Jake Maier Dances Around a Porous Offensive Line, as the Ags win Wire to Wire

Last weekend, the UC Davis Football Team marched north to Portland Oregon, one of the country’s most lax municipalities when it comes to nudity. Is it any wonder then the Aggies came away streaking? (rim shot). In all seriousness though, Davis has won its last two contests, and that’s meaningful for a program one might describe as historically beleaguered. Remember that timeline I showed you a few weeks ago? Let’s revisit that for further context.

You read that right, my friends. The last time this program won two in a row was November of 2013 when they defeated arch rival Sacramento State (boo Sac State!). This streak coincides with some rare national media attention from ESPN. Does correlation equal causation? My gut tells me no, and perhaps people just like stories about cute animals doing people things (empirically verified), but regardless everything is coming up Davis as the undergraduates head back to school next week. Let’s revisit the blowout and analyze how we got here.

Blips Don’t Lie

Last week we found measures of central tendency, like average yards per pass play, weren’t indicative of the Aggies’ true performance on offense. Rather, those gaudy numbers were driven by explosive outliers that masked an otherwise fairly inefficient offense. What about this week?

The box score says Quarterback Jake Maier was 24 of 32 passing — 75% — for 316 yards, three touchdowns, no interceptions, and only one sack. Holy cow that is an excellent stat line! It would be a shame if it didn’t hold up to further scrutiny. Before the grand reveal, let’s check to see how the Davis rushing attack fared in this game. As a unit, Davis ran the ball 45 times, for 3.9 yards per rush. That statistic is less overwhelming from an efficiency standpoint. (Remember, last week we defined efficiency per Football Outsiders as gaining 50% of needed yards on first down, 70% on second down, and 100% on third and fourth downs). If your average rush is netting you under four yards, that’s not a promising way to stay on schedule and move the chains.

No matter, we don’t trust the box score anyway right? Right! Let’s see what really happened in this game.

That looks…pretty good! Unlike last week, this is how you want your customary blowout to look. As you can see from these distributions, while both teams had a fair number of their plays go for just a few yards, Davis’ rushing and passing distributions are more widely distributed than Portland’s, indicating their plays generated more yards more frequently. Not only that, but those long right tails you see on Davis’ pass plays mean the Aggie offense once again, generated more explosive plays than the opponent’s. This week’s explosiveness cutoff (one standard deviation above the average of all yards created per play) was 13.84. To really make the point, here’s the same visualization with this week’s explosive play cutoff visualized for you.

Your eyes do not deceive you. In this contest, a full quarter of Davis’ pass plays were explosive. Consider only 20.9% of all of Portland’s plays met this week’s explosiveness criteria, and it becomes apparent that this time the box score is a fair representation of what actually happened in this game: the Ags dominated. “But!” you protest, “Last week you said efficiency is more important than explosiveness because it’s a more reliable metric!” To you, discerning reader, I say you are absolutely right. However, this week we have the opposite problem of last week.

Last week, an extremely explosive offense masked a fairly inefficient offense. This week, an explosive offense is masking a more efficient one!

This week the Aggie offense was on schedule 46.25% of the time, which isn’t amazing, but it is an improvement over last week’s 45.6%, and puts them closer to the national average of about 48%. By comparison, Portland managed to stay on schedule only 41.6% of the time, a differential of nearly 5 percentage points. As I mentioned last week, a team that exceeds its opponent’s on schedule rate by five percentage points goes on to win the game 76.2% of the time. Therefore, this time around, the Aggies’ explosiveness came as a corollary to their efficiency, rather than in spite of it. That’s a more reliable way to run a successful offense and is an encouraging sign.

It’s also worth stepping away from the efficiency conversation to mention that Portland just didn’t have a reliable way to score points in this game. Its passing attack, led by Jalani Eason, completed under 50% of its passes for 99 yards total…yes total. In addition, Portland was zero for three on point after attempts (essentially chip shot field goals) coming into this game, and one quickly realizes that Portland really didn’t have a way to generate points either by landing in the end zone, or by putting it through the uprights. This discussion will lead into next week when we turn to the final of the five factors: the ability to finish drives with points, or ‘green zone offense’ as I’ll be calling it.

However, the Aggies didn’t do everything well in this game. The improved efficiency of the Aggies’ offensive attack, subverts the efficacy of Portland’s sound defensive game plan.

Showing Some Love for the Other Side of the Ball

Remember in week one, I told you that Aggie Quarterback Jake Maier was a superior passer given a clean pocket to throw from, and a fairly average one when under pressure. Recall also, I defined pressure as any time the Quarterback was hurried, hit, or sacked by a defender while attempting to pass from the pocket. It seems the Portland State coaching staff was aware of this disparity in metrics as well, and decided to send pressure at Maier all day long.

