Total points scored against UW

[UTE98]

Anybody want to venture a guess as to which team scored the most points against UW this year?

Yeah sure it took a pick 6 but yes once again Utah put up the most points against a team this year.

3rd most points against UM.

4th most points against USU.

4th most points against Fresno. 73 against Miss St. Holy crap that’s bad.

Most points scored against Oregon. 62, that was a great offensive night.

4th most points against Cal. They gave up 44 in a win against Texas. Then two games after their loss to us gave up 44 and 40. They tied for the most points given up with a win and a loss, odd.

5th most points against ASU. 61, 42, 38, 38 and 34 to us. We gave up 42 to USC, our next highest is 24 to both Fresno St. and Cal, then 23 to Washington.

4th most against USC. They gave up 30 points in a win against Arizona, but gave up 41 to ND and Stanford in losses.

6th most against OSU. They’ve given up 50, 40 three times and 35, we scored 27.

Most points scored against Washington, beating what Stanford, Cal, Oregon and USC put up on them.

So Oregon and Washington gave up the most points to us. We scored the 3rd most against Michigan; 4th most against USC, Cal, Fresno, USU; 5th most against ASU; 6th most against OSU. Seems like we play up to our opponents except for USC. But I’m not complaining.

[Anonymous]

Utah’s offense sucks you just need to shut your yapper. 😉

[GadValleyUte]

I agree it’s exciting to put up the most points a team has seen all year, and to do it twice so far, but I’m not sure those numbers are actually saying Utah has a great offense.

Running down the list

Michigan – our rank (3) – their total losses  (2)

USU – us (4) – total losses (4)

FSU – us (4) – total losses (7)

OU – us (1) – total losses (3)

Cal – us (4) – total losses (4)

ASU – us (5) – total losses (5)

OSU – us (6) – total losses (7)

Washington – us (1) total losses (5)

Those numbers tell me our offense is generally not as potent as other teams that beat teams we have beaten. If 4 teams have beaten Cal and we’ve scored the 4th most points against them then 3 teams have scored more than us, and 2 of them also won the game. 4 teams have beaten USU and 3 teams have scored more than we did. Or in Michigan’s case there’s a team that scored more points than we did against them, but that Michigan still beat.

Also against the 2 teams that we scored the most points on Oregon and Washington – we had substantial scoring contributions from Defense and special teams. 14 of our points Saturday were very directly attributable to defense.

Those numbers tell me we have a great defense that keeps teams scoring low and our offense is just good enough to beat them. That’s fine that’s all that really matters.

Our offense is obviously ok, and many fans, myself included, are probably harder on it than we should be, and I’ll take winning in the final drive the way we do it over the way TCU has been doing it any day of the week. I just don’t think the massive score against Oregon, and Saturday’s score indicate we have some great under-rated offense.

We have a human cannonball at RB, an O-line that can play great when they want/need to, a badass freshman slot receiver, and a QB that is a gamer but not especially good at going through his progressions or making very accurate long throws. Its OK. It’s who we are and who we’ve been the last 2 years. I honestly hope over the next few years we add a slightly more potent passing game to what we’ve got. 200-250 yards passing in P12 play would make this team really really difficult to beat.

[GadValleyUte]

Just did a bit more digging to see if my belief that our defense seems to contribute more to us outscoring and winning than our offense. I don’t think that’s controversial to say, but in case there is any doubt this is what I found.

Our avg. margin of victory is 12 points.

When you look at how many points most teams we play score (avg points for) and compare that with how many points they score against us I think you get a feel for how much better our defense is than the average defense they face and how much our defense contributes to the victory. On average opponents score 8.4 fewer points against our defense than they do on average. Basically our D prevents at least 1 TD per game that our opponents would be expected to score.

To look at offense I compared the avg. points against our opponents against how many points we scored. I think this is a reasonable measure of how much better our offense did compared to their other opponents. We score 4.8 points more than would be expected.

Not surprisingly when you add these together you get 13 which is basically our average margin of victory (12).

It seems to me that our offense is helping more than hurting. This is actually a pleasant surprise to me. However our D contributes twice as much of our margin of victory. At least 2/3 of the fact that we win is that our D is just 1 TD better than our opponent’s offense.

If you account for how many points our defense has scored directly (21) this year, then the offense is actually only scoring 2.4 (less than a field goal) more points than our opponent’s average.

If you then account for special teams direct contribution to either scoring for us or giving up points, and how many points another team’s defense has scored on our offense the numbers get even more unbalanced.

For Defense contribution to margin of victory – If you take out the pick 6 by SC, and the KO return and  safety for ASU (both not in any way the Defense’s fault) then the defensive contribution to margin of victory goes up to  10.1 points Our defense basically prevents 1 TD and FG per game. They spot our offense 10 freaking points. That is amazing.

For offense – The special teams  have scored 21 points directly on punt and kick returns. This actually drops our offense’s contribution to margin of victory to 0.1 points per game. Basically our offense doesn’t score more points than other teams against our opponents. They are average. This is still a pleasant surprise. Our offense isn’t below average against pretty good competition who also play good competition. They may not be scoring a bunch, but they are NOT hurting us either. I guess I should stop complaining.

 

[Anonymous]

Well throughout the Travis Wilson era there have been those begging for the coach staff to open up the offense. Throw the ball all ever the place, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Fact is, this coach staff knows what they’ve got in Travis Wilson and Booker and they know how to win with that. There is a method to their madness. They know the run game is a safer way to win the game. They just need TW to manage the game and not turn the ball over. They’ll let him make occasional passes downfield, if it’s there. They are simply playing into age old probabilities. Defense and run game wins games and championships. Yes, it’s not sexy. But winning drives composed entirely of runs just exude domination.

[GadValleyUte]

I agree. 2013 Travis was slinging the ball and think that lost us at least 2 games before he went down. He hasn’t shown progress in improving his throwing so we are who we are. He looks more than serviceable against bad defenses so we think he’s “turned a corner” but that’s not true. He will continue to struggle so we might as well double down on what got us here.
The question that I think we all have are TWs struggles just him, are they due to instability at OC, can we not develop a QB, or is it the “Kyle keeps the O down” theory that makes us stay this way?
I honestly don’t know. Perhaps we will find out over the next 2 years. If we keep the same OCs for 3 years and the same “system” for 4 then maybe we eliminate the “stability” question and look at coaching very closely.

[Tony (admin)]

I don’t think TW’s struggles are any one thing. There are many contributing factors, including injury or fear of injury.

I do think that the upper end QB’s have instincts which can’t be taught, like stepping up at just the right time, sensing a blindside blitz, looking off the defense to make them move then dumping it elsewhere… Those seem to be things TW doesn’t do, except perhaps in the ASU game. He did those things often. I just can’t figure out why THAT game he did, and others he doesn’t.