Not a bad offense?

by simbiom on Jan 9, 2009 12:43 PM EST Comment 15 comments

Hi everyone, I was searching the web for Steelers articles and found one very interesting stat, let analyze it a little bit.
The Steelers have faced six of the top eight defenses:
TEAM             RANK DEFENSE    POINTS SCORE
Baltimore                 2                          23 , 13
Philadelphia            3                               6
Washington             4                              23
NY Giants                 5                              14
Tennessee              7                              14
Dallas                       8      20

In those games we are 4-3. The point differential is -2, very close games if you took apart the loss to ten and the win to Was. So that says that with the great help of the D, Ben and the offense can score the points need to win.
The rest of the games were:
TEAM                  RANK DEFENSE    POINTS SCORE
Houston   22    38
Cleveland      26     10, 31
Jacksonville                17 26
Cincinnati                    12    38, 27
Indianapolis                11      20
San Diego    25                                 11
New England             10      33

In those games we are 8-1. The point differential is +126 (WOW). So this says that with the great help of the D, Ben and the offense can destroy a lot of teams.

I know this is the weak spot of the team, but really is not that weak. If you check the offense injuries, Parker miss a few games, Ben injured almost all the season, Miller missing games, the o-line in a continuous change of players due to performance or injuries. Santonio miss a few games and the weed game also. One head of a 2 headed running monsters done for the year.

We have a healthy O now, and I know we can change that trend of not scoring against great D's.

Lets cheer the O the same as the D, let give us our support on Sunday and the will crush SD.

P.S. Once again everybody is talking about SD and forgetting the Steelers, that such a good thing all of us know we are far better playing under the radar.

Saludos a todos.

VAMOS STEELERS!!!

0 recs | Comment 15 comments

Story-email Email Printer Print

Comments

Not A Bad Offense

but not a good (consistent) one either. It is refreshing that they can score against a D that isn’t Philly or NYG.
Great info simbion. Thanks for the post.

When You Run The Ball Good Things Happen

by 5020 on Jan 9, 2009 1:15 PM EST reply actions 0 recs

Offense

I like your post. I just made the same point (without stats) on Blitz’s post…lets support our offense!!!

It’s playoff time!!! Lets get excited!!!

by SteelerMike on Jan 9, 2009 1:22 PM EST reply actions 0 recs

Football Outsiders

They adjust for opponents, and they gave us 20th in the league, with a 1.7% DVOA. Even though we’re below average this year, a positve DVOA means we’re slightly “above average” in the grand scheme of things.

The stats you show are pretty interesting, though. I think one reason we’re not higher up in DVOA is because we tend to do fairly well against bad defenses and completely self-destruct and do nothing productive against those top defenses. That’s not exactly an encouragement, since we’ll probably face the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, or 7th defenses after this week.

charity standing orders

by BadMaafala on Jan 9, 2009 3:21 PM EST reply actions 0 recs

I have not been impressed with football outsiders DVOA adjusted for opponents this year honestly. I guess I personally think that opponents should be weighted more heavily. Pittsburgh’s D was rated at 2 or 3 through most of the year until towards the very end. Most recently, I have a hard time buying that SD has the 3rd best offense in the league. I’m not trying to knock SD’s current incarnation as a team in the playoffs, but the list of team’s they played in the regular season is simply atrocious.

by steelguy99 on Jan 9, 2009 3:54 PM EST up reply actions 0 recs

yeah

I’ve become a little more jaded to the as well, although their rankings really liked the the Eagles and Ravens, who could do some real damage in the playoffs, from the beginning.

I dunno, when you look at the sum of the work our offense has done this season, good defenses or no, I’d have to think there are 19ish offenses our there who could have done it as well or better. I mean we averaged 3.7 ypc and a 81.9 QB rating.

Also, while I’m not diminishing what we have done on defense, the Ravens defense is outstanding. They’re second in just about every category this year, but they beat every other defense in total yardage since our 2004 defense. I can’t really fault them keeping pace with us in DVOA standings. I know their system isn’t perfect – this isn’t baseball – but it does mean something.

charity standing orders

by BadMaafala on Jan 9, 2009 4:11 PM EST up reply actions 0 recs

There are some really bad offenses out there, and we aren’t elite by any means.

BUT, lets take an example of the 9th ranked offense the patriots. Their offense looked JV when faced with a good defense. Whose to say how they would look if their gamut was full of the top ranked defense, and two games against the second ranked defense like the steelers have to play? We have no idea, because the new england patriots only played 1 top 10 defense – us. They looked crappy doing it too.

If you were to take all of our games against lowly ranked defenses and average them together our offense would look pretty damn good on paper. If anyone wants to average up our two cleveland games, two cincy games, JAX game, IND game and NE game I’d love to see our stats. The FO metric for taking into account opposing teams is completely broken in my mind.

I don’t think our offense is very good, but I think that other teams have very inflated ones – NE (rated 9th by FO metrics), MIA (rated 7th by FO metrics), SD (rated 3rd by metrics), DEN (rated 5th). Our offense does okay against the 2nd and 3rd rated defense, nothing spectacular, but neither have the rest of these “elite” teams.

by steelguy99 on Jan 9, 2009 4:50 PM EST up reply actions 0 recs

Okay, I gathered a few numbers. I looked at our opponents’ yards and points against and compared them to the yards and points we scored. Here’s what I found:

Opposing teams averaged 20.0 points and 310 yards (division weighted x2) against them. If anyone cares, that’d be the 11th yardage and 10th scoring defense.

We averaged 21.7 points and 312 yards, giving us on average +1.7 (7.9 percent) points and +1.5 (0.5 percent) yards versus the other teams they played. This suggests that our offense is almost exactly average at moving the ball, and I’ll hypothesize that our defense accounts for a lot of the point value over average. I find it odd that our FO offensive DVOA is an identical number (1.7) I hope that’s not their “proprietary formula”.

Now let’s split how we performed against top 10 defenses and everyone else. We played 7 games against top 10 defenses, averaging 16.1 points and 259 yards. The top 10 defenses averaged 17.6 points and 281 for the year. So on average, we were -1.4 (-8.8 percent) points and -21.7 yards (-8.4 percent) from our opponents’ opponents’ offenses. We were above average in 2 of 7 games in both points and yards.

On the flip side, we were +4.2 (16 percent) points and +19.6 (5.6 percent) yards against non-top 10 defenses. We were above average in 7 of 9 games in both points and yards.

This suggests the following:
1) On average, our offense is almost exactly average.
2) Our offense performs worse than most teams would when faced with a good defense and better than most teams would when faced with a bad defense. All teams production should fall off against good defenses, but ours declines more rapidly than usual as opposing defenses get better.

We can analyze the reasons for this, but it looks like a pretty consistent trend. This is, of course, the worst kind of playoff offense around since you want them to step up to the challenge, instead of backing down. If we want to win the SB, we may have to beat the Ravens, Titans, Giants, or Eagles. The good news is we play the Chargers this week.

charity standing orders

by BadMaafala on Jan 9, 2009 6:00 PM EST up reply actions 1 recs

Very well researched – I agree with your conclusions. Specifically because you don’t explicitly argue with what I really care about – that there are very overrated offenses out there.

I’d have a hard time arguing ours is underrated.

by steelguy99 on Jan 9, 2009 6:51 PM EST up reply actions 0 recs

Nice

Good work as usual Bad.

by Chicago Steeler on Jan 10, 2009 11:03 AM EST up reply actions 0 recs

Good information but

I look at it this way…in a close game, is our offense capable of making some plays in the 4th quarter for us to win a game.

I answer, a resounding…yes!!! We drove 92 yards, IN BALTIMORE, on our final possession to score a TD and win the game…against that big, bad defense. We were winning the Giant game and had a long TD called back before imploding…

My point is, I think we can over analyze stuff and come to conclusions, good or bad, which ultimately mean nothing. The only thing that matters, come playoff time, is making plays.

I, for one, think we have just as good as a shot at the SB as anyone. I think, even against these top defenses, our offense can be productive and efficient. We will see…

by SteelerMike on Jan 9, 2009 8:03 PM EST reply actions 0 recs

We have a better shot than most.

It’s the old adage. Offense wins games. Defense wins championships.

by Jonny B. on Jan 10, 2009 1:30 AM EST up reply actions 0 recs

Yes, we are facing top defenses now, but every team we face has a bigger problem in this area.

by Jonny B. on Jan 10, 2009 1:31 AM EST up reply actions 0 recs

In short, it's a showdown.

The top scoring offence in the AFC versus the lowest scoring defense. It’s clear who is going to win this battle. Onward!!!

by Jonny B. on Jan 10, 2009 1:39 AM EST up reply actions 0 recs

nice post..ugh…you and the Titans drove the length of the field on us with final possessions. those drives prevent me from going overboard with how “good” our D is. rex ryan likes to bend too much in those situations.

by raven on Jan 9, 2009 11:56 PM EST reply actions 0 recs