This is sound defensive strategy, when it works. The thing is that it did.

The Portland State front seven consistently sent pressure at Maier, and that pressure got home. Of particular concern was that Davis Left Tackle Kyle Sulka, done got his lunch ate by his defensive counterparts. Sulka got better as the game went along, but as you can see, on the Aggie’s first offensive drive, pressure coming from the left side of the offensive line got to Maier a whopping six times. This potential weakness of the Aggie offense is something to watch in the weeks ahead.

Now, you may have noticed that two of the plots seem at odds with one another. On this heat map, we see the Maier was under pressure almost constantly on the first drive. However, on the efficiency plot, we also saw that the Aggies’ first drive was one of their longest, and resulted in a made field goal. How to reconcile these apparently dissonant facts?

Well unlike the San Diego State game, Maier was masterful under pressure in this matchup. Time and again, as pressure arrived on his doorstep, he either scrambled for an efficient average gain of 5.2 yards, or he stepped up through the pressure and delivered accurate passes to keep the offense on schedule. It was actually remarkable how ambivalent he was to Portland defenders breathing down his neck on a near constant basis. The numbers further demonstrate Maier’s unflappability.

It’s worth taking a moment to explain what we’re looking at here because this is a somewhat nuanced plot. On the x axis we have the play from scrimmage, with the yards generated from that play on the y axis, basically your run of the mill scatter plot. The wrinkle here is I’ve added two linear regression lines that show Maier’s average yards per pass, based on whether he was under pressure or not. In statistics, this is a way of displaying an interaction effect between two variables, in this case, the interaction between yards and pressure.

The key takeaway here is the slopes of these two regression lines are not significantly different from one another. We can tell that on sight, but we also see the silhouettes, representing the standard errors around the lines, intersect one another across the full range of plays. This means that though there might be slight differences in Maier’s performance under pressure, most of that difference likely stems from random statistical noise or sampling error. In essence, the plot tells us that Maier was just as good under pressure in this game as he was with a clean pocket.

So, even the points of caution in this game are actually causes for celebration. Yes, the offensive line submitted a performance that Seattle Seahawks’ Quarterback, Russell Wilson, would find familiar,

I hate you Russell Wilson

but Maier was so good in this game it didn’t matter. I guess this is how a blowout is supposed to feel though. Your team’s strengths were so overpowering to the opponent, that any shortcomings just come out in the wash, leaving pessimistic bloggers like myself with little to complain about. Except…

What about Special Teams?

Okay, okay I know, I should have just put this win in my back pocket and been content for the week, but that’s not what we do here. Remember last week I mentioned the Aggies won despite losing the field position battle? That is, they tended to start drives further from their opponent’s end zone, and had to work harder than the opponent to score on offense as a result. Well that was also better this week, with Davis having to drive an average of 66 yards to reach the end zone, compared to Portland needing nearly 79, but much of that was influenced by Davis blocking two of Portland’s punts, and Portland turning the ball over on downs and via a fumble. When we look at just the kicking game, things don’t look quite as rosy.

If there’s one thing the Aggies definitely did worse than their opponent, it was on special teams kicking and kick coverage. Portland State’s kickoffs, on average, pinned the Aggies nearly 20 yards deeper than vice versa. Conversely, Davis was actually better by about 3 yards when it came to punting, however Matt Blair’s first punt of the game only netted 22 yards in total, and perhaps as a result Coach Hawkins twice faked going for it on fourth down, only to have Maier (as in the Quarterback) pooch punt the ball instead. This decision actually worked out for Hawkins because Maier’s punts netted average distances of 39.5 yards, versus 31 yards on punts off Blair’s foot. That’s right my friends, I’m conjecturing Davis may have a punting problem going forward. This may seem like nitpicking, but we’ve already discussed last week that field position actually matters a great deal when it comes to winning football games.

Ending on a Happy Note

I need to end by giving some love to Davis’ defensive unit as well. Though the front seven allowed the Portland running game to reach the secondary several times, the Davis secondary was more than game for the challenge. In one on one coverage, Davis cornerbacks repeatedly broke up passes that would have found the hands of Portland wide receivers. On top of that, Davis safety, Ryan Parenteau was everywhere in this game, leading the team with eight tackles and haunting the nightmares of Portland’s freshman punter by blocking not one, but two of his kick attempts. One of those blocked punts resulted in a Davis player scooping up the ball and taking it to the end zone for six points, so one could say Parentau contributed in all three phases of the game.

Coming Up

The Aggies head west next week to face conference rival Weber State, which I learned this week is in the state of Utah. Who knew?!