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Fun With Numbers: Texas State

Howdy and welcome back to another season of Fun With Numbers. If you’ve never read one of these before, I generally post some advanced stats and charts along with my explanations and ideas for what they might mean, and a few people tend to enjoy it over the course of the season.


Let’s start off by saying I have no idea what Fun With Numbers will look like this season. The past two seasons most of my data has come from a combination of Football Outsiders and Bill Connelly’s Stat Profiles that he made available through SB Nation. This off-season, Bill made the move to ESPN, and while I believe he has intentions of keeping the SP+ (renamed this off-season due to some... uh... trademark issues) and other data fully available to fans, I have no idea how it will look as the season progresses. I've already seen him mention on Twitter that the odds of him having the stat profiles from previous years is pretty small, but hopefully we'll still have access to most of the good stuff. For right now we’re going to assume everything is normal and fine here, so I’ll jump into your typical early season warnings and reminders.


First, this is the first game of the season, so we’ll have a few preseason projections (which rely on a combination or returning production, recruiting rankings, and historical performance) to look at, finals stats from last year, and not much else. As the season progresses, real data will come in and preseason projections will phase out, and we’ll get more numbers to compare and talk about. Basically, this post is more of a "Hey, I’m still here." and in general will get better and more interesting as we get deeper into actual football.


Second, if you’re not at all familiar with everything I briefly mentioned in the first paragraph, I highly recommend checking out this glossary to familiarize yourself with the SP+, FEI, and other advanced stats concepts.


What Do We Know?

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The Aggies take on the Texas State Bobcats at Kyle Field on a Thursday night to open the season. Similar to last year’s matchup against Northwestern State, it’s a strategically scheduled warm up game to give these guys a chance to shake the dust off and then rest up good for the Week 2 matchup against Clemson. Oh and also it has something to do with TV time slots and BU$INE$$. Or something like that. And while 2019 sees the Ags taking on a school of FBS caliber, it’s still very much a warm up game.


The Bobcats are coming off a 3-9 season where they finished 114th in the SP+, fired their coach after 3 seasons, and hired a name we’re all too familiar with to run the show in San Marcos. You can read a little more about the Bobcats here in Bill Connelly’s last set of previews for SB Nation, but I’ll lay out the finer points. Texas State is not projected to be good this season, but they are expected to improve based on returning production alone (they rank 3rd in the country in this regard). Withers (the previous head coach) left behind a steadily improving defense and a stagnant offense for young Jake Spavital to take over, as well as what sounds like a mess of an athletic department (though that is not the fault of Withers at all, read more about all that in the preview). The SP+ predicts them to win about 5 games this year, something they haven’t done since 2014, the second to last season for another name that folks in College Station will remember all too well (Hint: It’s a four letter F word here).


The Aggies are coming into 2019 with just a touch of hype, going 9-4 and finishing 11th in the SP+ in Jimbo’s first year in Aggieland. The Ags return a decent number of players on offense (62% of production) but lost the majority of their defensive production (returning 49% in 2019). They’re projected to finish 13th in the SP+ with 7 wins (I know right?), the FEI is even less optimistic, ranking the Ags 22nd with 6 wins. A&M is projected to win this game by 30 points with a win probability of 96% by the SP+, and Vegas has the Ags as a 33.5 point favorite. That all sounds pretty good right? Let's look at the match ups.


Aggie Offense vs Bobcat Defense

*The comparison charts look a little different right now for a couple of reasons. I'll start moving back towards what they looked like last year once 2019 stats start showing up. All data in the charts is from 2018 unless stated otherwise. I also like the look of the radar charts as a way to visualize a teams strengths/weaknesses and also to make it even easier to compare differences between the two teams.

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The A&M Offensive radar looks like a Gig'Em. That has to be good. The Texas State Defensive radar looks like a goldfish. I'm not sure what that means.

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The Aggies lost their leading rusher, leading pass catcher, and a key piece of the OL. That sounds real bad up front, but everybody remains a little optimistic in Aggieland thanks to Mond getting a second year of work under Jimbo, the receiving corp and the rest of the OL mostly remaining intact, and an exciting committee in the backfield led by Jashaun Corbin. All of that (plus strong performances to cap off 2018) has the Aggies projected to finish as the 9th ranked OSP+ (they finished 10th last year). The Aggies found success last season by being incredibly efficient, especially in the run game (Finishing 17th in Rushing Marginal Efficiency). The offense lacked big play ability, particularly through the air, had an OL that really got worked over in pass protection all season (97th in Adjusted Sack Rate), and struggled to finish drives, averaging less than 5 points per scoring opportunity. There were hiccups all season long, but it’s hard not to be a little optimistic after 3-4 years of offenses that relied primarily on explosiveness to make things happen.


As stated earlier, defense was the one thing Withers figured out in his 3 years in San Marcos. They ranked 73rd last season and return enough to project up to 50th in the SP+, which would be the best they’ve had since 2012. As an offensive minded guy, Jake Spavital needed to get this hire right, so he did what has always worked for other coaches, and hired his brother. Zac Spavital spent the last few years coaching under Gibbs at Houston and Texas Tech, where he worked on defenses that ranged from "decent" to "existing". As mentioned earlier, he couldn’t walk into a better situation, with 85% of last season’s returning production back and a defense that finished higher than the one he co-coordinated at Texas Tech. Spav inherits a defense from 2018 that played incredibly sound football. They weren’t particularly disruptive, ranking 123rd in Adjusted Sack Rate and 94th in Overall Havoc rate (although the LB group ranked 18th in Havoc), but they were efficient and didn’t often give up big plays. In short, they were a solid but incredibly boring defense. I only felt a twinge of jealousy typing that.



