Todd Grantham is an enigma. He’s easily the most accomplished coordinator Dan Mullen has ever hired in his time at Mississippi State — but Grantham seemed to wear out his welcome at his two previous jobs (Louisville and Georgia). This is an analysis of how his defenses have performed historically and if “3rd and Grantham” is fact or fiction.

Past Performance

Below are some fairly dense tables. These are the most important traditional team defensive stats that are readily available: (from left to right in table, not ordered by importance)

Points allowed per game, Yards per rush, Yards per play, Opponent completion percentage, Third down conversion percentage, Redzone scoring percentage, Takeaways per game, Sack percentage

The last two columns are overall defensive rank metrics (“Relative rank” and “Defense S&P+”). Both of them should give a rough feel for how good a defense is and how it would rank overall nationally.

“Relative rank” uses a weighted formula using all of the listed ranks in the table:

Relative_rank = 33% Points allowed per game 22% Takeaways/game 12% 3rd down conversion 8% Yards/play and Completion rate each 5% Yards/rush, Redzone scoring, Sack rate each

Relative rank is weighed heavily towards points allowed and forced turnovers. These two metrics compose over half of the formula.

“Defensive S&P+” is a metric from Football Outsiders that ranks overall team defense.

All statistics are parsed from teamrankings.com (sadly for Peter Sirmon, the Samford game is not accounted for in the Miss St team stats; no FBS vs FCS games are included). “Hi/Low drop” is an average of all defenses excluding the best and worst performing defense. This is used to cut outliers and provide a more precise sample.

For the full spreadsheet, click here (I also include Ole Miss defensive tables for reference).

Grantham’s Collegiate Defenses:

Mississippi State Defenses Since 2010:

General Observations

Grantham consistently has good rush defenses (especially at Louisville). His career yards per rush is only 3.6 which is impressive because he faced some impressive running backs at both Louisville and Georgia (his defense held Dalvin Cook to only 54 yards last season).

In 7 seasons, he’s fielded five top-25 caliber defenses including three in the top-15

Comparing Grantham to Sirmon is a waste of time (one exception being Georgia’s 2013 defense, I explain below); most of the comparisons I make will be to Miss St defenses not coordinated by Simron.

Grantham, for his career, has had a good-to-elite defense about every two years

Objectively, Grantham fielded much better defenses at Louisville over Georgia (S&P+ avg of 17 vs 26, and a more pronounced difference of 25 to 44 in relative rank). The caveat is that Charlie Strong had a top-10 defense the year preceding Grantham’s arrival, and Strong did not leave the cupboard bare.

Georgia fans have a reason to dislike Grantham, Louisville fans do not. Georgia had two very good defenses with Grantham (2011 and 2012, both years they made the SEC championship), but in Grantham’s other two years at UGA, the results were quite bad. His first year at UGA, Georgia had a mediocre defense and in 2013, UGA had a defense on par with the Miss St defense from 2016 under Sirmon (Relative Rank: UGA 2013: 79th, Miss St 2016: 72nd). From the UGA perspective in 2o13, they went from having back-to-back SEC championship teams (losing closely to Alabama in 2012) with their senior QB returning for the 2013 season, and the defense under-performs immensely.

Compared to past “Mullen defenses” (not under Sirmon), Grantham has a higher points allowed career average than Mullen generally allows at Miss St (Miss St: 22.5, Grantham: 24.0). Conversely, Grantham tends to not allow many yards (career avg 4.8 yards per play, ranked ~27th).

The other negative discrepancy I see with Grantham is that his Redzone defense seems fairly poor (avg career rank: 62nd) compared to what Mullen normally fields (avg career rank: 30th).

The thing I’m excited about is that Grantham always has an attacking defense and consistently has a high performing pass rush (avg career rank: 20th). I expect we’ll see a noticeable difference in the fall — Grantham knows how to generate pass rush from his 3-4 scheme.

“3rd and Grantham”

Not to be confused with “3rd and Dak” (two completely different references). 3rd and Grantham is a term coined by the Georgia faithful to describe when a Grantham defense allows the opposition to convert third and longs regularly (“3rd and Dak” refers to 3rd and short when absolutely everyone knew Dan Mullen would call QB power with Dak running up the middle). “3rd and Grantham” can be attributed to a few things: