2011 Football Review: The Offense, big picture

Instead of big posts, we're going to review the football season for the Falcons in little nuggets over the course of the next few weeks, when there are openings in the basketball posts.

We will review offense, defense, and special teams.  The main question we will ask with each one is this:  was BG better than in 2010 and how much?



With that in mind, we start with the offense.  Before looking at the components, we will first look at the big picture.  A reminder--we are looking at stats for conference games only in 2010 and 2011.  I feel it provides a much more stable basis of comparison.

In 2010, BG was 11th in the MAC in scoring at 17.9 points per game.  That number did improve significantly, up to 23.9 points per game, a 33% increase.  However, and this is a key point, we have already seen that the MAC's scoring also improved over the whole year, so you had to get better just to stay even with the competition.  BG's improvement in offense only moved them from 11th to a tie for 10th.

We all know (and we will see) that BG had issues with turnovers and that impacts scoring.  However, it was not the only issue involved.

When looking at yards per play, BG was tied for 12th at 4.0 yards per play in 2010.  This year, BG took a major jump, getting to 5.4 yards per play, a 35% increase.  Again, that is significant.  However, while better, it still only placed BG in a tie for 9th in the MAC in yards per play.

Simply put, the team improved on its overall offense last year, however, lacked production and further hurt itself with turnovers, all of which led to an improved but still sub par effort.