For the Hawkeyes to live up to expectations they must be much more efficient this season. There are a ton of ways for football teams to score points, and good Iowa teams score in all three phases, but the bulk must come from an effective and efficient offense. This post is going to concentrate on setting statistical benchmarks for this offense to achieve by looking back at the most successful Iowa offenses. Iowa is never going to land in the Top 10 rankings for scoring offense or total yardage but they don't need to. But for them to score around 28 to 30 points per game there are certain benchmarks that this team is capable of achieving. And 28 points a game coupled with this defense should be enough to scare any opponent.
The stats that I am going to focus on are going to be turnover margin, red zone attempts and TD percentage within that stat, Stanzi's completion percentage, and finally third down percentage. Turnover margin should be pretty self-explanatory, you hold on to the ball better than your opponent. It is possibly the only stat that I have ever heard Ferentz mention. Red zone attempts stress how well a team moves the ball over the course of a season, although some Iowa teams have scored well without a great attempts per game number. This season's team could be explosive enough to be that kind of offense. Stanzi's completion percentage for me is half about his decision making and half about the Hawkeye's improving their running game. If Iowa is a more balanced team than Stanzi should be a much more effective passer. And finally third down percentage is about keeping drives alive and giving a bunch of talented skill players a chance to make plays. Iowa was very effective on Saturday and it would be great if they could continue that throughout the season.
I will be begin with turnover margin. This doesn't seem to have a direct correlation with Iowa's highest scoring offenses although that doesn't seem to make sense. I am sure if Iowa cuts down their turnovers this season that they will score more points, however one of the Hawk's most successful offensive teams in the Ferentz actually had a negative turnover margin. However that team also had one of the fewest amount of total turnovers in the era, also. One problem with this stat is that it doesn't solely rely on the offense. I would say it is a safe bet to rely on the 2010 defense to force in the neighborhood of 30 takeaways. If Stanzi and company can just reduce their 2009 total of 28giveaways by 2/3rds I am sure that would lead directly to more Hawkeye points. If Stanzi were to reduce his pick 6s by 3 that would reduce the opponents total points by 21 (4 pick 6s last season). Here is a little chart showing the turnover margin of last season's team, the 2008, 2005, and 2003 along with their points per game.
Team PPG I Int. I Fbl. I Tot. Op Int. Op Fbl. Op Tot. I. +/-
2009 23.2 20 8 28 21 9 30 2
2008 30.3 11 13 24 23 9 32 8
2005 30.0 8 9 17 10 6 16 -1
2003 28.7 10 11 21 13 12 25 4
Iowa's best offenses have been very efficient in the red zone scoring no less than 84.2%(2008) of the time they entered the opponents 20. They also managed to make their way quite often. 2005's team had the lowest attempts per game at 3.67 but that team also managed to score a lot of explosive type of TDs (16 TDs of 21 or more yards offensively) . The best offenses also converted TDs when they got there- 2008's 56% was the worst. Last season's Iowa team struggled in almost all of these categories. Here is a chart on red zone scoring involving the same teams.
Team Rz Att. Rz TD Rush TD Pass TD FG FG Miss Downs Int. Fbl. Half Game
2009 38 20 11 9 12 2 3 0 0 1 0
2008 57 32 25 7 16 4 3 1 1 0 0
2005 44 27 12 15 15 1 1 0 1 0 0
2003 55 32 17 15 16 1 0 1 1 4 0
The 2003 team scored as many TDs as the 2009 team scored in the red zone in one fewer game. The 2010 team has too much skill talent to repeat's 2009 red zone numbers.
Stanzi's completion percentage is probably the most debatable benchmark of the four I am laying out. Iowa's quarterbacks have not had to be high percentage passers to be effective during the Ferentz/ O'Keefe regime. Last season Ricky completed 56% of his passes but he had a very good average of 14.13 yards per completion. If he is able to bump his completion percentage into the low 60s, the trade-off of a lowered yard per completion would be well worth it. This lends itself into the decision making area and his progress in making better and faster reads within the offense. Forcing the ball down-field less and checking down more often will lead to more running room for Hampton and Robinson, and more manageable third downs the final benchmark.
The last stat up for debate here is third down percentage. Looking at the trends of college football the last few seasons one thing that is pretty obvious is that effective third down teams score points. The top scoring teams from last season also happen to litter the top ten ranking of third down conversion percentage. You can see the index(their Iowa stats didn't mesh with the Iowa Official Site, I am going with the Universities numbers for almost all of my info in this post) here. The outliers were Wisconsin, Penn State, and Washington. Wisconsin still finished in the top 21 percent of college scoring offenses with a healthy 31.3 points per game. Penn State averaged 28.7 ppg and Washington (26.7 ppg) fell out of the top half of scoring offenses still outperformed Iowa by 3.4 points per game and ranked ahead of Iowa by 22 ranking spots in that category. On the surface this stat may seem kind of silly- if the Hawks converted their third downs at a clip of 42% with the same number of attempts as last season it would only mean 9 more conversions on the season. Another way to look at it is Iowa averaged 5 out of 14 attempts per game. Converting at a clip of 42% would only net them a bump of 6 out of 14 attempts per game. But that is a potential big play on 27 more downs. It is time that your defense is off the field. It is changing field position. It is wearing out the opposing defense. Iowa's best offense of the years that I have discussed was the 2005 which operated at a 41.25% clip. The '08 team had a 40.88% third down rate. Last season's squad converted on 38.1% and they need to convert at least 40% to sniff the 30 points per game mark.
If Iowa's offense were to meet all of these stats that doesn't guarantee success but coupled with the defense that we all saw on Saturday this would surely lead to a pretty difficult team to defeat. An efficient offense with the play-makers on the outside and in the backfield that have the potential to score from anywhere on the field would certainly make for long nights for opposing defensive coordinators.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment