Best College Football Offenses – Get with the programs

May 26th, 2009 by Vince Mullins

If you have been around this site for any length of time (esp. back to the pre-Blogger custom made website abomination of 2005) you know that we prefer deductive reasoning – have an opinion, then gather the data and crunch the numbers in order to determine if your opinion is worth a crap.

Graham Harrell leaves Texas Tech after three years as starting QB, but the program will live on.

Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not. That is life my friends.

One thing I have found to work very well is the “Dynasty Study” which looks at three variables that mean the most to fantasy college football and see which schools and/or coaches consistently produce top-shelf offensive output.

Total offensive TDs, Yards per play and yards per game are scraped from the NCAA website, each variable is ranked one through 120.

Lots of numbers and the offenses to watch in 2009 after the jump.

Last month I looked only at the 2008 data and today I am looking at the three-year period of 2006 through 2008 to get a bigger picture look at what schools you should focus on for your fantasy research. I created two different scores – RAW means that each year’s results have an equal weight in the calcualtion (simple average) and a WEIGHTED score that gives added gravity to recent years (exponential or weighted moving average). I thought it would also be interesting to see how much RAW and WEIGHTED differed and found it gave me a momentum measurement – I highlighted the postive momentum in green and the negative momentum in red.

fantasycollegeblitz-dynasties-study-2006-8

I hope you get some value on my quick notes on all 119 teams (Western Kentucky has yet to put in 3 years on probationary status). More snarky than enlightening but it should add some additional color to the black-and-white rankings.

Some observations:

there was not a lot of variance in the names nor the two scores in the Top 20, unless you count Hawaii dropping to 62 after two straight seasons of Colt Brennan magic.
SEC offenses performed awful in 2008 compared to recent history – of the 18 teams with nine points worse rating on the WEIGHTED score, 14 were BCS schools and 3 (Tennessee, South Carolina and Kentucky) were from the land of SEC speed.
Non-BCS schools have been a key driver for strong stats – of the 14 teams that WEIGHTED scores were nine spots better, ten were from outside the power conferences. Arizona was the largest mover but lost QB Tuitama and WR Thomas to graduation, so do not expect the Wildcats to continue their offensive ascent in 2009 unless the Gronk goes on a James Casey-like stats binge.
Nebraska quietly finishes in the Top 20 all three years which tells me two things – Shawn Watson is one of the better OCs in the land and the tradition of the Blackshirts defense is long gone.

Your comments would mean a lot if you can divine some other wisdom out of all the data – here is the link to the whole darn set going back to 2000 when Chris Weinke to Marvin Minnis was the rallying cry.

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