I spent most of Saturday morning doing the research and Sunday morning writing and taking a look at figures. Let’s dive in.

Advanced Stats

This first one is simplistic and doesn’t take a ton of explanation. The 2023 team was better than last year by pretty much every metric. Basically, 28 or so to about 45 or so in terms of ranking.

2022 Offense vs. 2023 Offense

Now we’re starting to dig a bit. I always run the numbers each week, largely from Sharp Football and the deep dive function on each program. Let’s start at the top and go clockwise. The FEI and Sharp Football numbers are overall numbers for the offense, the 2022 offense was largely spots better in 2022 than in 2023. The Drive Efficiency was also significantly better in 2022, the 2022 team was darn near elite at it despite the rotation of quarterbacks. The same thing goes true for explosive drives, the 2023 version is 90th and the 2022 version was 55th. Each play was also more efficient in 2022, not by a ton, but by some. Negative drives are essentially a wash.

Where things get fun is the effective rush, remember, this is how effective, not how much the team ran for the ball. The effective rush was basically the same despite trying to run the ball more. The offense wasn’t more effective as a result of that earnest attempt to run the ball.

The big outlier in this entire graph is that the pass was significantly more effective in 2023 and so the question is why is the 2022 offense so much better than in 2023? Slingin’ that rock is the only reason. Offenses are in an age of passing the ball and to revert back to those of you that just want to run the darn ball, it’s actually counter-intuitive to a successful offense. We can talk about why the pass offense wasn’t as good, that’s fine, but the reality is that those of you that want to run the ball like this year will have a worse and less effective offense in 2024 if that continues.

This chart doesn’t change a ton, but it is indicative that the 3rd down conversion rate was better in 2023, but not by a huge margin. And we can also say that the disruptive play allowed was better in 2023 and when you run the ball as much as you did in 2023 you’re not going to have as many disruptive plays. The offensive line was likely better in 2023, but I think the lack of disruptive plays was a running the ball thing more than anything else. I don’t think the line was that much better. The offensive line allowed 23 sacks in 2023 and 41 in 2022. To take into account pass attempts, that’s 1 sack for every 13.87 attempts in 2022 (569 passing attempts) and 1 sack for every 18.52 attempts in 2023 (426 passing attempts).

2022 Defense vs. 2023 Defense

Now we are in on the defense and we’ll start at the top and go clockwise. The overall result was the same for the most part, the 2023 defense was just slightly better by both FEI and Sharp. The drive efficiency was better in 2022, which it was elite in 2022, while limiting the explosive drives was significantly better in 2023. The general take away here is that the defense was better at limiting drive efficiency in 2022, but better at limiting explosive drives in 2023. And with the strength of the defense being the interior of the line, it makes sense that the 2023 defense is better.

Negative drives are a wash and the effective rush and effective pass are also a bit of a wash relative to each other.

I don’t like either of these 3rd rates for either year. That’s the back half of this metric. This is an area that needs work. The negative plays created definitely dropped in 2023 and it was clear that Tyree Wilson was a dude and Texas Tech has to be better about creating negative plays. Texas Tech was 94th in 2023 (31 total) and 42nd in 2022 (22 total), in tackles for loss the 2023 team was 106th (57 total) and in 2022 20th (92 total), and in interceptions 58th in 2023 while 68th in 2022 (both years it was 10 picks).

Conclusion

I’ll get to the defense first, which is that despite different parts, the defense largely had a similar result. The defense is going to have to figure out a way to create more negative plays, I think that will help and Tyree Wilson was a unicorn, so not expecting a similar player, but McGuire should also not claim that current players are on the level of a unicorn. There will be a lot of pieces that get replaced in 2024 so those young players will have to step up and play.

The offense is a different matter. Objectively, the offense was worse and it was because it was a “run the damn ball” attitude. Texas Tech cannot expect a better offense or even a good offense if they continue to want to be a running offense. If you want a better team in 2023 you should hope that Kittley is given free reign to have a more open offense that’s not centered around running the ball. And before you say, “Good thing Will Hammond arrives and will save the day.” please list all of the true freshman quarterbacks who lit up and led a top 20 offense on a team similar to Texas Tech? Hammond is a fantastic prospect, he seriously is, but you would expect a significant regression if he were to start. Hammond has a huge arm, but this past year he was extremely interception prone, 35 touchdowns and 14 picks this past year, compared to 30 touchdowns and just 5 picks his junior year. Turnovers are an absolute killer for offenses and if you are hoping for anything, hope that Behren Morton makes the progression that a sophomore makes to his junior year.

It was also reported on Sunday that Zach Kittley and Kenny Perry interviewed for the UTEP position and so of the twitter comments were “good” and I’d caution you to be careful what you wish for. Kittley isn’t perfect, no doubt about that, but if McGuire goes more towards “running the damn ball” type of offense then you can probably expect further offensive regression. I don’t think that McGuire would do this, I think he and his staff are smart enough to pull the stats and look at last year to this year and the win-loss results are different and it’s clear that it’s largely because of the lack of a passing offense because the net results of the defense are essentially the same.

McGuire said that he wants a tough offense and you don’t need to run the ball to be tough. A tough offense can be a spread offense, whether it is receivers blocking the ball, but the offense has to open up in 2023.