If you would like to see and play with the interactive version of these graphs you can find them at
https://github.com/MCurve7/mcurve7_cfb/tree/main/RBR/2023
You just need to download the Alabama_(year)_regular_wk??_(opponent).html file and open it in a web browser.

I think someone asked balloons to give a TL;DR of his article and so I thought I'd start with one.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt! Bama, sweetheart, what was that? IT WAS BAD! It had nothing! No fire, no energy, no nothin'! You know I have a show to run here, you know? Hmm? Hmm? And it must pop, Pop, POP! So next week from 2:30 to 6:00, will you please act like you have more than a two word vo-cab-uh-lary? It must be green, OK? OK?

I guess I'll start with the SR by Drive graph. We never broke 0.6 on any drive and the closest was on the first drive where our SR was 0.57 and that drive ended in a interception! Our mean SR on all of our drives was 0.286. This is the first season that I've calculated this mean, but I don't think we need to compare this number to any other game to know that's just bad. (Partly self NOTE: make turnover drives a black/something bar).

Texas didn't look that much better until their 9th and 10th drives. Their 3rd and 11th drives had SRs of 0.5 and .43 respectivily, but they still were able to score on them. Their last drive, 12 (SR = 0.25), was all about killing the clock, so this lowered their mean SR to 0.395. I'm not sure how to interpret this other than it was better than ours (approximately 40% to our 29%).

At first the SR by Distance to 1st/TD looks great at the 1-3 yard distance until you realize that we were only on this range twice during the game! Of our basically non-kicking offensive plays, 41 out of a total of 62 offensive plays were in the 10-12 interval. And 5 were 13 yards or longer.

If we look at the Yards to Success vs Yards gained by Down and its associated table it's just more yuck. A mean distance of 10 is of course normal on first down and the distance standard deviation of 0 would indicate that we didn't commit any penalties on 1st down nor did Texas. A mean gain of 5.78 looks like a great number since 1st down success from 10 yards is 5 yards, but the standard deviation of 8.19 yards means that I am now interested in the median... Sorry for the delay, but I had to add some code to calculate the median gained. And that's not good. On 1st down we had a median gain of 3 yards which is 2 yards short of the 5 to be successful. (Another self NOTE: Might be time to see how to make a box-and-whisker plot.) Our mean/median distance to a 1st/TD just gets worse on 2nd and 3rd downs (9.05/10, 9.5/9). But hey, on the one time we went for it on 4th we only had to go 3 yards and gained 6, so there's that. Lets dig a little deeper into the Distance by Downs.

Yards-Success-Gained is going to reference the Yards to Success vs Yards gained by Down scatter plot above and SR-1st-Downs will reference the below bar chart titled SR by Distance to 1st/TD facted by Downs. (Note that for the SR-1st-Downs graph the colors are not meaningful other than they are supposed to help distinguish the bars.) It's a little hard to see exactly what the Yards-Success-Gained is telling us for 1st down, but the SR-1st-Downs shows that we only had a SR of .41 with 27 plays. Second down looks bad in both graphs. Looking at Yards-Success-Gained there are way too many red dots vs green. And the SR-1st-Downs backs that up since we had:

2nd Down

Ignoring the one 1-3 play our best SR was 0.27 in the 10-12 interval. For third down we're getting a small sample size of 14 plays. From 7-9 we had a SR(7-9) = 0.67, SR(4-6) = 0.50, SR(>=13) = 0.25, and SR = 0 elsewhere. These are new graphs and data, but I feel confident in saying woof.

The graph below is the same as the Yards-Success-Gained but allowing the data to use it's best scale to display itself.

To be honest, the Texas version of these graphs aren't exactly blowing my skirt over my head. NOTE: for some reason the SR by Distance for the game isn't going up to 1 for the SR axis whereas it does for our version of this graph. (I'll try to fix this in the future so it will be easier to compare visually.) In fact looking at the table below our numbers are really close to each other.

Looking at the below table, their mean distances are not that much better on 1st and 2nd downs. Their 3rd down is better than ours and maybe that difference (5.89 vs 9.5) is major since that is means they were 3.61 yards closer to a 1st down on 3rd. They struggled in the 4-6 interval on 2nd down and weren't all that great from any other interval except 3rd down 4-6 (0.60) and 4th 1-3 (0.67). Just looking at the numbers I don't think the defense looked horrible (but my eyes of course say our pass rush was very ungood!)

And then there is the penalties. So many penalties. The two, count them two, Illegal Snaps are just atrocious. Pre-snap penalties are mental mistakes that just can't be allowed to happen. A Face Mask or Ineligible Downfield On Pass are effort penalties and sometimes just happen. Anyway I think these graphs speak for themselves, so I'm going to shut up.

Roll Tide and let us hope that CNS can get things corrected or this looks to be a loooong painful season.

All SEC teams

All data below includes intra-conference games and OOC games.

Summary statistics for FBS conferences

ACC

American Athletic

Big 12

Big Ten

Conference USA

FBS Independents

Mid-American

Mountain West

Pac-12

SEC

Sun Belt

All FBS sorted by z-scores

Data: @CFB_Data or collegefootballdata.com