The Youth Manifesto – Party 3: Total Team Stats

By now, I’m SURE you’ve thoroughly read, thought about and analyzed Part 1: Offense and Part 2:  Defense of the Youth Manifesto.  So this post brings it all together.

Sorry DomerMQ, no cake (marzipan?) babies this time.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time commenting on the straight up numbers.  It’s not tough to figure out that ND is very young at this point (rated 3rd youngest in the FBS based on the 2-deep roster to start the season, I might add), and these numbers support that.  Great.  What I found a bit more interesting were the Offense-Defense matchups that the ‘08 schedule featured, and so I’ll dig into that a little post-numbers.

% Underclassmen Starters

Average Months in Program

Average Letters Earned

The Top 10 and ND’s Opponents, on average, feature underclassmen as starters 26% of the time (~6 out of 22 players are frosh/sophomores).  ND is at 45% (10 players).  Again, not at all surprising.  The match-ups of the very-young Irish O vs. opposing Defenses and the somewhat-young Irish D against opposing Offenses yielded some interesting results though.

Notre Dame Offense vs. Opponents Defense

Excluding SDSU (no stats), Notre Dame’s O faced one team with a defense as young as they are – UNC.  UNC’s D was extremely young this year, as was the ND O, and that’s the only time this was really close this year.  In every other game, the Irish offense was facing, on average, an older opponent.   In some cases, significantly older. 

Notre Dame’s Defense vs. Opponents’ Offense

ND’s D faced some opponents on both sides of the slate this year.  Three teams’ offenses pretty much mirrored the ND D in terms of age and experience this year – MSU, Pitt and Syracuse. Washington was also close – though older, they have fewer lettermen.  Michigan (sucks!)’s and UNC’s Offenses were the only units where ND comes out as relatively older on D.  The rest?  ND was younger.

So when we net things out, we’re looking at a schedule where almost every game featured an age/experience advantage for our opponent:

Against Michigan (sucks!) we had a pretty even match-up in terms of age/experience and against UNC we held an advantage, but otherwise we were fighting an uphill battle on both sides of the ball in many matchups, against older/more experienced players.

Once again, I believe this is a factor in how the year went.  Not an excuse, because we simply should’ve won more games.  But it’s a factor.

One last note – I did this on starters simply because it was faster and easier.   If you look at 2-Deeps, ND gets even younger.  ND’s offensive 2-deep is 64% underclassmen and averages only 1 Letter.  6 Irish backups had not earned a Letter coming into this year.  None.   So we get significantly younger among these players that do log a lot of minutes.   Compare this to USC’s Defensive 2-Deep, which is only 27% Underclassmen, and which averages 2 Letters per player, and that lack of offensive production isn’t so shocking (again, no excuses, just context). 

Okay, fine, CREEPY CAKE BABY!!!!

I have no idea why anyone would ever make this, and then ADVERTISE that they make it.  Ugh.