Small Improvements Not Enough For Top Ten Upset (Week 5 Advanced Stats Review)

Every week Parker Fleming of College Football Insiders posts the "How Badly Did We Get Beat" chart on Twitter, a look at net success rate between the winning team over the losing team. On the right hand side are games where the winning teams dominated in victory, while on the right are teams that lucked into a win (looking at you, Rutgers vs. Washington).

While he has the VT @Miami game listed as Miami having a net success rate about 5% points better than VT, and one of the closer matchups of Week 5, I'm not sure it was all that close in terms of advanced metrics. We can debate the ending of the game all we want, we can shout about points left on the board, mental mistakes, and baffling game management decisions; but the advanced numbers show that Miami was the much stronger team last week.

My numbers show a game that wasn't as close in net success rate, but I'm just someone dicking around in VSCode, not an actual sports data analyst. I think in the grand scheme of things, we were just as many plays away from a convincing win as we were to a devastating blowout. But maybe that's what happens when we root for 18-23 year olds (Cam McCormick notwithstanding) on a weekly basis. There is going to be some high variance.

While I don't want to harp too much, there actually were some silver linings for Virginia Tech to take away from this game. In terms of net EPA per play, Miami finished at 0.571 net EPA/play last week, which was 32nd in FBS football, which was easily below their season average (0.661, 3rd overall) by my metrics. However, the Hokies only managed to come out ahead in a single quarter in terms of net EPA/play (the 2nd quarter when VT outscored Miami 17 to 3).

Virginia Tech actually held Miami below their average in terms of overall success rate, passing and rushing success rate, and passing explosiveness.

• Overall success rate, down from 53.3% to 50.0%
• Passing success rate, down 54.5% to 50.0%
• Rushing success rate, down from 51.9% to 50.0%
• Passing explosive rate, down from 20.7% to 16.7%

Obviously these numbers are too high to expect to win, but it is impressive to hold one of the top offense by my metrics to below their season averages. However, we did backslide a little bit on rushing and overall explosiveness.

• Overall explosive rate, up to 15.7% from 13.8%
• Rushing explosive rate, up to 14.3% from 6.1%

A handful of plays here and there, and Virginia Tech isn't just the team that was a Hail Mary and bad coaching away from a top 10 upset, but the rightfully dominate team.

To Virginia Tech's credit showed some improvement on the offensive side of the ball as well. Virginia Tech was between in terms of success rate, explosive rate, passing and rushing success rate, and rushing explosiveness, which they accomplished against a team that ranked 5th overall in defensive EPA/play.

• Offensive success rate, up from 40.0% to 43.9%
• Explosive rate, up from 11.0% to 12.1%
• Passing success rate, up from 36.6% to 40.0%
• Rushing success rate, up from 42.7% to 48.4%
• Rushing explosive rate, up from 9.1% to 16.1%

Only passing explosiveness was down against Miami vs. VT's season average (8.6% down from 13.4%), which, given the overall increases in passing success means a slightly better short/intermediate passing game that Virginia Tech is going to need going forward in conference play.

Looking forward to Stanford, this is hopefully an opportunity for a get right game. As much as I would love to see the Hokies win a close matchup, they travel to Stanford as likely 8-point road favorites (or higher). Stanford is so far a bottom 5 offense in the ACC in terms of success rate. The only thing they are above average in is rushing explosives (in which they were 8th after 4 weeks), which could give the Hokies trouble. On defense, the are 14th in success rate allowed, but 5th in explosives allowed, including the 2nd best at stopping big runs in the ACC.

While the betting markets have Virginia Tech as big favorites, this could be a good game for the Hokies to find a steady, rhythmic offense that doesn't solely rely on chunk plays or they may find themselves in danger in California.