I can’t be the only one ready to talk UTEP Miners football. Since it is my intention to inform and stimulate some discussion I will give some stats. Now, we all know that “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”-Twain>Disraeli. With that in mind I will try to avoid using them for such. I have my biases but will try to keep it clean. Perhaps it will also provide a simple baseline of information for those interested in the Kyyote’s Den Pre-Season Prediction Challenge. Here is how I will lay it out. It was my first concern to look at defense as I felt that Kugler’s offense was fairly steady.
According to UTEP’s Athletics website Tom Mason will move into his second season as Sean Kugler’s Offensive Coordinator. There should be considerable discussion about Mason as he has been coaching football since 1978. But, we will save that for another day.
For Defense I looked at Total Defense, Yards Per Catch, and Red Zone Defense. I should explain why I chose those particular stats. When I looked at Total Defense I found that under Mason Total Defense had improved significantly from the previous season under Kugler’s previous Defensive Coordinator. Ranked 93rd in FBS football for the 2015-16 season, the Miners had improved to a ranking of 7oth last year. That is an impressive jump and a ranking of 70th in Total Defense would indicate at first glance an average defense. For most, that would mean nothing, but for Miners’ fans average or normal is quite an improvement over abysmal or horrible. But here is where I detected one of those lies. I just felt some kind of cognitive dissonance because I never felt like the team’s defense was normal or average last year.
It seemed to me that as I recalled it teams could basically score easily with either a long pass or be set up for a score with a long run. My first instinct was to look at Yards Per Catch. I was somewhat surprised to find that in the 15-16 season UTEP was ranked 105th giving up an average about 11 yards a catch and the numbers last year wear almost identical, as was to ranking. Horrible remaining very consistently horrible under two different Defensive Coordinators while interesting didn’t solve my curiosity. I realized that yards per catch didn’t tell me what I felt in my gut.
What I felt in my gut was that for years Kugler has use an almost exclusively an offense based on grinding it out with a pounding offensive line run blocking to beat up defenses and control time of possession. This served two purposes. It matched his basic offensive philosophy based on his own personal experience as an offensive lineman and as an offensive line coach all the way up to years in the NFL, where he was matched perfectly with the Steelers. The second thing it did was to keep his defense exposed as little as possible. The two go hand in hand naturally, but the UTEP Defense was by far and away the greater concern. For good reason. Under Kugler, it seemed that the Miners could use 45 minutes of clock to score 17 points while the defense could give up scores in the blink of an eye leading to losses while having huge advantages in time of possession.
So, I moved to Scoring Defense. What I found was that in the 15-16 season the Miners ranked 98th giving up 32.9 points per game and in the 16-17 season the Miners were ranked 105th giving up 34.9 points a game.
Finally, I looked a Red Zone Defense. Bingo, perhaps. In the 2015-16 season, the Miners were ranked 78th with teams scoring 0.854 of the time they got into the Red Zone. That jumped to 117(T) ranked and almost automatic 0.913 in last season’s campaign. What I also found was that it was necessarily scoring passes that did the defense in as in both seasons the scoring was pretty much balanced. Teams could score on the defense either way.
To summarize the defense, in just comparing the past two seasons can we make a few generalizations? Oh, why not. Take them with whatever you want. First, looking at total defense where there was a big difference, improvement last season over the season before. Second, looking at other important factors it would indicate that it had little to do with wins and losses and scoring allowed. As always there are so many variables involved this is subject to debate. Next, I think we can say that the pass defense in the area of yards per catch indicate that the Miners have had more bombs dropped on them in the past two years than Dresden did in WWII.
That sounds bad, but we can also pretty much count on giving up 34 points a game on average plus or minus if the last two season can be used as a guide. That is in the Horrible area of the rankings. It is possible to be worse. Not a lot, though.
Remember that I thought that Kugler’s Offense was going to be pretty steady. I was surprised.
We will start with Total Offense. Last season the Miners were ranked 102nd with 369.2 yards per game. The season before that they were ranked 107th with 342 yards a game. But, in Scoring Offense the Miners went from being ranked 102nd with 20.7 points per game in 2015-16 to being ranked 82nd scoring 26.3 points a game last year. That is a significant increase.
Now, all of that is just what it is. Schedules were different. So were the results in wins and losses. The Miners were 5/7 two seasons ago and 4 and 8 last year. Are the numbers any help predicting future outcomes, or even trends? I will let our resident mathematicians figure that out. Those of you with crystal balls must really have to be careful. I might have to get out the Tarot cards and my pouch of hen’s teeth and chicken bones. Oh, yeah and try to work my way past all of the lies.
Link to the Den and the Pre-Season Prediction Challenge Championship; http://kyyotesden.com/den/index.php?topic=5.0