with the run game.  If you get 8 yards per carry with one 80 yard run and 9 stuffs at the line of scrimmage, that means that you are going to get one touchdown and 3 three-and-outs, which is certainly much worse than your first situation.  Variance matters as much as averages.

Reminds me of the days of Bryce Love when he would have 150 yards running with 2 touchdown runs of 50 and 70 yards, and 30 carries that didn't go anywhere.

BC