For the second week in a row, Tech is scheduled to open the season against a first-time FBS head coach in their first game as coach. Any other year, that sentence wouldn’t make sense, but welcome to 2020.
Scotty Walden, who was the co-Offensive Coordinator and Wide Receiver coach previously, now holds the reins of the Southern Miss football team.
The coaching shake-up was a consequence of USM's 32-21 loss to a Sun Belt team that hadn’t won a road game since 2017. The humiliating defeat at the hands of South Alabama resulted in Jay Hopson’s resignation, and Walden’s promotion
But even though Hopson is out in Hattiesburg, we probably won’t see much of a different system for the Eagles in the rest of 2020. Interim head coaches that take over in the middle of the season are usually just tasked with keeping the ship afloat.
So let’s look at Southern Miss's embarrassing performance against South Alabama, and see what we can expect from the Golden Eagles on Saturday.
This week, the stat we’re going to hone in on is Success Rate. This advanced stat comes from Football Outsiders, and is used in calculating SP+ rankings. The stat looks at how often an offense gets 50% of the years to gain on first down, 70% on second down, and 100% on third or fourth down.
So for example, a 6 yard run is a “successful” play on 1st and 10 or 3rd and 3, but not on 2nd and 15. A team’s success rate for a game is the percentage of plays that met that criteria for “successful.”
Let’s use Success Rate to look at Southern Miss’s offense first, since that’s the background of their new head coach.
Last year across the NCAA, the average success rate for a team was right around 41%, and the Eagles were just below that at 40%. And if we break it down by quarter, we can see that USM was able to score in the quarters they were the most successful (as you would expect):
The Southern Miss defense wasn’t quite as sharp, but South Alabama wasn’t drastically better on the night on the offensive side of the ball, excluding the first quarter.
But overall Success Rate is not what decided this game.
Success Rate divides further into Standard Down Success Rate and Passing Down Success Rate. The difference between a Standard Down and a Passing Down depends on down and distance. Standard Downs are all first downs, second downs and less than 8, third or fourth downs and less than five. All other downs are passing downs.
So a 1st and 10 is a Standard Down. A 2nd and 10 is a Passing Down. A 4th and 4 is a Standard Down.
Basically, the difference is that defenses have to prepare for runs or passes on Standard Downs, but only really need to defend the pass on Passing Downs.
As you'd expect, teams typically have more success on Standard Downs than Passing Downs. Last year, the NCAA average Success Rate was 46% on Standard Downs, compared to 31% on Passing Downs.
But, somehow, the Jaguars were more successful on passing downs a week and a half ago:
The Southern Miss defense simply failed to stop the Jaguars when South Alabama had their backs to the wall.
We can see this in traditional stats as well. South Alabama went 7-for-12 on third down and 2-for-2 on fourth down. Meanwhile, USM was only 5-for-14 on third down and 1-for-2 on fourth.
It’s early in the season and we only have one USM game to look at, so it’s hard to say how much of this is on South Alabama or on Southern Miss. But against Tulane over the weekend, the Jaguars weren’t nearly as successful on third and fourth down, going 8-for-17 and 0-for-1, respectively. And the South Alabama's Success Rate fell from 43% on Standard Downs to 27% on Passing Downs against the Green Wave.
Still a small sample size, but that points to Southern Miss's defense being the problem on Passing Downs.
But again, the Eagles do have a new coach now. A week and a half is a long time to make some necessary changes, and Tech is travelling to Hattiesburg without any in-game experience in 2020.
But if the Bulldogs are forced into some third-and-longs early, don’t give up hope on the drive just yet.
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Nathan is also a contributor to gtpdd.dog, a lighthearted Louisiana Tech blog. Be sure to check out @gotechplsdntdie on Twitter.
