Bo Scarbrough -- was he really dominating

Jan 22, 2017, 11:19 AM

Scarbrough.JPG(56.4 K)

I live in Munich, Germany. I stayed up and watched the OSU game and was sick part of the next week. On a work night, and still getting back to 100%, I couldn't convince myself to get up at 2am to watch it all. So I got up at about 5:30am to watch the end of the game. And what a finish it was!!!

In any case. Scarbrough was out and I kept hearing the commentators explain how dominant he had been and how he was missed. In the days that followed, the highlights showed how he was peeling off huge runs. It fit the narrative -- 'big 'Bama back runs over opposing defenses'. The reactions following the game seemed to echo this as well.

But I didn't see what they were talking about. I thought we shut him down mostly. I felt like our defense did a pretty good job. Except for those 2 long runs -- of course. You can't ignore those, but I still don't think they were representative of how well we played them overall.

Below are data I took from the game. I captured this data from sirvizalot's amazing visual of every play from the game here: http://www.tigernet.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=20917666#20917666

In short -- his median (not average) rush for the game was 3yd. That's pretty good.
But if one takes away the two long runs, he only averaged 2.2 and 3 of his 16 runs (just under 20%) going for negative yards.

So yeah - we got burned on a couple. You have to give him credit. But we otherwise really controlled him very well and I think the defense deserves more credit than we were getting.

Case in point -- compare his 1st 8 runs to his last 8 runs. We adjusted and I don't think his staying in the game would have made a difference.

Rushes: 16
Total: 93
Avg: 5.81
Median: 3
1st 8 runs: 71
Last 8 runs: 22
Avg. without 2 TD runs: 2.21