Big East Maze

Yep you read that right. I figured why don't we look at the entire conference. Yes entire conference. They are loaded with human coaches, but not just regular human coaches but legends of the game. Well some of them are legends, (shots fired). I wanted to to look at what they have done in terms of how they have played thus far, throwing or running, who have they thrown to, and anything else that comes to mind as I work through the data.

First thing is to just look at how often do they throw and how often do they run the ball as a conference. The conference has ebel and we all know his feelings towards running the ball.

Looking at the graph above we can see that the Big East coaches like to throw the ball. This should come as no surprise to anyone. The current engine seems to favor throwing and the most coaches have figured it out and have started throwing more. After looking at this more questions arose. What is the breakdown by Down? Well let us take a look.

Looking at those numbers I am surprised that there are coaches who chance it on fourth down and run the ball. Then again that is unexpected and might work. It seems like the coaches like throwing the ball across all the downs. I would have thought the coaches would try to run a bit more on first down to see if they can break a big run and move the ball a bit. But what do I know? I think these results for the most part just confirm what we already know, though there are a few things that always catch me off a bit.

So we have a breakdown by down and how about by player by down. We can see that above the breakdown by player by down. It seems as if the RB1 and WR1 are the go to guys across all the downs, which should not be a surprise. Most people have them as their best players in the depth charts and thus they are targeted more and they make more offensive players for the team. The QBs seems to also make some plays which I think is more of being under pressure which forces them out of the box. We can see there is an RB3 in there which tells me someone is running or ran the Wishbone formation. I think that is something worth to keep an eye out for. With the popularity of Pro Set and I Formation in the game amongst the coaches I guess it should not be a surprise to anyone that the RB1 and WR1 are the top offensive play-makers in the game.

How about a break down by the passing distance. The coaches love going for those medium and short passes. On fourth down they go short more than medium which rules all the other downs. There are some distance symbols I have never seen in the graph but I decided to leave them in there. We have the "C" distance which I have no clue what it is, please do let me know what it is. The blanks I am going to assume were incomplete passes. Not a lot of plays going deep but I think this might change with more games for South Florida under ebel. I think he enjoys going deep. Very short routes are not very popular either, which I guess makes sense but I think if you have studs you can use them as your screen plays and break something off. Now this has all been pass plays, how about showing the run some love.

Do the coaches like running inside or outside?

Coaches like running outside but there are more inside runs than I expected. With the speed most RBs have these days it does not surprise me that coaches prefer to run outside. Now does the run direction change by down?

When coaches run the ball they do so more on first down which is expected but that fourth down running surprises me a bit. It is close to being 50/50 also on fourth down. Running outside is the way to go for the Big East across all the downs.

Now I think that might be enough for now, I am sure the coaches do not want me to keep going exposing what they have done thus far. Though I think any decent coach will do more than what I have done here when they gameplan. This was just meant to give people a taste of what coaches in a full conference do to win games. I am sure some of you will have more questions than what I have answered here and please do not hesitate to send those my way. Until the next time, take it easy.