Five “sweeeeeet” Graphs from Alabama vs. Western Carolina

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Play Map: Yards and Result by Play

This Alabama Play Map is pretty much a textbook template for a cupcake game: Alabama was raining explosive plays down for three quarters, then closed things out with a ton of runs (and mostly successful ones, to boot) to close out the game.

Nice job, Mac Jones and team.

Success and Explosiveness by Play Type

Whoa! I was ready to see some sky-high efficiencies out of this late season cupcake match. But that passing chart is truly insane: I don’t remember an example of Tua Tagovailoa (or any modern Bama QB) putting up an 80%+ SR over an entire game.

And it wasn’t just the easy stuff: that 56% explosiveness rate is also extremely high. You have to take these mismatches with a whole shaker of salt, but it’s good to know that Mac can at least “scrimmage” very, very well.

(Oh, and the running game was it’s usual efficient, but not explosive, self. Actually, it’s almost a shame that we can’t get a higher rushing XR against such an outsized opponents.)

Rushing and Passing Success (cumulative), Alabama

This one is pretty much a deeper look at the prior chart. Our passing was working so well, that we got up by 50ish points and just stopped doing it.

Running the ball was hit or miss through the first 3 quarters, but the backups came in and cleaned up late to get our rushing SR back into positive territory.

Success and Explosiveness in the Red Zone

Here’s the one “not awesome” chart I can pull from this game. While our normal efficiencies were pretty much off-the-charts, our performance in the Red Zone wasn’t nearly as good: in fact, we came in with under-league-average efficiencies on the plays we had inside the opponents’ 20.

Some of that is likely related to the prior chart: our running game wasn’t nearly as efficient, and that’s something we’d like to rely on that close to the end zone.

Rushing rate (cumulative), Alabama

But... let’s get back to the happy stuff. Our rushing rate was pretty much >50% for the entire game. And in the 4th quarter, we just kept running and running the thing: we closed the game out with literally twenty rushes in a row (with only 5 of those not successful). Keilan Robinson, Chadarius Townsend, and the other backs kept things moving late.

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Now, on to the real deal. We’ll see you around these parts next weekend. In the meantime, comment below or check out all of the graphs from this game.