Bumped. GO BRUINS. -N

may be in the minority here but I'm not really upset with the playcalling over the past few weeks. I had UCLA's plays charted for the SDSU game, and went ahead and copied in the basic play data for the Stanford, Tennessee, and Oregon games from ESPN.com into an Excel sheet I use for scouting, and cranked out some charts and numbers to take an objective look at how UCLA's offense was really doing.

Here's a good article that ran in the New York Times awhile back that discusses applications of statistical analysis to football and how the Patriots have capitalized. There are plenty of variables to consider in real-life situations but I still think that the main points hold water. 

Belichick also sticks to running the ball on third down in short-yardage situations, while other coaches pass reasonably often to try to surprise the defense. According to Aaron Schatz, founder of the sabermetrics-inspired Web site FootballOutsiders.com, Belichick's strategy, though predictable, is well warranted by a careful analysis of the risks and rewards involved in using it.

Following in James's footsteps, Schatz employs a metric known as defense-adjusted value over average, or DVOA. It takes into account that not all yards gained in football are created equal -- that, for example, gaining 5 yards on third down and 4 is more beneficial, on average, than gaining eight yards on third and 10.

Since they've been winning, the Patriots have always been receptive to statistics and research methods, and they found out in this case that being conservative in short-yardage does pay off. If you run playaction on 3rd and 1 and the tight end drops the pass or the quarterback overthrows him, the result is no different than the coach calling for the back to slam into the middle of the line for no gain. However the perception in the first case is that the call was good, it was because QB or the TE screwed up. In the second case, the call was bad because it did not work, even if someone missed a block or the back misread the hole - the coach takes the blame for being conservative. The perception may be that being aggressive pays off, but if you take a look at the numbers then I don't believe this is necessarily so.

Yards/Play

Passing - 4.18 yards/play, rushing - 4.35 yards/play

Those numbers should already throw up a red flag...this is different than the official NCAA statistics because I counted sacks as passing plays and logged interceptions as negative passing plays as well. The passing average is low because of all the incomplete passes, picks, and sacks we have been taking. Throughout these 4 games that I charted (keeping in mind I may have made a few mistakes copying the data over), UCLA actually averaged more yards each time we called a run compared to each time we called a pass. For comparison, teams like Texas Tech and Houston average about 8 yards/pass (unadjusted for sacks/picks), and the teams at the top of the rushing rankings average about 5-6 yards a pop. Here is a chart that breaks down run and pass vs. gain.

UCLA is pretty close to balance, don't have a chart or the numbers off the top of my head but I believe they were slightly tilted towards rushing (maybe 55% to 45%?). I charted the SDSU game completely because I wanted to get a feel for what we would be doing this year, and I didn't really notice any major tendencies - pretty balanced and diverse performance that game. Anyway, you can see that the first two categories are negative or no yards, which is what has happened most of the time we've dropped back to pass. The "under 4" and "over 4" are the plays that went for 0-10 yards and the bulk of them were runs, and as you get to higher gains you see more passes. I don't have any breakdowns for other NCAA teams to compare against but it seems to me that the "risk" of passing is greater than the "reward" of the big plays at the other end, if you look at the big picture of these four games. It's not like the passing game has been able to consistently pull off gains of over 20 yards, the numbers are almost even between running and passing for those big plays.

Down and Distance

Here's a breakdown by down - pretty much what you'd expect, a little more running on first down, even on 2nd and 4th, and pass-happy for those 3rd downs.

Here is the same data separated by down and distance. What surprises me is how little UCLA has run the ball on 3rd and short - if anything, I think the gameplan needs to be more conservative on those, keeping in mind the New York Times article at the beginning and the fact that about half the time we drop back to pass we either get no yards or take a loss. Don't have any data on this, but from what I've seen we haven't been great picking up those 3rd and shorts with the pass.

Field Position

Finally, here's a chart on field position. As you'd expect, a lot of running at the goal line (those runs were probably all from today against Oregon) and when backed up. Otherwise, fairly balanced. Goal line is defined as inside the 5-yard line, there's only a handful of plays on file but I'll admit that we could mix in a pass or two, but I still believe that running the ball is the better option for us at this point.

Playcalling

As far as playcalling is concerned, I don't really believe in the idea that you need to call certain plays in certain situations to become "less predictable" - if there is a notion that the "correct" play call is playaction on 2nd and short and go deep, because it is less predictable, isn't that predictable? In my opinion playcalling is not as important as things like preparation, planning, adjusting, and actual coaching...If you boil it down, playcalling is basically just a giant game of rock-paper-scissors. This might get a little weird but I think it's the best analogy I have heard about playcalling (I didn't come up with this).

If you call rock and the defense calls scissors, you score a TD, if they call rock as well you maybe pick up a yard, if they call paper then you get sacked. All the scouting, preparation, statistical analysis can help you with the probabilities of whether they will come out with rock or scissors when its 3rd and 1 inside the red zone, but in the end its just educated guesswork.

Now, maybe you call scissors three times in a row, and are really tearing through their paper calls. Then you figure they will switch it up and call rock to defend your scissors, you can out think them and call paper. Or maybe they will just stick to paper - in that case you'd be screwed. I think some people out think playcalling - in this situation, or in rock-papers-scissors, you're almost better off just picking randomly - there's no real right answer. The correct offensive play is the one that works against the defense that is called. The only way to get a real advantage is to "cheat", which teams do with audibles, formation checks, coverage recognition, option football, etc - figuring out what the defense called and then adjusting to make them wrong. If you call paper and see that they threw scissors, you then switch to rock to take it out, or adjusting your blocking scheme to work against scissors.

Of course, football's a lot more complicated than that, there are situations where you know that they are going to come out and run spacing on you when it's 3rd and 4 because they've done that in every single tape you have on them and you see them out in trips bunch, and you can call your defense to stop that. This is when playcalling is important. But those situations are few and far in, so I think that for the rest of the game, there isn't really any "bad" playcalling - bad calls are just the ones that don't work. The job of the coach is to just have an idea of what to expect, based on situation, and the look they provide the defense, and to send in a play that they believe will work.

Calling paper on every 3rd and 5 isn't necessarily a bad thing - it may be predictable, but that also helps you predict what the other team will do and gives you a better idea than anything else of what to expect. You can throw paper in that situation a few times in the first quarter, figure out what their scissors call looks like, and then keep that in your back pocket until the 4th quarter when you call paper on 3rd and 5, but tag your curl route to a curl-and-go and beat their scissors call. You can't try to win the game on every play.

Teams like Georgia Tech and Texas Tech only run a handful of plays, but they rep the hell out of them, practice the adjustments, and use this predictability to beat other teams (this is where great coaching comes in - I think Paul Johnson and Mike Leach are two of the best coaches in the nation). GaTech figures out which guys are assigned to dive back, which guys have QB, which guys have pitch man, and mess with their blocking assignments give false reads so that the defense has two guys covering quarterback and no one on pitch man...the defense knows what's coming but can't stop it. On TV you see them run midline, option left, toss left, option right, counter option left for 3 yards a pop and it seems pretty conservative, just scraping by on the same few plays, until they bust open an option pitch for 65 yards and a score.

I don't think that it's so much Chow marching into a rock call with scissors in hand, knowing that he is going to get smashed...he understands defense and how to attack them, and he definitely understands the concept of "tags". The way the Oregon game went down leads me to believe that he did have this in his back pocket, as the offense started to rumble towards the end of the game when the QBs were given a chance...if not for that 21-point swing maybe things would have been different and we would have cruised to a win.