Let’s face it I am a numbers junkie when it comes to analyzing college football. I am always fascinated by different sets of numbers and it’s why I have nine different sets of power ratings in evaluating teams.

As of right now I am putting together my final computer numbers for the 2012 season and I have to look at each unit on each team. For these particular numbers, yards per game and points per game are heavily equated into the final numbers but for some teams those can be deceiving. For example, if a team averages 250 yards per game on offense vs their 8 conference opponents but averages 450 yards per game on offense vs 4 weak non-conference opponents, their final yards per game average will be greatly affected and they could look much stronger on offense than what they actually are.

On the flip side, a team could have a couple of poor performances vs elite teams really weigh down their final average numbers and their offensive/defensive rankings would be affected.

In today’s blog, I thought I would look at total offense averages and then compare it to the median offensive numbers. For those of you that need a fresh reminder what median is…it is when u take a series of numbers like for instance 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 and then take the middle number of the sequence and in this instance it would be 3. When you have an even set of a number sequence you then take the two middle numbers and average those two. For example the median for 1, 2, 3, 4 would be 2.5.

I am using offensive medians because a couple of strong and/or poor performances could greatly affect your average. By using the example from above, the offensive ypg average for the team that avg 250 ypg vs its 8 conf foes and 450 ypg vs its 4 non-conf foes would be 317 ypg. However, if u took the median of the 12 numbers, their median average would be only 250, which in my opinion would be the more accurate number in evaluating their offense.

Here are the results of all 124 teams in taking their offensive ypg average and comparing it to their median offense average.           

Offensive YPG vs Median Offense

As you can see from above UNLV’s offense was underrated in the regard that their median offense was far better than their yards per game average. A quick look at their total offensive yards in their 12 games will show 4 games where their offense was held to 275 yards or fewer. However, in 7 games their offense topped 425 yards therefore giving them a positive difference between avg/median. Texas A&M also performed high in this category as their offense was held to only 334 yards vs Florida in the opener which hurt their overall average but they did top 600 yards seven times giving them a 605 median!

At the bottom of the comparison is Oklahoma, which averaged 498 ypg this past year. However, that total was greatly influenced by their 4 games where they topped the 600-yard mark this season. In 7 of their other games they actually were held to 430 yards or less giving them a median average of just 427.

If you find anything else fascinating from these numbers let us know by emailing brandon@philsteele.com I was looking at doing a couple of similar blogs in the future and already have found that Arkansas and Auburn’s ppg were greatly helped by wins over much weaker foes in non-conference play this past season compared to what they averaged in SEC play.