Texas A&M Football: Auburn Statistical Postmortem

It seemed like it was already going to be a long night after Auburn’s first few plays on offense.  This Texas A&M football team was back to their old ways of sieve-like run defense, and it seemed a virtual certainty that Auburn would be able to run on the Aggies at will.  However, the defense stepped up, only allowing Auburn 13 points, and forcing 3 turnovers, with what should’ve been a 4th ignored by the replay booth.  Here’s how things shook out (ranks are from FBS vs FBS competition only):

• 4.6 YPA allowed – 2nd best of the season (App State – 4.5)
• 60 yards passing allowed – best of the season
• 79.53 rating allowed – best of the season
• 2 interceptions – most of the season
• 5.04 YPC allowed – 5th worst of the season (Ole Miss – 6.19; MSU – 6; Florida – 5.82; Alabama – 5.65)
• 277 yards rushing allowed – 4th worst of the season (Ole Miss – 390; Florida – 291; Alabama – 288)

One of the best passing defense performances of the season, and not quite as bad a rushing defense performance as we’ve seen over the last two weeks, with both the Ole Miss and Florida games ranking worse in that category.  A huge part of that is getting your best tackler back in Antonio Johnson, who had a great performance against the Tigers.

Here’s how the advanced stats looked: A&M allowed an adjusted points per play number of only 0.223— their third-best of the season behind the Miami game (0.145) and App State (0.171).  The unadjusted number (0.191) was only 55% of what Auburn averages gaining, so scoring efficiency-wise, the Aggies played well.  Much of that was likely due to the high amount of turnovers they forced, keeping Auburn off the board more than one time when they had driven into Aggie territory.  This Texas A&M football team also neared their season best in percentage of YPA allowed, giving up only 65% of Auburn’s average, the Aggies’ second-best mark of the season behind App State (56.75%).  However, they did give up 107% of Auburn’s YPC average (surprisingly only the 5th time this season they’ve allowed an opponent to meet or exceed their average on the ground).  This Texas A&M football team also only allowed the Tigers a 35% success rate, good for 92% of Auburn’s season average, so it was tough on them to have consistent production on offense.

In all, it was a good defensive performance, even by opponent-adjusted metrics.  They kept Auburn way below what their normal offensive production is, but, sadly, couldn’t pull out the victory.  Let’s hope that for these last two games (especially the season finale against the Bayou Bengals) we see a similarly high-energy performance from this defense.  The only question is whether the offense can match it.