Graphing the SEC, 2023 Week 5

For data definitions and disclaimers, take a look at my rundown in the first article in this series: Graphing the SEC, 2023 Week 1

The W/L column in this is mostly predictable, with all of the W’s towards the top and all of the L’s towards the bottom. Of course the teams that win these games are most often the efficient ones!

But the only row marring this otherwise-immaculate trend in Week 5 is the LSU Tigers, who managed to lose at Ole Miss while literally leading the SEC in efficiency. That’s bizarre, but it looks like 3rd downs and turnovers are culprits at play here.

Other notes:

• Ole Miss, for their part, managed to win a shootout with “only” 49% SR (still a pretty high efficiency) against LSU’s 62%. 3rd downs giveth, in this case.
• Alabama’s offense rounded out the top-middle handful here: there were lots of 49-51% SRs this week, so you could call us anywhere from ~3rd to ~10th in the SEC. This chart is also sorted on the opponent’s SR, though, so we slipped behind a few other defenses and landed at 6 here.
• Speaking of defense, we did managed to plant Mississippi State into the bottom three in the list, with their low 33% SR (which I believe filters out garbage time).
• Auburn and Georgia were both middling-to-poor, in what became a boring game where Georgia won again simply by throwing the ball vaguely in the vicinity of TE Brock Bowers.
• For all of the Kentucky hype, they weren’t particularly efficient. Florida was worse but only by 7 percentage points.
• Oklahoma looks efficient across several weeks now (though yeah they’re playing in the Big 12 still ... not that I know what the conferences actually are like this year)
• Texas was respectably efficient — similar to the Tide — against Kansas, but the real key there is that their defense held Kansas to a horrid 23% SR. That’s not an SEC opponent but it’s the lowest SR in this table (and is technically a Power 5 team).

And onto the Explosiveness table ...

Vandy tops this list! Hahahaha. (No, Vandy, you don’t get the image feature.)

• The LSU at Ole Miss mystery from the efficiency chart above is solved in this chart: Ole Miss was much more explosive than LSU, putting up the second highest efficiency in the SEC this week.
• In Graphing the Tide this week, Alabama seemed to be improving in explosiveness week over week. Unfortunately, that XR (Explosiveness Rate, aka rate of plays that gained 15+ yards) is a kinder metric to Alabama this week than this isoPPP metric is. When we actually consider how explosive those plays were, as we are here, Bama lands towards the bottom of this list.
• On the same token, Mississippi State was actually top 6 in explosiveness, and had an argument to be seen as top 4. But this may be another effect of the “only (few) successful plays count” effect that we saw in Week 2.
• Tennessee is back at the bottom of this list somehow; each week they’re at different spots in this list. We know they’re able to be explosive sometimes, that they’re somewhat explosive at other times ... and now we know that they can manage to win while being incredibly unexplosive.
• Georgia threw the ball near Bowers on every single 3rd down and got a nice spot in the explosiveness table as a reward for this dynamic gameplan.
• Texas A&M beat Arkansas on respectable efficiency (again, the same as Alabama’s against Miss State), but at least were even less explosive than the Tide in their win. Let’s hope they’re similarly unexplosive next week.

Holler with any other observations; there are a lot in these tables. Roll Tide!