Tag: football

I hate that it is all that I do lately but here is more downer shit.  Dr. Natalicio has been in charge for more than a quarter of a century at UTEP.  Ask yourselves what the football has been like during that period.  Now, do you think she hasn’t heard anything before?  She teaches kids.  Football is a diversion for the students, and since they don’t care, she reads that quite clearly.  It doesn’t matter to anyone except silly fans.  I know exactly how it works on a campus.  Leadership comes from the captain of the ship.  What do you think she does, what her job is?  To run all of UTEP’s different departments and set the agenda, tone, and measure the results.  Literally, she and doesn’t ask Stull, she tells him the agenda, makes sure he understands how she feels about it, and has watched the results.  Since Stull was here as long as he wanted to be here, he was obviously doing exactly what she wanted done.  She is the President and she has never been a rubber stamp figurehead.  She is a very strong leader.  Any teacher out there knows which principals run a tight ship, one that gets it done in all areas, academically, athletically, cafeteria, and sparkling shiny floors.  Any one on that ship not performing at a level of expectations will be gone.  Nothing personal.  They are cold blooded when it comes their ship.  Oh, and the people who work there, love it and the Captain.  They shine just like the floors.  It is pretty obvious to me that Dr. Natalicio has weighed the different aspects of the Athletic Departments role and is comfortable with its level of performance.  As for it being the face of the University as seen across the country, ask yourselves how many of her students come from anywhere other than El Paso county.  Nope, for her, and to those she is serving The Best Bang For the Buck recognition for the degrees she hands to her kids is all that matters.  Everything is perfect in Minerland.  Even the football players are getting good grades.

As a public service, I am posting some of the information I find regarding UTEP Miners football and the Preseason Prediction Challenge (read more here) http://www.kyyotesden.com/preseaon-prediction-challenge-championship/ and enter here http://kyyotesden.com/den/index.php?topic=5.0 to better prepare you for the Challenge.  We have talked before about lies, damned lies, and statistics so each of us can use the information as they see fit.

This time I looked at offense.  In particular, I looked at three areas, total offense, passing offense and scoring offense all over the past 4 seasons.  Some of you will immediately notice the missing rushing offense.  So, let me tell you why I chose the areas I did.  Total offense tells me how steady Kugler’s offense has been overall.  The scoring offense is where the rubber meets the road. The passing offense will tell me if the passing has changed much as I believe the passing offense is a key factor.  It tells me the rushing offense at the same time, but I already know Kugler is going to run on every down he can.

Let’s start with total offense.  The Miners have been amazingly consistent in this area over he past 4 years.  In the 2013-14 season the Miners averaged 347.9 yards a game, ranking them 103rd in the nation.  The next two seasons saw the team ranked 105 and 107 giving up 350.7 and 342.3 respectively. Last year UTEP battled back up to the 102nd ranked spot. But, as we saw when looking at the defensive side in my prior analysis, it isn’t how many yards that determines wins and losses.

The passing offense is  a bit of a mixed bag once you get past the fact that it is ranked very much toward the low end of yards per game average and yards per pass.  This is no surprise to Miners fans familiar with Kuglers offensive philosophy. In the 13-14 season UTEP was ranked 110.  The next year it changed to 118. The 2015-16 season saw it change somewhat dramatically to 94th ranked, 24 point difference.  The 2016-17 season saw the team return to the triple digits with a ranking of 103.  Now, I want to point out that this area also has little to do win wins and losses.  A team could certainly win every game without ever completing a forward pass-in theory.

So, here comes what I said is where the rubber meets the road.  It doesn’t determine wins and losses, either, but it may get a little closer.  I have to say that scoring offense is where we might get some clues. The 2013 campaign ranked the Miners scoring offense at 101., scoring 21.8 points a game. The next season it moved to 81 scoring 26.6 points per game.  The 2015=16 season saw it move right back the other way to a 112th ranking, scoring 20.7 points per game.  The, last season it was back 82nd rank, scoring 26.3 points a game.  Keep in mind that when you look at wins and losses, this doesn’t guarantee anything. What it does tell me is that during the past four seasons the scoring offense is perhaps the most subject to change.  For what it is worth.

So, there you have just a touch more information to help you as you think about the upcoming football season.

 

Ask yourself, what is a rival.  I think, if you get down to it, it is a competitor with an emotional connection. There are competitors who compete against each other without a thought about it other than winning, losing, technique, form and such.  They may not have ever met the competition before.  They are rivals in a seemingly distant way. There are one-sided rivalries in which one team regularly beats the other and the records are lopsided.  In these, the competitive event may mean little more than an opportunity for the two emotional sides to meet in battle.  Often, there is a regional component to these rivalries. Then there are rivalries that are competition based.  Rivalries can spring up overnight or they can grow slowly over decades.  Rivalries can sometimes develop around other things first and then be seen in competition and vice versa. The competition between El Paso and San Antonio is a whole lot older than football.  But, when UTEP and UTSA met of the football field it all had a focal point in competition.  So, here is my assignment for you to contemplate.  List in order and give your reasons why for your Top Three UTEP Miners rivals.  Post your list here on the Den message board http://kyyotesden.com/den/index.php?board=1.0 .

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