This was kind of a shock to me.
This was not.
In case you’re wondering about the offensive side of the ball, Georgia is 40th in Explosive Plays and 25th in 3rd Down Offense. What I gather from the rankings above is that Georgia is not so great at stopping the offense when given third down situations, but we limit explosive plays that could be back breakers. Teams can chip away or get in short yardage situations with our defense and convert…save for the Tennessee game and some horrible coverage situations, the defense is bending but not breaking, which might eat away at clock but keeps us in good position to win games.
What do you take from the data?
For most of the season it’s felt like no 3rd down was too long for us to give up the 1st down & any 3rd down of 10 or more is a punt for the offense. That seems to be changing the last few weeks. Maybe this team of young pups is growing at just the right time.
Punt for our offense, I mean
Yeah, that seems about right to me as well. We’ve gotten a lot better on defense not giving up big plays, but it’s taken us a while to figure out how to stop 3rd downs. It seems like there’s been an increased tendency to blitz the past couple of weeks to make up for the lack of pressure from the DL. But the blitzes are disguised pretty well and it doesn’t seem like we’re leaving guys on an island.
On offense, yeah, the longer 3rd downs are still rare, but that’s true to most teams. We don’t have a ton of plays over 20 yards (I think that’s the cutoff for “explosive”) but we do have lots of 10-15 yard plays. We all see the occasional open receiver that Gunner skips to take the 10-15 yard gain so maybe that will change a little, too, as he continues to gain confidence.
The offense has lots of 10-20 yard plays. Not as many 50+ home runs.
Defense is in a 2 deep ALOT to keep the lid on.
Good strategy, Alabama’s bill walsh offense was the kryptonite for that strategy.
I’d bet those rankings looked a lot worse about 3-4 games ago. Defense has improved (or grown up) of late especially in the secondary. Hope CJ Allen makes it back.
Makes me think “bend, don’t break” on defense. Although in some of the early games it felt more like bend, bend, bend on 3rd & long, endzone.
And I don’t know how other teams compare in this category, but any time our defense has a penalty that results in a first down for the bad guys, we’re giving up a score. Maybe that’s super obvious, since those tend to be 15-yarders and that’s a big chunk of field to give up.
Those statistics make absolute sense to me. The defense has hardly ever given up big plays, other than the Tennessee game. Most other touchdown drives against the Dawgs have been long sustained drives. And offensively, it took a while to get things going, which explains the mediocre ranking for the season.
I would be interested to know where our defense measured up in previous weeks during the season.
I suspect that we are improving in each category due in large part to getting healthier on offense and controlling the ball combined with our younger defensive players getting more experience and accustomed to the scheme.