Maze Runners Vol. 2

I hope you are enjoying your time off the roller coaster ride called the Wilkinson world. We are about to get back into it though, so I hope you have been well rested. We have another Maze run to get you warmed up for the season. Today we are just going to look at a few things about those important fellas who stand either besides or behind your QB. This should be a short article because I know you guys want to get your recruiting boards ready as recruiting officially kicks off tomorrow.

Remember a while back when I talked about how teams and conferences were similar with regards to their production. We have some graphs that kind of show that. What I did was just add up all the rushing yards, add up all the rushing touchdowns and also all the rushing attempts by conference. Below is our first graph we are going to look at.

The graph above shows the rushing yards vs rushing attempts and how the conferences are distributed. From just doing an eye test we see that there are 3 distinct groups. We can do some math and really show there 3 groups, but that is ongoing work right now. Now let us talk about this graph, you have power conferences being similar to mid major conferences. Look at the group that has the most yards with the most attempts, you have the PAC 10 and the ACC being around the Sun Belt, WAC and MAC, from that it looks like the mid major conferences run the ball more on average than the power conferences. In the low attempts, low yards you have 2 power conferences and a mid major conference. BIG 12 step your run game up guys, come on. The PAC 10 is doing a better job than you guys on the ground. Another thing that this graph shows us is that the more rush attempts you have the higher the likelihood you are going to get a lot of yards too. So guys if you are trying to run and it is not working just keep at it. So now we know what the yards vs attempts graph looks like, how about rush touchdowns vs rush attempts. We are going to look at that next.

Now this is an interesting graph. The conferences seem well spread out. There are some that are close together but for the most part everyone has elbow room. Even with all that elbow room there are conference couples out there, Conference USA and the Big East, looking all cute out here. You have the Sun Belt and the WAC just looking like a pair of electrons in the helium atom. We have a 2 power couples, we have the BIG 12 with the SEC and we also have the ACC and the PAC 10. It is like two big power couples out here, who will outshine the other, well it looks like the ACC, PAC 10 couple is shining like a diamond. The diamond couple can really score on the ground and they do not have to do it in so many attempts as the WAC and Sun Belt. From the looks of things you do not need a lot of attempts to score on the ground but you need the attempts for the yards. Now we have to figure out what it is that is key to scoring on the ground with out so many attempts. The BIG TEN and MAC have about the same TDs but the BIG TEN have way less attempts, though I think the SEC have figured it out. A lot of TDs on the ground with little attempts, that is impressive.

So I guess from here the next natural question is how about them yards and TDs, how do they look?

We again have some coupling taking place. The ACC and PAC 10 have a thing for each other, I wonder if it is for real or just a cuffing season thing. It is about to warm up so someone might be getting dropped. The Big East and Conference USA are back together again, they like hanging out in that little corner. They have carved out a little area for themselves, everybody stay out. Now looking at this graph the top rushing touchdown scoring conferences are also the top rushing yards conferences, which kind of makes sense. If you are able to move the ball, you should be able to move it into the end zone, right? The SEC has figured out a trick for this run game, they do not attempt to run a lot but they are still productive when they do so, look at the touchdowns. They are very efficient it seems, guys you need to share the secrets to that efficiency. The guys in the Sun Belt try really hard to run the ball but that is not how they get the ball into the endzone, I do not think looking at this graph. I might be wrong. I wonder how the graphs will look like at the end of the next season.

As promised this is going to be short. All this was done with all the rushing numbers for the top 25 rushing guys from each conference, so we have 250 total records to look at, I think that is enough for us to say we have a good picture on how the run game was last season. Well I feel it is good enough. I will try more stuff and share it with you guys as it gets done. Now in the in between time, I think we need to rest our legs, that was a good little run around the Maze.