Welcome back to another week of advanced stats! We had so much fun last time that we're going to do it again. There's some movement in the stats from last week based on Baylor and TCU trucking Oklahoma and Kansas State, respectively. There are some minor tweaks to the layout of the stats from an order of presentation perspective, and that's just for my convenience. The stats themselves haven't been altered.
Here are the charts. As always, all numbers are courtesy of the metrics at FootballOutsiders.com. Check out last week's post for a full look at the stats, but I'll include movement in the F/+ below each table.
Big 12 Conference by F/+
Big 12 Standings According to Overall F/+
The rankings below are according to Overall F/+. The two numbers in parentheses represent their movement: the first with respect to fellow Big 12 members, the second in the overall F/+ rankings.
1. TCU Horned Frogs (+2, +3)
2. Baylor Bears (+2, +10)
3. Oklahoma Sooners (-2, -5)
4. Kansas State Wildcats (-1, -11)
5. West Virginia Mountaineers (0, 0)
6. Texas Longhorns (0, +9)
7. Oklahoma State Cowboys (0, -3)
8. Texas Tech Red Raiders (+1, -1)
9. Iowa St. Cyclones (-1, -9)
10. Kansas Jayhawks (0, +8)
The clear loser in this week's update is Kansas State, owing to the shellacking they took at the hands of TCU. The Wildcats dropped 11 spots in F/+ this week, all the way out of the Top 25. Meanwhile, Oklahoma only dropped five spots and landed just outside of the Top 10 in F/+ rankings. An interesting juxtaposition to the College Football Playoff rankings, if a meaningless one. The advanced stats continue to love Oklahoma, if less so this week than last.
TCU takes the top spot in the conference at 7 overall. But the Bears are the big winner this week, having jumped up 10 spots in F/+ to 8 overall, one behind TCU. The win over Oklahoma put them back in the Top 10 in the advanced stats after hovering in the low teens.
Big 12 Offenses
1. OU (0, -1)
2. Baylor (+1, +6)
3. TCU (+1, +13)
4. K-State (-2, -8)
5. WVU (+2, +9)
6. TT (0, -6)
7. ISU (-2, -25)
8. OkSt (0, 0)
9. UT (0, +19)
10. KU (0, +4)
At this point, the only explanation for Oklahoma still being at the top is that the Sooners are actually a cat. Despite not scoring any points in the final three quarters of Saturday's game, Oklahoma's offense still ranks in the Top 10 of F/+, only moving down one spot. Baylor and TCU both move up, while K-State and Iowa State both drop two places in the overall rankings this week.
The two stat components that have most interested me the past two weeks of doing these posts have been Explosive (Ex) and Methodical (Me) Drive components of FEI. The Explosive Drive metric is the percentage of a team's drives that average at least ten yards per play. Methodical drives calculates the percentage of an offense's drives where that offense runs ten or more plays. TCU ranks highly in explosive drives, while they're near the bottom of FBS in terms of methodical drives. Gary Patterson likes to score big, y'all. Iowa State, on the other hand, may never have any explosive drives, ever, but they're content to plod along the ground, extremely slowly. Then they likely peter out right outside of field goal range. At any rate, they're #3 in all of FBS in methodical drives. It's the Mangino effect, y'all.
Meanwhile, Baylor's is the only offense that is highly ranked in both categories. They'll kill you by a gunshot to the head, or they'll kill you by a thousand paper cuts. It's your choice.
Big 12 Defenses
1. TCU (0, +1)
2. Baylor (+1, +11)
3. UT (+3, +9)
4. WVU (+1, +12)
5. K-State (-3, -17)
6. OU (-2, -13)
7. KU (0, +3)
8. OkSt (0, -10)
9. ISU (0, -13)
10. TT (0, -2)
This week both K-State and Oklahoma took major tumbles both in these standings and in the F/+ rankings. Their loss is Texas and West Virginia's gain, though, as two teams that squared off against each other both make nice jumps in the rankings this week. K-State's tumble may be the most alarming, as they still face two high-powered offense in West Virginia this weekend and Baylor in the last game of the regular season.
Iowa State took a major tumble in F/+ owing to the fact that it got destroyed by an abysmal Kansas offense. As good as the Iowa State offense is at methodical drives, its defense is equally horrific at the metric: when you play Iowa State, be prepared for like 4 total drives in the entire game, each one lasting an entire quarter. One and a half yards and a cloud of dust! Anyway, ISU also has the dishonor of being the worst defense in terms of success rate, meaning that the 'Clones give up more successful plays than any other defense in the nation. Iowa State would have taken over the cellar from Texas Tech, but the Red Raiders' defense is bad on an historic level and dropped another two spots, possibly to save the Cyclones the ignominy of being the worst defense in the Country. It's a race to the bottom of the ugly tree; it's just a question whether Tech or ISU will hit more branches on the way down.
It's Time for a Poll Question
As I've been taking a deeper look into these stats once again, it's occurred to me that there are plenty of new people who have joined the boards and may not be as familiar with the metrics that we're examining on a weekly basis. It's also possible that you may be a little bit rusty on what all of the acronyms mean, and why they are significant. Would it be helpful to have a sort-of reintroduction to the Football Outsiders advanced stats post, that briefly discusses each different metric? Vote in the poll and let me know in the comments.