As the Irish find themselves 3-0 for the first time in a decade, the title of this post is definitely the question on the mind of any Notre Dame football fan. After all, we’ve been conditioned for disappointment after all these years. With this question in mind, I wanted to examine the past performances and compare them to this year.
For this exercise, I focused on something that came up in one of Brian Kelly’s pressers last season. In it, he mentioned that gaining loads of yards was worthless if you didn’t have any points to show for it, citing the goal should be a TD every 80 or so yards gained. Using this metric, I took a look at the first three games from the last time we started 3-0 (2002), our last two BCS seasons (2005 and 2006), and last season in comparison to the start we’ve seen thus far in 2012.
Using Kelly’s baseline of wanting a TD every 80 yards, I took each game from the aforementioned years, and applied a simple formula:
[Points Scored on Offense] / [Number of Yards Gained] = Offensive Efficiency
And to clarify, “points scored on offense” includes only TDs scored by the offense (no kick/punt returns or defensive TDs) and FGs (as it is the end result of an offensive drive). So if we use Kelly’s baseline, for every 80 yards, we should see 7 points, leading to an offensive efficiency of 0.0875. Now that mark would be the “perfect game” of sorts, so if we were looking for a “par” score in this area, that would be a FG every 80 yards or a 0.0375 efficiency.
So within the range of 0.0375 – 0.0875, you have an offense that is actually functioning as expected. Fall below that range, and there are serious issues. Going above that means some very beneficial field position via turnovers and/or special teams play.
With that in mind, here’s how the Irish stacked up (click on table headings to sort):
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Surprisingly the efficiency in 2012 is comparable to what we saw in Weis’ first year in 2005. As we all know how that year (and that coaching era) ended, such dramatic improvement from 2011 and the smoke-and-mirrors year that was 2002 doesn’t exactly inspire much hope.
However, there are always two sides to every coin. Here are how the Irish opponents fared in those same years (click headings to sort):
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And now we see the difference.
The defense has seen remarkable improvement over previous years with only 2002 eclipsing it (which should be no surprise considering how many turnovers that defense forced). In fact, 2012 has seen the Irish push their opponents to the lower range of the offensive efficiency as opponents are just 0.002 away from being in the “your offense is seriously terrible” region.
Putting it all together, here are the differentials in offensive efficiency (click table headers to sort):
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This year does appear to be different and it isn’t even close.
Perhaps most striking is the largest differential for this year came not against lowly Navy, but our only ranked opponent thus far: Michigan State. Even our struggles against Purdue this season put the Irish on top in efficiency differential, which is a far cry from losing that battle and yet somehow magically winning as we did against Purdue in 2002 (21 points of turnovers helped) and Georgia Tech in 2006.
However, there are still hurdles to clear, starting this week with Michigan (as I write this post, and as you read this, they still suck). A great start is just that, a start. It can all be undone with just one bad game; however, should the Irish keep this current pace, we could be in for quite a special season.
- Epilogue - January 3, 2022
- HLS Podcast Finale - January 2, 2022
- The Final Fiesta: Notre Dame vs Oklahoma State NCAA ’14 Sim - December 31, 2021