Texas A&M Football: Ole Miss Postmortem – Statistical Breakdown

Defense gets gashed on the ground

We’ve praised the defense of this Texas A&M football squad a lot on here, but Saturday night, they came up short for really the first time this season.  Tackling abandoned them in crucial moments, a key trait in any game but especially against this style of offense, where making the 1-on-1 plays is so key.  Let’s take a look at the raw defensive numbers (again via cfbstats.com):

• 390 rushing yards.  This one gets top billing because it’s simply unacceptable.  You cannot win games while giving up a number of this magnitude in the rushing game.
• 6.19 YPC (honestly surprisingly low)
• 140 yards passing
• 7 YPA
• 173.3 Passer Rating
• 3 passing TDs (also surprising, given how deadly the ground game was)

Not great numbers, and definitely not what you want to see from such a highly-touted defensive unit, especially with the offense finally finding their sea legs.  Let’s take a look at the advanced stats to see if we can get any more context here.

The first (and most surprising) number I want to cover here is the very low success rate allowed number this Texas A&M football team ended up with.  Ole Miss only had a 39% success rate (again per collegefootballdata.com) for this game, good for 77% of their average number.  That’s shockingly low for a team that felt as though it was chewing up the Aggies down in and down out for most of the game.

Another number that I was surprised to see so low had to do with percentage of opponent averages allowed, this time with respect to yards per attempt.  Ole Miss, as I mentioned, had 7 yards per attempt in the passing game; this, however, was good for only 82% of their average.  The Aggie defense on the year is averaging allowing just under 83% of opponent averages through the air— an impressive number when it comes to pass defense— and that’s almost exactly what they did to the Rebels.

A few final numbers: The Rebels achieved 111% of their average as far as YPC, but only 76% of their average when it comes to points per play.  The Aggies’ adjusted defensive points per play number was 0.311.

So what we can gain from these advanced defensive numbers?  My takeaways are as follows:

• Though the Aggies gave up a huge number on the ground, it came mostly through explosive plays.  The Rebels had trouble running with consistency relative to their average for most of the game and stringing together long drives, with the exception of the drive where the Aggie defense incurred all those penalties.
• A&M’s defense continued its season-long trend of holding teams to low scoring efficiency: for the season, teams have only gained just under 67% of their average in points per play against the Aggies.  This comes mainly from their ability to stifle explosive plays (though that abandoned them in the run game against the Rebels) and get red zone stops.
• The Aggie passing defense had an average day for their standards, but an excellent day by the average team’s standard.  Antonio Johnson was missed, especially in the run game, as he is one of A&M’s better tacklers and would’ve been really key against this offense, but as far as defending the pass, this defense held serve.

So what do you think?  What are your takeaways?  What surprised you about these numbers?  Let me know with a comment down below!