Analysis of playing time and depth development

Oct 12, 2017, 1:08 PM

Book2.pdf(231.1 K)

Everyone knows we play a lot of players, and certainly this is a good thing. But what does "play a lot of players" mean, exactly? I've merged the depth chart for Syracuse with the playing time breakdown found on the front page into the attached table. The table is an attempt to quantify it.

Basically, defensive players are grouped at the top (starters in purple), and the offense is at the bottom (starters in orange). I divided each players total plays by the total snaps for the season. This is 389 total plays for the defense, and 456 for the offense. This shows what percentage of plays a given player has played. The totals don't always sum to 100% for positions because of a few factors: players may play more than one position, injured players aren't on the depth chart, special teams plays are included, etc. There may be other reasons as well, but don't get hung up on that, just look for trends.

If the starters get more than 70% of the available snaps, it's highlighted in yellow. I've chosen 70% arbitrarily, but it seems reasonable that if your backups get 30% or more playing time you will develop good depth. This would be about 19 and 23 snaps per game for the defense and offense, respectively.

What it shows is that at MOST of our positions, the backups are getting plenty of reps. The positions of concern are Clelin Ferrell's DE position (he's getting 78% of defensive snaps), Kendall Joseph's LB position (79%), Justin Falcinelli at Center (89%), Taylor Hearn's guard spot (81%), Mitch Hyatt's tackle spot (82%), and Kelly Bryant at QB (87%).

It kind of makes sense to for the battery of Falcinelli and Bryant to get most of the reps. Bryant is still refining his game after playing behind Watson. Also, it's better for the backups on O to get reps with him. That said, hopefully he'll get out of the game early tomorrow and rest his ankle. So no real concerns with these two.

It will be interesting to see if Ferrell and Joseph get fewer plays in the next few games with the recent emergence of Register and JD Davis.

For Hearn's guard position, we've really got three backups with nontrivial -- though not a lot of -- playing time in Simpson, Morris, and Stewart. Pollard and Anchrum have both started games at RT, and are listed as backups to Hyatt at LT. But if Hyatt goes down ... ugh.

It would be really interesting to compare this kind of data to other top ten teams. That'll give a good gauge as to how much better we're developing our depth and preparing for the stretch run than others. Developing this depth has much higher priority than running up the score on a bunch of cupcakes. It'll serve us well in December and January.

Any other takeaways y'all can spot?

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