Here are the benchmark statistics for the IU game.
A few notes.
First IU won the statistical battle in most areas. BG had a bunch of yards, but when you average it out over 113 plays, you see that BG had below average success on a play-play basis.
Not to say no success. BG had a first down on 35% of its plays. That's amazing. Indiana actually had a first down on 38% of their plays.
The difference in a very close game was that BG was better on third-fourth down, and IU had a red zone whiff on the missed FG.
BG had the ball about half the game and ran 113 plays...which means the Falcons ran one play every 16 seconds. That's right up on twice as fast as last year's team and faster than earlier this year, even.
Knapke had a good percentage and the numbers would show that he had a high percentage play mix. Coach said that was what Indiana was giving us, and that was a lot of short passes. Obviously, big gains in our attack are supposed to come after the catch. Knapke did make some long throws--he has a solid arm and seems to be accurate. But, yardage wise, BG'd expect to have even more yards with that many plays.
One thing that helped was the BG did a good job of avoiding negative passing plays.
Oh, and BG had only 8.8 yards per point. That is ridiculously efficient.
On, and for the second week in a row our opponent netted out at <20 yards net per punt.
Do dropped passes count as negative passing plays? We had several in the game that could have made the offensive numbers look even better than they were.
ReplyDeleteNo, just sacks and Interceptions. If drops was an official category, we could count them...and yes, in both the IU and WKU games dropped passes certainly held the offense back.
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