Dreaming of What Might Have Been
The MSU football season wrapped at 7:00 pm last Saturday evening, and I’m sure many of you who hadn’t already turned your focus to basketball by 5:45 pm did so by 7:01. But that will not stop us (or me, rather) from digging further into the stats from the 2024 season to pull out some nuggets to chomp on and regurgitate in hopes of tasting a few extra glimmers of positivity for the season that was and the ‘25 season that will be.
Thus I give you the Five Factors for MSU’s 2024 season! Ta daaaah! er. yeah. Anyhow.
Important things to remember:
- There are lots of reasons a game might be won or lost – at some point years ago someone recognized that these particular stats decently reflect the chance the scoreboard moves in your favor.
- Similarly trends don’t necessarily reflect on individual players, coaches, schemes.
- The stats primarily focus on the offensive side of the ball – how well our team is moving it irrespective of how well the other team is moving the football.
- I am a total homer, picked the Spartans to win every game this year, and did not care of the stats suggested I might be wrong.
- Don’t try to read the table on your phone – the layout is going to not work well for you. Don’t read on your phone anyways, you’ll strain your eyes and… (depending on where you’re reading) give yourself hemorrhoids.
The Numbers:
Lost in the formatting of the table above was that for the first 4 games of the season MSU dominated all explosiveness categories against their opponents, save passing vs BC. More surprising is that the Spartans had more Yards/Pass than their four middle opponents, Ohio State, Oregon, Iowa, and um, averaging more than 8 yards per attempt before that average tailed off with the final four matchups. Preseason, I imagine most fans would have happily taken that stat comparison and, turnovers aside, Aiden Chiles was actually looking like the QB we were hoping he’d be. Overlaying the Turnovers & Points per Drive chart we can see the turnovers spiking the averages. We all know about the offensive line depth challenges and thus could expect (and definitely saw) some drop-off through the season. That drop-off really manifested vs Indiana and beyond.
So looking at overall explosiveness for the season in the chart below, the trend lines make sense. Passing bowed up then down with the average yards per play generally flat, though trending down. The run game necessarily backstepped slightly against stronger competition and/or a greater opponent emphasis on stopping our run mid-season, before rushing trended slightly up towards the end.
One thing is clear, the team was able to cut down on turnovers (note the last INT against Rutgers was a toss by a true freshman throwing his one and only pass in his first playing time of the season). The inverse relationship with points per drive (PPD) is illuminating. The PPD dipped mid season – when coupled with the passing game momentum, the Spartans were driving the ball a bit – just not finishing with points. Early in the season the team was driving and scoring a mix of TDs and Field Goals. Late in the season – it was feast or famine – if the drive got going it scored. Unfortunately, most of the drives late in the year did not get going, as we can see in efficiency.
Yards per Drive and Percentage of Yards Gained both trended downward in lock step throughout the season. However, those trend lines don’t reflect the inconsistency of the game performances the way those camel humps do. Hit close to 50% efficiency and we’re winning the games. Unfortunately, the season trended towards 40% (and generously so, as I used the logarithmic fit for the aesthetics, instead of the polynomial – even though the latter is better for such fluctuations). The other part of that is, getting close to 50% of the yards, mixed with Jonathan Kim, means we’d often be walking away with at least three. If we can get that starting field position closer to 70 than 80, that kick becomes a lot cleaner.
Unfortunately, in only two games in 2024 did the Spartans’ average starting position put them at the 30 or beyond. Most of the season they spent not just playing from beyond kick-off touchback area, but in most games, even further back. I don’t know how much that extra bit of yardage, creating a slightly longer field plays into these players’ psyches – but not even getting a kickoff return across the 25 certainly hypes up a defense. With an even longer field in front of you the D-line starts pinning their ears back.
We know we have some valuable tools in the Special Teams box – but one area of focus for these guys in the ‘25 season ahead will hopefully be, not just the kicking game, but the return planning. The returns are a unique area of game planning because the plays typically aren’t mapped out beyond a certain distance. Instead they often rely on the individual returner to get to “the wall” or, “make the first man miss.” Good field position though, absolutely makes a difference. Meanwhile, bad field position can kill drives before they even get started.
Dale Young-Imagn Images
There’s a lot of ways to slice the data and a lot to be thankful for with 2024’s team and hopeful for with 2025’s. Looking at the charts – I’d like to see next year’s run and pass yards per play follow the same paths, not opposite. I do like that, offensively, the team actually did decently in the first halves of games against some of the toughest opponents (against OSU, the first four drives gabbed yards for 84.3% efficiency – in setting up the 5 factors I had to look at each drive). Really, so many of the games started strong – then turnovers or penalties or small errors led to the points not accumulating. Second halves lacked adjustments. The turnovers and penalties decreased with the season, the individual errors leading to backfield blowups… less so. The O-line will need work – we got a lot of great value out of Tanner Miller and Luke Newman. Lots of the younger guys like Stanton Ramil and Cooper Terpstra were thrown into the fray and will enter next year with more to prove alongside the guys returning from injury. If we can shore things up with a few additional transfers, see a new set of leaders emerge (and we somehow appease the AOLHG) the line could be in better shape than it’s been in years.
Kimberly P. Mitchell / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
I didn’t dig much into the defense for these stats, but the defensive backfield we know is injured, not broken. Brantley, Tatum, Martinez, and Spencer are all juniors (though Malik Spencer may opt for the League). The front 7 will have their own turnover but Jones, Thompson, and VanSumeren are all sophomores. Wayne Matthews III and Darius Snow are juniors, Jordan Hall is a sophomore, then I see a lot of inexperience in the LB corps (though have heard good things about Brady Pretzlaff).
We’ll see how the transfer portal plays out, regardless, the talent is there on this team (at least on the first line) to be successful in the modern B1G. The scheme has massively improved. The desire from the team leaders is there. How the staff navigates the Portal and NIL is yet to fully play out, though we had a few positives yesterday. With one year in the books for the Jonathan Smith tenure that was disappointing for most, sprinkled with a few surprises, but not excessively different from where the oddsmakers put us, I’m looking forward to the growth in store and seeing what 2025 holds.
Go Green
Rick Osentoski-Imagn Images