Wisconsin Football vs. Washington State Analytics Recap
Initial Analytics breakdown of the Badgers and their Week 2 Performance vs. the Washington State Cougars.
There’s not much to say about Wisconsin football and their week 2 performance vs. Washington State. They didn’t do enough to get the job done, with strikingly poor performances in two key areas in the first half.
First, the O-Line protection and, more specifically, the protection from the LT spot led to 2 strip-sacks. One didn’t hurt us, but the other led to a TD. Ultimately, the killer obviously is it took away OUR ability to score the football on two possessions.
The second area was the defense, which seemed completely out of sorts dealing with Washington State’s up-tempo offense. That discombobulation manifested in two areas. One was a complete lack of pressure early on. The second was through blown coverages on the back end due to seemingly miscommunication?!? It had to be because in the second half, we cleaned that up for all but one drive. It happened that drive was the final nail in the coffin for UW.
Offensively, we struggled to run the ball. With 3.1 YPA and -0.02 EPA/Play, to put that in reference, against Buffalo that was 8.0 YPA and 0.35 EPA/Play. I’m interested to see how Washington State defended UW from a Men-In-Box perspective, but it seemed to me they were loading it pretty heavily based on our personnel. I’ll dive deeper into that when that data is live until now, we can only assume. But given how successful the PA/RPO Passing game was, I think it shows WSU’s game plan was to get beat through the air!
Talking playcalling, let’s dive into the analytics…
Play Call Distribution (All Game):
We can see that our PA/RPO game wasn’t extremely pronounced all game. But once you split these by half, it really shows how much we left on the table in the first half of this ball game. At least from an offensive standpoint.
Now, on first down, it looks as though the PA/RPO game wasn’t that successful on an EPA/Play basis. But when you look at how successful it was on 2nd & 3rd down, it really shows how impactful it can be when your opponent is trying to take away the rushing attack.
But how much of a difference was there in the PA/RPO game from half to half?