Latest / The Jake Wimberly Podcast / Kelley Ford discusses his special teams ratings.

Transcript

Kelley Ford discusses his special teams ratings. · The Jake Wimberly Podcast

• 0:00
  I want to talk start off with an infograph you put out last week on
• 0:03
  special teams. Since during the college football playoff era, on average, San
• 0:06
  Diego State has had the best special teams units per your power rankings, And
• 0:11
  just to kind of give some context to this, san Diego State won Stanford
• 0:14
  to Florida three. This is you know, obviously through the college football playoff
• 0:19
  era about twenty fourteen up last ten years, A and M, Memphis,
• 0:23
  Tennessee, Auburn, Ohio State, Kansas State, and Iowa. So,
• 0:26
  but my question for you is this is have you seen a situation where and
• 0:30
  look, we always hear coaches talk about three phases of the game offense,
• 0:33
  defense, special teams to where a bad special team's number may be kept a
• 0:38
  team out, or maybe even a good one pushed the team in. No,
• 0:43
  I don't think so, Jake, at least as far as what I've
• 0:46
  been able to determine, you know, going back through the last ten years
• 0:49
  of data that I've had access to to generate these power ratings for both the
• 0:53
  offensive units, defensive units, and then the special teams units you talked about
• 0:56
  here. Special teams is certainly the unit of those three that carries the least
• 1:00
  amount of weight, and it makes perfect sense because that's the unit that's on
• 1:03
  the field by far the least. I mean, you're talking about a half
• 1:07
  a dozen to a dozen plays a game for any specific special teams unit,
• 1:11
  whether that's you know, your punt team, your punt return team, and
• 1:14
  then obviously to kick off the kick return team. And with some of the
• 1:17
  rules changes I've gone in place and limiting the number of kick returns, it's
• 1:19
  been even fewer in recent years. So special teams is a very very small
• 1:25
  component of my power ratings to something that I've spent a pretty good amount of
• 1:27
  time on the last two or three off seasons now trying to fine tune exactly
• 1:33
  how much weight that holds. But to put it in kind of the perspective
• 1:36
  of what does a special team's unit rating meme with regard to the overall team
• 1:42
  power rating? At most, if you have a really, really really good
• 1:46
  special teams unit, IOWA in recent years comes to mind. South Carolina's had
• 1:49
  really good special teams here the last year or two, they're probably worse at
• 1:55
  most, you know, two, maybe two and a half point to a
• 2:00
  team's power rating overall on a football point per game basis. So if you
• 2:04
  have a power rating of thirty, that's going to be you know, in
• 2:07
  the top five, certainly the top ten nationally in any given year. If
• 2:10
  you have two points of that associated to your special teams, your special teams
• 2:15
  is really really good. So this is a small percentage of the overall team
• 2:17
  power rating. I don't think that special teams in and of itself has been
• 2:23
  a reason that a team's gotten in or a reason that a team's been kept
• 2:25
  out. Iowa is probably the most prolific example with regard to their defense and
• 2:30
  their special teams combined over the course of the last five or ten years,
• 2:34
  with how they've really carried that program as a whole, with the offense being
• 2:38
  as bad as it's been, because the defense and to a lesser degree,
• 2:40
  special teams have been so good, that's gotten Iowa over the hump. In
• 2:45
  the Big Ten West. Of course, they've done away with divisions almost across
• 2:47
  college football entirely. We still have the Sun Belt holding out with divisions,
• 2:51
  but other than that, divisions are gone. So that doesn't necessarily mean as
• 2:54
  much moving forward that Big Ten West title, if you will, since it
• 2:58
  doesn't exist, But probably the example of a team that had a really good
• 3:01
  special teams unit that helped propel it on the field with regard to win loss
• 3:06
  record, maybe more than anybody else here in the last ten years.