Texas A&M Football: Notable Numbers – New Mexico

Welcome to Notable Numbers, where we’ll be breaking down some of the most interesting stats of the previous game for Texas A&M football each week. We’ll be doing both standard and advanced stats here, but I’ll do my best each week to explain some of the less familiar categories when advanced stats are at play. Let’s start with some of the top-line offensive statistics for Texas A&M football versus New Mexico.

• 52 points
• 411 total yards
• 6.52 yards per play
• 277 passing yards
• 8.1 YPA
• 134 rushing yards
• 4.6 YPC
• 0 TOs

Those are pretty efficient numbers, if not eye-popping totals. As I wrote previously, though, the Aggies were dealing with rather short fields throughout the day, as their average starting field position was their own 40. Controlling for number of plays and number of drives helps us further contextualize the scoring efficiency that the offense for this Texas A&M football team showcased on Saturday. The Aggies recorded marks of 0.825 points per play and 4.73 points per drive on Saturday—both great marks (the per-play number is actually the highest in any game since Jimbo has been head coach). In the whole conference, only Alabama and Ole Miss recorded better numbers on a per play basis (0.905 and 0.875, respectively), and the Rebels alone were better on a per drive basis (6.09).

Let’s take a look now at the defensive stats for the Aggies versus the Lobos.

• 10 points
• 222 yards
• 3.7 yards per play
• 131 passing yards
• 4.7 YPA
• 91 rushing yards
• 2.8 YPC
• 1 TO

On a yards per play basis, this would have been the third-best performance for the Aggies in 2022, behind Sam Houston State and UMass. While the Lobos have been one of the most dreadful programs in FBS offensively over the past two years, they did bring in a new coordinator and an experienced transfer QB in Dylan Hopkins, who for the most part made good decisions and a lot of checkdown throws. The most encouraging here for the defense is the total rushing yards number: not once in 2022 did the Aggies allow fewer than 100 yards on the ground, which is hard to believe. On a per-carry basis, this would have been the best performance for the Aggie rushing defense of 2022 behind UMass, where they were aided on defense by poor weather.

There aren’t too many advanced stats to check out here for Texas A&M football—a lot of opponent-adjusted stats are largely useless until later in the season—but let’s take a look at what we do have, starting with success rate. If you don’t know, success rate is a way of measuring yardage gained on a given play that accounts for down and distance—how good you are at staying on pace or ahead of the chains. A “successful” play is classified as one that gains 50% of the required yards on 1st down (so on a normal first and ten, five yards or more), 70% on second down, and 100% on third or fourth down. Success rate, therefore, is the number of “successful” plays a team had divided by their total number of plays.

Surprisingly, the Aggies were a bit middle-of-the-road by this metric, with a success rate for the game of only 46%. This still would have been in the top four Aggie performances from last year, behind the Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and LSU games respectively. This makes sense on further reflection, however, when you consider the fact that UNM was selling out to stop the run, dedicating large numbers in the box to keep the Aggies from consistently moving the ball on the ground. Thus, Petrino dialed up lots of shot plays for Weigman, which are characteristically boom-or-bust. When it comes to success rate, a 50-yard TD pass on 1st and 10 is considered just as successful as a 5-yard gain on 1st and 10—it’s a binary outcome meant to tell you how consistently you were picking up the required yardage. Since this offense for Texas A&M football was slanted towards being explosive on Saturday, it stands to reason that the success rate mark wouldn’t be as important for this particular game.

Next week, we’ll be back at it with a look at the Miami game!