By the Numbers

Offense

Well so much for the balanced offense that Kelly ran the last two games.  The Irish passed on 69.14% of their plays and passed on 100% of all of their red zone plays.  Now granted, the Irish still had success on offense for the most part, having 7.07 yards/pass, Crist having a 58.18% completion rate, and scoring on all their red zone visits with the only FG coming in their OT drive.

However, the thing that boggles my mind is that the rushing game wasn’t exactly dead.  3.54 yards/rush is the lowest of the season to this point, but that is far from saying the rushing game was completely ineffective.  Considering that we still have a very young QB in Crist, who, make no mistake, is still showing his inaccuracy quite often, why not help the kid out a bit more and put the ball on the ground a few more times?  I’m all for leaning on the pass if it works, but going towards one side of the play chart damn near 70% of the time worries me, especially with such a young QB.

Add on to that, and we now have a three game trend in which the Irish have steadily moved away from the run while running more plays.  Purdue saw 33 rushes on 62 plays, Michigan faced 31 rushes on 76 plays, and finally Michigan state only had 25 rushes on 81 plays.  To no surprise, our rushing yards have also drastically declined with the Irish having 205, 154, and 92 rushing yards respectively.  The rushing average has also dropped from 5.69 to 4.81 to 3.54.

So are we seeing an decreasingly effective rushing game yet again this season or is Kelly just completely married to the pass?  Even with Allen’s hand injury, he was still tearing off some good runs all the way up until OT.  This will definitely be something to monitor next week against Stanford whose passing defense is currently ranked #1 in the nation.

Of course, the only thing that sticks out like a sore thumb more than the play calling patterns is the number of penalties and turnovers in this game.  The Irish had three fumbles, losing two, along with an INT and a failed fourth down attempt.  Want another disturbing pattern?  Turnovers from the last three games: 1, 3, and 4.  Ouch.  Continuing on disturbing patterns, how about the penalties: 2 for 15 yards, 4 for 29 yards, and last week 7 for 70 yards. Double ouch.

I’m sure hoping that this game was a huge case of nerves on the road because a team getting sloppier with ball security and becoming increasingly less disciplined as the season goes on really, really scares the ever living hell out of me.

Defense

The big test for the Irish defense was how well they’d hold up against the rushing attack of Michigan State.  While Sparty did manage over 200 yards on the ground and over 4 yards/carry, it was definitely marked improvement from getting torched by Michigan Denard Robinson last week.

The crazy part about the game though was that Michigan State did not lean heavily on the run during the game as they had a damn near 50/50 split on run/pass with one more running play called than passing.  To continue the trend of “I sure didn’t see that coming”, ND allowed the most passing yards all season in this game with 274.  Yards/pass was also the highest in this game at 7.21.  And yes, all those numbers have been steadily trending upward these last three games, but what hasn’t is the number of passing attempts against the Irish.  Here is the passing trend the last three games:

	Purude	Michigan	Michigan State
Passing Plays	46	40	34
Passing Yards	220	244	274
Yards/Pass	4.78	6.10	7.21

Our secondary holes are showing.  Here’s hoping the return of Slaughter will help tighten these numbers up a bit because this trend absolutely cannot continue.

There are still some encouraging numbers from the defense though.  ND forced the Spartans into 4 three-and-outs in their 14 drives and red zone scoring was 50%.  One of those red zone trips was of course the only turnover in the game with the INT and the other was a one play attempt by Michigan State in OT which was a sack.

The overall effort was far from stellar, but there are still some bright spots to be found.

Crazy Stat That Probably Means Nothing

I’m not sure if I’ll do this every week, but anytime I see something like this, I’m going to bring it up.

The Irish are now 0-2 this season in games that share one absolutely crazy similarity: total game time.  Both the Michigan and Michigan State games lasted for 3 hours and 37 minutes.

The one Irish win came in a quick game time of 3 hours and 1 minute against Purdue.

So uh…cheer for a quick game?