As was the case with total offensive sacks allowed, defensive sacks created on its own is a pretty meaningless number, and only takes on real meaning when you put it into the context of pass attempts. Long story short, a team that piles up a lot of sacks can be a relatively poor pass rushing team, and a team that has only a relatively few sacks can in fact be a good pass rushing team, depending on how many passes they have thrown against them.
So, what I have done is taken the total number of sacks created by a particular team in SEC play in 2006, and divided that by the total number of pass attempts against the same team. That division yields a percentage of passing plays that I call Adjusted Sack Rate, which of course is the percentage of passes that resulted in a sack.
The following is how the SEC ranked in terms of sacks in 2006:
Moreover, we'll break things down a bit further. I understand that Adjusted Sack Rate can be a bit hard to grasp, being a raw percentage and all, so I also added Adjusted Sacks. Basically, Adjusted Sacks is the number of sacks that a team would have gotten had they faced the league average of pass attempts (223). Again, it doesn't change the data at all, it just makes it a bit easier to comprehend and fully understand by putting it in concepts more familiar to football fans.
Also, I've looked at teams not just by sacks alone, but also the lost yardage from those sacks. As you'll see, I've ranked the SEC in terms of the average yards lost per sack as well.
Without further adieu...
So there it is. If you've ever wanted better statistics regarding sacks in 2007, now you have them.
Honestly, I really don't have a whole lot to say regarding the data itself, and the main reason I did this was to get data needed for a later post.
Why do you ask?
At bottom, a sack is a pretty meaningless thing, in and of itself. You often times see teams that have a lot of sacks because they consistently blitzed everything but the kitchen sink, and while that did accumulate a lot of sacks, it still did not mark solid defensive play. Opposing teams would know their heavy blitz tendencies, and game-plan accordingly with a lot of max protect packages and short drops, with the end result being lots of completions and many big plays when a defensive back, playing man-to-man coverage, would miss a tackle and there would be no one over the top to clean it up. So really the reason I did all this is to compare it (hopefully in a post coming shortly) to 2006 SEC pass defense results. Again, hopefully that post will be coming shortly.
But I will say a few things...
Namely, Alabama just didn't get it done. The pass rush was a little better than most would have thought (eleventh instead of dead last), but there wasn't much to it. As I've posted before, the underlying idea behind the Kines scheme with regard to pass defense was to drop a lot of defenders into coverage, usually only rushing three or four defenders, and then forcing the opposing quarterback to throw into heavy zone coverage. And, well, that's exactly what we did. It just didn't work. We didn't get very many sacks (as expected, even by Kines), but we also didn't force incompletions with the heavy zone coverage. Again, at bottom, it just didn't work. You really can't put it any way other than that.
Georgia does need to be mentioned. The Dawgs finished third in the conference in total sacks, which sounds about right, considering their two outstanding defensive ends Quentin Moses and Charles Johnson. However, once you analyze the Dawgs through Adjusted Sack Rate, they only finished fifth in the conference, and really just looked like a very mediocre pass rushing team. Honestly, that shocked me. I fully expected Georgia to be one of the, if not the, top pass rushing teams in the conference. With Moses and Johnson gone to the NFL, and Georgia having to replace eight starters on defense in 2007, perhaps there are some signs for concern in Athens. All told, the Dawgs were the textbook example of racking up a lot of sacks against the Sisters of the Poor, racking up ten sacks against the, shall we say, vaunted triumvirate of Western Kentucky, Colorado, and UAB (a 6-5 Division 1-AA opponent, and two D-1A opponents with a combined record of 5-19. If you ever wanted a case study of why I only look at conference games, this would be a good one.
The rest really aren't too shocking. The teams that you thought rushed the quarterback really well (LSU, Florida, etc.) in fact did so, and the teams that you thought rushed the quarterback poorly in fact did so, too.
The only other mild surprise, to me, was Tennessee. The Vols are always very talented in the front seven, and I expected them to be a pretty solid pass rushing team, and they were far from it. For whatever reason, the Vols struggled to get after the quarterback, finishing tenth in the SEC in Adjusted Sack Rate, and had only about two Adjusted Sacks more than Alabama and Ole Miss. Yikes for the Vols. Not what I expected.
Finally, let's look at average yards lost per sack. Arkansas, LSU, and Florida (i.e. three of the top four teams in Adjusted Sack Rate), finished 9th, 10th, and 12th, respectively, in terms of average yards lost per sack. At bottom, teams knew they had a great pass rush, and planned shorter drops accordingly. And, of course, shorter drops equals less yardage lost when in fact a sack does occur. On the other end of the spectrum, the two teams that finished first and second (Alabama and Tennessee) in average yards lost per sack were about the two worst pass rushing teams in the conference. Opponents saw the lack of a pass rush, and planned deeper drops and longer routes, accordingly. That, in turn, resulted in a higher amount of yards lost per sack, when in fact a sack did occur.
Later we'll put all of this together with 2006 pass defense and see what we find. It should be interesting stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment