Iowa State Game Report

Due to the incredibly horrible production quality of Fox College Sports (no HD feed) and the Big XII TV package (unable to get every conference game on TV)...charting the Iowa State debacle was a lost cause.

I got through 1.5 quarters and had already missing data on 8 plays because the game never showed the formation before the snap. At that point I cut my losses and am looking forward to having something for the Baylor next week.

As far as officiating goes, despite many Tech fans having much disdain for Randy Cristal, nothing stuck out to a badly missed/incorrect call at first watching. Granted my RC/CR consumption might've impacted my attentiveness...but we won't try and break that down in this post!

See ya next week...

Charting on Texas...

I know this won’t be earth shattering news to anybody reading this blog but there is simply no good way to spin Texas Tech’s offensive performance vs Texas.

Consider these stats:

- 5 of 14 (35.7%) on passes thrown beyond 5 yards downfield.

- 2.8 yards/play gained.

- Only 2 of 16 run plays ever got outside the tackle box..

- Only 4 balls were thrown beyond 15 yards. The only one caught was for a 15 yard touchdown by Lyle Leong Jr .

Conclusions I reached about the Tech offense from charting the game:

- Potts strongly favors the right side of the field. 20 of 38 passes were thrown to his right and 30 of 38 were thrown over the middle or to his right.

- He was 6 of 8 for 30 yards on throws to his left. However 4 of those completions were on WR screen passes thrown under 5 yards downfield.

After looking at the breakdown of play calls, I must say that Greg Davis did an excellent job managing Garrett Gilbert in this game.

I say that because:

- Gilbert was very balanced between throws to his left (14) and his right (18).

- Gilbert threw 17 of 38 balls (44.7%) more than 5 yards downfield.

- Running plays were also very well balanced with 16 going to the left and 18 to the right. I wonder if this was done in part to keep Bront Bird even more confused at his MLB position.

Despite this great balance, there was a glaring weakness in Gilbert’s performance on Saturday.

He was an atrocious 4 of 18 (22%) on passes thrown to his right. At 41 yards of passing, that works out to an abysmal 2.27 yards/attempt. Gilbert was at 7.64 yards/attempt to the right and 13 yards/attempt over the middle. However, Davis kept letting him throw to his right side as 18 of his 38 passes went that direction.

To contrast, Taylor Potts was between 3.5 and 4.1 yards/attempt to the various parts of the field.

Texas Game Charting Spreadsheet

***note*** The game charting is on 2 separate pages of the same spreadsheet.

Bringing a blog back from the dead...

I started this blog a few years ago because I needed an outlet for all of the thoughts going through my head about Texas Tech football. Life went in a different direction and I found myself unable to write in the way that I wanted to so I stopped writing altogether.

I'm certainly not going to do anything nearly as ambitious as I did in the past. Instead, I'm going to focus on reviewing each game from a purely statistical perspective.

I'm pulling out the names and numbers of the players and simply looking at formations, types of plays, and the yards that they do or don't produce. If you're familiar with the work of Bob Sturm then you've seen him do this for the Cowboys/Jason Garrett in recent seasons.

I will also use my moderate knowledge of the rules of the game to look at each penalty called and give it a thumbs up/thumbs down. I'll try to explain what made a call good/bad and also point out if I see something that could've been officiated in a different way. I don't consider myself an expert in officiating the game. However, it is something that I have a developing love for and hope I can apply my experiences in as unbiased of a way as is possible for a fan that has a built-in bias towards Texas Tech.

To give you a small sampling of data...here is what I have on Tech by formation from Saturday: (for the record, my charting has 1 more play for 7 yards than what the box score shows. I'm assuming this has to do with how they counted a play with a penalty applied to it that I overlooked).

Formation	Count	Yards Gained	Yds/Play
S0	3	10	3.3
S1	40	157	3.9
S11	3	3	1.0
Total	55	151	2.7

The formations are:

S0 - 0 RB, 0 TE, 5 WR
S1 - 1 RB, 0 TE, 4 WR
S11 - 1 RB, 1 TE, 3 WR
S2 - 2 RB, 0 TE, 3 WR

**The S2 formation includes the 21 yards lost when the ball was snapped over Potts on the first play from scrimmage for Tech.

In the 9 plays run from the S2 formation you had the following occur:

- Snap over Potts head
- Intentional grounding on Potts
- Sticks sacked for a loss of 10
- Potts' INT over the middle in the 3rd quarter
- Detron on a WR sweep
- Motion used on 4 of 9 plays from this formation

Hopefully I'll get a little better with my html skills and learn how to align tables better as I progress in this endeavor.

I hope you enjoy that sample and I'll be back with my final breakdown of the game in the next day or two as time allows!