Was Texas A&M football sneakily dominant against MSU? Advanced stats say so.
Despite fan discomfort, advanced stats show Texas A&M football controlled the game against Mississippi State
When I come away from a Texas A&M football game and feel like they were either extremely dominant or extremely disappointing, one of the first things I normally do is go check the advanced statistics. Knowing how to read these numbers can help give context to how a game actually went, much more so than regular box scores do.
That's what I found myself doing in the moments following the Aggies' victory against Mississippi State. A&M fans felt throughout that the game was way closer than it should have been, and at times it looked like the Aggies were sleepwalking their way through the game.
But the advanced metrics reveal something way different. Checking in on the advanced box score from collegefootballdata.com displays the Aggies dominance.
First off is the note up top about the "postgame win expectancy"—essentially, given all of the following statistics, how likely is it in a vacuum that one team won rather than the other? If a win was particularly close, this wouldn't be much more than 50%—if it was fluky, it would be weighted towards the team that lost.
Texas A&M football's postgame win expectancy in this one was 95%. Despite all of the hulaballoo during the game, this was a decisive victory for A&M.
The Aggies' success rate (a measure of consistency in offensive production) was 8 percentage points higher than the Bulldogs'. A&M more than doubled the projected points added/play (a statistic that adds context to yards per play) of Mississippi State.
More than that, the Aggie defensive numbers show how difficult they were making life for the Mississippi State offense. For much of the game, it felt like the Ags were dominant physically, but that the Bulldogs were simply executing at a high level whenever A&M wasn't directly messing things up.
The havoc rate numbers for the Aggies show just how disruptive the A&M defense was: on more than a quarter of the Bulldogs' offensive snaps—28.2%, to be exact—the Aggies were registering a deflection, interception, TFL, quarterback hurry, or sack. That's an extremely impressive number.
The only spot where the Bulldogs soundly outperformed the Aggies was in explosiveness. This, of course, makes sense—many of the big runs A&M had were called back for penalty, and MSU really made some hay in the first half with chunk yardage gains.
The usefulness of these stats, at the end of the day, is predictive. When you're looking forwards, you need to ask yourself just how dominant a win or loss actually was and see how that informs a team's profile as they continue throughout the season.
Though many A&M fans were sweating this final score, it looks like the Aggies, though they have definite room to improve, ended up showing how much better of a team they are than MSU.