Over-reliance on Analytics?

Dec 1, 2024, 12:53 PM

The offense looks like a shell of its former self. Have we become too reliant on analytics? Dabo has talked about when we rush for 200 yards and throw for 200 yards, we’re 58-0. We did that last year against Duke and lost. We’ve heard that if we win the turnover margin, we win. We won it yesterday but lost the game. We defied that stat so many times in 2016. Deshaun had a lot of turnovers (17 INTs), but we had resilient players that kept their foot on the gas. We’d get the ball back and go 3 plays 80 yards for a TD and didn’t let a turnover ruin the whole game. Deshaun had 50 TDs that year btw (passing & rushing).

Our offense looks like it talks about metrics that we need to hit, and we automatically win the game. It’s the only explanation why we continue to run the ball up the middle or try to get easy completions on screen passes that go nowhere. It’s like we’re trying to fill up the stat sheet and be perfectly balanced with the run and pass for the sake of being balanced. Why? In 2016, we’d game-plan but adjust by how the defense played us. Tony Elliott would say after every game that the defense played us a certain way so we threw it or ran it more. This year, we threw the completed several balls down the field against the Gamecocks. As soon as we got to midfield, it was a run, screen, incompletion, and punt. Why not keep running the plays that work and be aggressive? On the flip side, we could not stop Sellars running around the right end, and Carolina just quit calling it (thank you).

When we had Chad Morris, our offense was exciting. Our identity was to play fast, run 100 plays, and score a lot of points. In 2015 and 2016 when Jeff Scott and Tony Elliott took over, they put their blend on the uptempo offense and made it highly effective. In 2017, they changed it for Kelly Bryant and his skill set. Then in 2018, they changed it for Trevor and his skill set. We won the Natty in 2018 by throttling people, and not letting off the gas until the game was out of reach. Jeff Scott left in 2019, and I wonder if the over-reliance on analytics began then and worsened over time. Ever since then, we’ve had three offensive coordinators (Tony Elliott, Brandon Streeter, and Garrett Riley), and the offense has looked the same. Is analytics the common theme with all of them? Has the pendulum shifted to over-reliance on analytics and not focused on the only stat that matters (POINTS - how many we score vs how many they score). We scored 14 points yesterday. We can’t outsmart the game by hitting metrics and think it’s going to be an automatic win. We need to play to win the game and crush the opponent, and let the stats be what they’re going to be.

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Over-reliance on Analytics?

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