Stat Attack - Troy

When Louisiana Tech beat South Alabama 35-20 in Mobile on Halloween night, the Bulldogs held Jaguars quarterback Jared Hollins to 14 completions on 31 passes. That’s a rough night for most passing games. But for Tech’s next opponent, Troy, it’s pretty close to a normal one.

At 4-4 on the season, the Trojans are initially a fairly difficult team to figure out. They lost 21-14 to the same ULM team Tech shut out, and they lost 33-6 at Louisiana-Lafayette. Then they traveled to James Madison last week and won 24-21. But while it’s easy to write that game off as a fluke, Troy won that game as 18-point underdogs while still being who they’ve been all season. 

And what the Trojans have been all year is terrible in the pass game. Between Goose Crowder and Tucker Kilcrease, the Troy passing attack combined for a 54.3% completion percentage, ninth worst in college football. And the passes don’t go very far either, averaging just 6.15 yards per attempt, the 11th worst.

Perhaps a better way to measure a passing game is EPA, or expected points added. Every snap starts with an expected point value. This is based on the down, distance, and where the ball is on the field. EPA measures how much a play moves that number up or down. A 15-yard completion on third-and-9 adds quite a bit of expected points. An incompletion on that same down takes some away.

Troy’s passing game averages -0.024 EPA per dropback. In other words, the average Troy pass leaves the Trojans a little worse off than before they snapped the ball. And the Bulldog defense has been just about as good as the Trojans have been bad:

Or, in other words, only 11 offenses have a passing attack so bad that they, on average, hurt their own team’s chances to score. Also, only 15 defenses are so dominant that team’s actually, on average, hurt their chances to score when they decide to throw the ball. And one such offense faces one such defense on Saturday.

Success rate tells the same story. It measures the share of plays that keep an offense on schedule, and Troy’s passes only do that 33.9% of the time, the 7th worst in college football. Two out of every three Trojan throws put them behind the sticks.

Opposing secondaries have had plenty of chances to make plays, too. Defensive backs when facing the Trojan offense made a tackle for loss, forced a fumble, picked off a pass, or knocked one down on 8.3% of all snaps (4th highest). Louisiana Tech, ranked as the 18th best defense in this DB havoc stat, makes those plays on 7.6% of snaps. So there should be ample opportunity to move up those rankings this week for the Bulldogs.

All those incompletions and havoc plays add up and put Troy in a hole that it can’t climb out of.

And then you add in field position. Just like with EPA, every drive starts with an expected point value based on where it begins. So a drive that starts near midfield is worth a lot more expected points than one that starts at the offense’s own 10.

Thanks to the Bulldog defense forcing three-and-outs and turnovers, each Tech drive starts with an average of 1.63 points on the hypothetical scoreboard. Troy’s offense is not as fortunate:

Special teams are also a big part of that gap. The Bulldogs average 16.8 yards per punt return (11th in FBS) compared to Troy’s 4.4 (127th).

So how exactly does a team with this passing game beat conference-favorite James Madison on the road? While the offense stayed its same ineffective self, the Trojan defense intercepted three passes, recovered a fumble, and scored a touchdown of their own. And while this was an unusually big night for the Troy secondary, it’s not like they have been strangers to the football either:

That’s how Troy can beat you. It can’t count on moving the ball through the air, so it needs its defense to hand the offense short fields and free points. The kick coverage can help some as well, since the Trojans only allow 14.3 yards per kickoff return, the 12th best in the nation.

All of this puts the spotlight on Blake Baker, whose lone interception of the season was in Death Valley. Just like JMU outgained Troy and lost, South Alabama outgained the Bulldogs on the night. But unlike the Dukes, Baker and the rest of the Tech offense took care of the ball and won the game.

It may really be that simple. Don’t put the ball in danger, and the Bulldogs could be heading into the final stretch of Sun Belt play completely unblemished.  

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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.