Our Guys Should Lead for These Right Now

As widely published, Golden Tate has made the short list for the Best WR Biletnikoff Award and Jimmy the short list for Best QB O'Brien Award.

Both guys should lead for these awards right now. Let's take a look at the lists, and stats, along with SOS (general reading of each candidates' competition) and team performance thus far to get a read on where everyone stands.

O'Brien List

Jimmy should have a huge lead at this point in the season for Best QB. Course, using logic isn't typically the way these things work, but it's what should be going on when you look at team performance vs. relative SOS and QB stats. To do this across teams, I created a combined score based on ranking within the 15 candidates for the O'Brien award. This score equally weights record rank and SOS rank (vs other players' teams' SOS). I also included QB Rating, Yards, YPC and TD/Int ratio - I ranked all the QB candidates on all of these, and then averaged the rankings. Jimmy comes out #1, and it's not really that close.

As you can see, among the 15 Finalists for the award, Jimmy comes out as #1, 2 or 3 on all the individual stats on the board. Because team somehow seems to matter in individaul awards now-a-days, I included a team metric here as a factor, and this drags Jimmy down a lot. ND's 5-2 record hurts us, giving Jimmy a rank of 9 out of 15. #2 on QB Rating, #3 on Yards, #1 on TD/INT ratio (and that ratio is 8 to 1 - #2 rank on this metric is Case Keenum at 5 to 1), and #3 on YPA. Clausen dominates this group in stats. He should be favorite for the award just based on this. But take into account that he's played against the 5th toughest SOS among the candidates, and without his #1 WR Floyd, and they should just give it to him now.

Biletnikoff List

Golden Tate leads for the Best WR award as well.

I used the same methodology here, but looked at Yards, YPC and TDs as the individual stats.

Golden is churning out crazy stats too, against the 17th most difficult Sked in the country according to Sagarin. Tate is 2nd on the list in Yards, 4th in YPC, and 2nd in TDs. When you average across these and his team stats (which again bring him down), he averages a ranking of 3.3, a full place ahead of the #2 candidate Vincent Brown of SDSU. And if a guy with the name Golden, with crazy stats, at ND in a prolific offense can't win this award over an SDSU player, it ain't never gonna happen. Golden should take this down if he keeps up this pace.

Conclusion

Our players rule.

Caveat: I know this isn't perfect. I should've looked up Pass D rankings rather than SOS, etc etc. But I just wanted to take a look and see if there's a legit argument that Clausen and Tate should be leading candidates for the awards at this point in the year, without taking 9 years to find the perfect metrics buried somewhere on the internets where I can't find them quickly. So, sure, this is directional. But these directions point to our ND boys taking home some hardware post-season, assuming consistent performance in the 2nd half of the year.

There is.

Go Irish.