Upset Maze

It has been a while but this result just gave me a reason to write a little something after looking at the game itself. The game came early in the playoff run too. I would have bet the mortgage on the result going the other way. I think many including the coaches involved will analyze this game like the German Football Federation will look into how they got knocked out of the World Cup at the group stage at the bottom of the group. The difference between the Germans and the coach who lost today is he will dig deep to figure out what happened and will make sure it never happens again.

I think by now you have figured out I am talking about the Grambling State vs Arkansas-Pine Bluff. I think most would have put money on the Arkansas-Pine Bluff winning this game. Now I am not taking anything away from panthsho but he has not won much in his reign at Grambling State and he was facing nitros. I mean, nitros. He is a stud muffin of a coach. He went to the NC game last season and like I said before the safe money would have been for him to return. I looked at what the engine did in the first half and second half and will talk a bit about it.

So as we can see from the chart above nitros ran the ball on first down almost 65% of the time, well the engine made him run it almost that much. That kind of makes sense, get as many yards as you can and try to open the playbook a bit more on second down. Now looking at second down the engine threw the ball 75% of the time which was the most throwing done by his team through the engine. The engine made his team pass the ball two thirds of the time on third down. I wonder if the engine really followed the plan that he had in mind. The engine has been doing tricky things these last few weeks/months. Maybe this is exactly what he had in his gameplan, this might answer all the questions we have about how the engine interprets the gameplans we set.

When nitros passed the ball in the first half his players were cover 5 of the 14 pass attempts and they only managed to make 4 catches. Now this includes the times they were covered and times they were not.

The chart above shows us the results of the pass attempts. We have as many catches as we have batted down balls. There was 8% dropped passes, which is not too bad I do not think. Almost a quarter of the passes were knocked down by the defender. The I Formation was going up against the 4:3 formation and the offense had a higher formation IQ than the defense. The pass game yielded 82 yards, there was an 8 yard sack. The wide outs caught 75% of the completed passes from the QB and the back caught the remainder.

Every run attempt yielded positive yardage for the offense with an average of 7.8 yards per rush attempt. This was a pretty impressive average of yardage per attempt. All the run attempts were inside runs, I have seen people mostly run outside so maybe I need to rethink things on offense.

I will stop here in case nitros does not want me to go any further digging into his game and team. If he does not object then I will continue my work and also look at the second half and what the other team did. Until the next time, take it easy.