Aggie Defense vs Bobcat Offense

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The A&M Defensive radar tells the story pretty well. If the opponent wasn't running the ball and we weren't getting sacks, the Aggies were in trouble.

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Despite losing so much production, the Ags are still projected to have the 32nd ranked defense in the DSP+, where they will try to not move backwards from a defense that was Top 20 in efficiency and absolutely awful at preventing big plays. If you thought last year was a big test for Mike Elko, this year is a thesis defense. It’s tough to deal with losing your top 6 tacklers and the majority of your Front 7, especially on a team that relied very heavily on havoc to avoid getting beat and giving up big yardage. You have enough guys along the DL and in the linebacker group that have a good amount of experience, so even if they do take a small step back from last year they should be more than fine. I think the big hope in Aggieland is if your Front 7 is going to regress slightly, hopefully the combination of experience and infusion of young talent can elevate your secondary play from "there are players out there trying" to at least "serviceable".


Since leaving Aggieland after the 2015 season (finishing 51st in OSP+), Spav has managed three Top 40 offenses, with his last year under Holgorson finishing 9th in the OSP+. He hired Bob Stitt as an OC to keep himself surrounded by an older, highly thought of offensive guy and they find themselves with a unit that returns 80% of 2018’s production, but was unfortunately terrible at everything last year. No really. Everything. They finished 126th last season, and are projected to finish 124th in the 2019 OSP+. Occasionally you could poke them with a stick and yell "do something", and they could create some big plays, but they were nowhere near consistent enough for it to be sustainable. You have to assume Spav has learned a thing or two under Dykes and Holgo, and with all the experience coming back, the Bobcats almost have to improve a little bit in 2019.


Special Teams


In 2018, Braden Mann’s leg essentially carried the Aggies ST unit to a Top 30 finish, as he was 2nd in Punting Efficiency and 8th in Kickoff Efficiency in his Ray Guy winning season. The punt return game was almost nonexistent and the kick return efficiency was average, and Seth Small probably wasn’t quite ready for show time (Perfect on extra points but finished 81st in FG efficiency). With Mann back and another year of experience for everyone else, it feels like the Aggies have an opportunity to utilize special teams as weapon even more so than they did last year.


Texas State had a special teams unit, and that’s about the nicest thing you can say about them. That’s not really true, they were perfectly fine at kickoffs (50th in KO Efficiency) and Hutch White (All time name. Sounds like a character from Smokey and the Bandit) was an excellent punt return man. They have a long way to go to figure out their kicking game though after losing their main guy from 2018, and perhaps Clayton Stewart can take a step forward in the punting game after a disappointing freshman season.


Anything the Numbers Don’t Tell Us?

This is a tune up game. Let’s not over think it.


So What’s the Verdict?

Not exactly going out on a limb here to say that I think the Ags win big in their first game. The real question is what should fans hope to see on Thursday night.


Offensively you’d like to see the Aggies maintain their efficiency levels from 2018, but add a little more big play potential. Particularly you’d want to see some big throws from Kellen Mond in order to make defensive coordinators feel like they have to prepare for the possibility that we might just throw it deep a few times in 2019. You’d like to see improved pass protection by the OL (last year Mond was sacked twice in the opener by an FCS squad) and hopefully we’ll see enough efficiency from the deep receiving corps to make us feel better about losing Jace "The Safety Net" Sternberger. On top of that, let's try to avoid turnovers that tend to allow less talented teams to hang around longer than us fans would like.


Defensively, it’s actually pretty similar. You want to see the same efficiency they maintained through the 2018 season, and improvement against explosiveness. Last year’s opener against Northwestern State was 3 full quarters into a shutout before a receiver took a pass 71 yards to the end zone, a small and meaningless moment in the grand scheme of things but was 100% an indicator of where this defense would struggle the most in 2018. Spavital has a former 3 Star QB and plenty of receivers with experience, and their run game really struggled last season, so expect him to try to test the secondary early and often. Like I said, based purely off of returning production and the ideas that Stitt and Spav (Those names sound incredibly gross together for some reason) will bring in, the Bobcats almost have to improve, it's just hard to know if that will really show up against this young but talented defense on Thursday.


My Prediction: Ags win this one without a whole lot of worry once you get through the initial first quarter struggles. 41-10, Aggies win but don't cover.



Final Notes

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you'll follow along the rest of the season, I promise they get more interesting as the stats start showing up. Despite having the least amount of free time I can ever remember having, I enjoy doing these and look forward to your comments. If you are interested in advanced statistics in CFB, I recommend checking out the links below where most of my data comes from. And if numbers aren't your thing but you enjoy sappy love letters to billion dollar athletic facilities written by a sleep deprived weirdo in a fever dream, read my Ode to the Hate Barn.

FootballOutsiders.com for a solid compilation of all things related to football analytics.

Bcftoys.com for Brian Fremeau’s FEI data and other fun projects from him.

ESPN.com is the new home for all of Bill Connelly's SP+ info (as well as FPI rankings).

Questions? Comments? Criticisms? You know where to leave ‘em. I’ll see you at the tailgate.

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