Alabama By the Numbers: Third Down Conversions
by kleph on Jun 22, 2011 8:40 AM CDT
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Over the past two days, I've had posts up on Team Speed Kills, the SB Nation site covering all things SEC, looking at third down conversions. On Monday it was a look at offensive third down conversion percentages and yesterday was a post on defensive third down conversion percentages. My observations for across the conference are available there but I wanted to provide a look at Alabama's stats by themselves.
This chart shows Alabama's third down conversion percentages over the past five years. Obviously, the red line indicates the offense's ability to move the chains. The grey line shows the third down conversion percentage for Alabama's opponents, or more to our interest, the ability of the Crimson Tide defense to get off the field on third downs.
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Source: CFB Stats
Now those two thin red lines I've drawn on the grid indicate the targets set by Coach Saban for the team. He want's the offense to convert 45% of the time and the defense to limit opponents conversions to 30%. As you can see, these are not easy standards to reach.
Last year the offense actually reached that target for the first time in Coach Saban's tenure. Alabama ranked fourth in the conference for offensive third down conversions, a mark only matched once prior in the last half-decade, in 2008. The defense though showed a notable drop-off of efficiency from the past two seasons, but was still better than every other team in the conference save one - Arkansas (and no, I got no answer for that either).
So, basically, aiming for the targets Coach Saban sets means the Crimson Tide is likely to end up in the elite level of the SEC in both these categories. And this graph shows pretty plainly that even if the offense isn't able to reach that level of efficiency, it's not necessarily a crisis as long as the defense can. But, conversely, even if the offense is stellar, a step back on the defense can be extremely costly.
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I wonder what the conversion rates were in short yardage situations
It seemed like that’s where we dropped off last year, both Offense and Defense. And I would think the 2008 O was elite in short yardage situations, but that was balanced out by not being very effective on 3rd and long.
if you know where to find those numbers
outside of compiling them from the play-by-play accounts, i’d love to see them.
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Arkansas
When your D allows first downs off of 1st and 2nd down situations, your 3rd down defense looks stellar on paper. I’d venture to say that they had the least amount of defensive 3rd downs in the SEC, making them a statistical outlier. Just my 0.02 without looking at the numbers.
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by TopDaddy on Jun 22, 2011 11:31 AM CDT via mobile reply actions
Those fans
that bashed GMac need to look at this article & graph. Very interesting information. Thanks for the great work!
No.
I don’t bash GMac, I like him alot. But the offense hung the defense out to dry over and over last year.
LSU and Auburn for example.
The first half of the LSU game the offense stunk it up big time. Over and over we gave LSU the ball in good field position, and the defense held tight for the entire 1st half. The offense never really responded until the end of the 2nd qtr.
Any defense is going to break eventually the longer it is on the field. Especially when ours lacked depth. 2nd half LSU exploited our weaknesses, and our own offense wasn’t able to step up to the plate.
Auburn, the first half our defense was lights out. And our offense was off to a great start. The 2nd half we only muster up like 3 pts? Meanwhile Auburn is charging and charging, and Barron getting hurt didn’t help any either – maybe he makes that INT and things are different, but it didn’t happen.
Offense and Defense go hand and hand. When our defense has been awesome our offense has been the big grinding offense. Mark Ingram up the Middle, Mark Ingram up the Middle, Richardson up the middle. When you run on offense alot, your lineman are getting up off the ball. This wears the defense down, eats clock and so on. Late in the game when you actually need to run the clock, the defense is wore down.
And this at the same time keeps our defense fresh and on their toes. The less they are on the field, the fresher they are, keeps the other teams offense out of rythmn.
Our defense was not that bad last year, and it was certainly better than Auburns.
But when we needed our offense last year, it wasn’t there. When the edges were covered for screens, we ended up stuffed. Our offense had no real balance, and I’m not talking pass vs run %‘s, I’m talking about what parts of the field you are attacking.
Very interesting stuff Kleph....
In particular, the lines showing Coach Saban’s goals for the team – it is obviously not too easy to accomplish those goals, but I’m hoping we can find a way to do so this year…….though I would rather have the defense back meeting the goal if I had to choose…
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