How Much Has Arkansas' Defense Actually Improved?
Guest writer Matt Turner breaks down the Arkansas Defense's performance on the year
Welcome to Friday’s edition of Pig Tales! This is a special two part edition that will feature a guest writer! I’m really excited for this, as I think it’ll add an element to Pig Tales that hasn’t been there yet. If you haven’t though, please consider taking a moment to subscribe:
Welcome to Part 1 of our new series— Stat Showdown. Stat Showdown will be a recurring series in which my dear friend, logistical engineer, and major data-head Matt Turner will break down the statistical side of a question while I examine if the context and eye test of that question show the same results. In the world of modern football, I (controversially) think you can do both, so we’re going to do both!
Arkansas’ defense has been a lot of things this year— some good, some bad, some ugly. Before we face a Death Star offense in Alabama, I thought it would be worthwhile asking the question that may or may not have been on your mind this year: Is Arkansas’ defense actually improved, and if so, by how much?
In Part 1, Matt will examine the stat side of things, while in Part 2, I’ll examine the context of the stats and see if I even agree with the numbers (I probably do, because allegedly numbers never lie).
Part 2 will come later tonight so as to not destroy your inbox, but in the meantime, enjoy some advanced analytics.
With that, let’s talk Hogs, and welcome Matt Turner to the newsletter.
To start, I want to give you some perspective on where this is coming from. The early season narrative in 2020 was that the defense won us 2 games, with the shocking shutdown of Mississippi State, just one week after their historic offensive performance against LSU. Then, we saw the epic meltdown of Matt Corral and his 6 picks just a couple of weeks later. Since then, it has been rough going for the defense that once had Barry Odom in the assistant of the year conversation. After I had cooled off from that 4th quarter collapse in Columbia, I sat down and thought, “Has this defense actually improved from the historic lows of the Morris/Chavis led group the last two years?”
That led me to do a quick summation of the last three years to see if there is tangible improvement in basic defensive stats. Total points and yards are not the best stats to determine success, as a lot of outside factors can cause those stats to inflate or deflate, which can be misleading. We will talk about some better stats below, but this is a good starting point to talk about the places we look eerily similar to 2018 and 2019, and where we have clearly improved. For the sake of this exercise, I combined 2 games into one in 2020 since we have only played 9 conference games:
Looking at the totals in conference games from the last 3 years, can you guess which year is which? Once you look at individual game scores and back to all those blowouts over the last two years, you may be able to guess pretty easily, but the point is that you can’t just look at the totals of yards and points and immediately see which year is 2020, the year with a supposedly improved defense. Now lets look at a few things to see if this is trend is worrisome or not:
Not all stats are on the same playing field when it comes to evaluating a team. The first example of this is that the 2020 team has had to play 4 quarters in almost every game. Most games in 2018 and 2019 were decided at halftime or at the end of the 3rd quarter. That hasn’t been the case very often this year.
Just look at all that red in the 2018 and 2019 games. The absence of red in 2020 really speaks to the amazing improvement we have seen overall this year. In the Morris years, 7 out of 16 conference games had us losing by 3 or more scores at halftime with 9 games featuring that margin or worse at the end of the 3rd quarter. Only one game was decided at halftime this year (Florida), and only 3 have been done in the third (the Florida game, A&M, and Georgia). The takeaway here is that teams could just coast to end games against the Chavis defenses, whereas this year we have rarely seen teams step off the gas, as most games weren’t out of hand. If the games had been closer, the ’18 and ’19 stats would likely be much worse, on top of what was already historically bad. That improvement is massive, and one of the many reasons you can’t look solely at points and yards, or you’ll miss game changing stats.
Another game changing stat that isn’t included when you’re just looking at points and yards is Forced Turnovers. Turnovers are a weird stat to look at when evaluating a defense, because while turnovers are game changing plays, they are very inconsistent, and hard to predict for even the best defenses. The main point? You cannot rely on turnovers to be a good defense. With that said, you only get turnovers if your defensive players are in the right spots. Arkansas did make its bread and butter with turnovers in 2020. We had 6 turnovers in SEC play in 2018, and 9 in 2019. This year through 9 games we have 16. That early season flurry of picks helped us get in the win column, but were occuring at an unsustainable clip. As the season has continued, and the turnovers have dried up, we’ve seen that much. It’s clear that this was a turnover dependent defense. Players are in the right spots, which is good, but as I said, you can’t rely on that.
The last aspect I wanted to examine is a pretty general look at how much resistance we gave opponents through each year. The way I want to do this is by looking at how often our opponents got in position to score, and how long it took them to get there.
Here are the drive results over the last 3 years— the results could not be clearer. I know it’s frustrating giving up a lot of points. I have been frustrated plenty of times this year too, but the defense is still vastly improved from the catastrophic lows of the Chavis days. When we do give up TDs, our opponents actually have to work for it. 2019 had 19(!!!) short touchdowns (5 plays or less) given up. That fact, combined with getting more punts in every drive type, and the turnovers we discussed above have turned one of the worst defenses in college football into….well still a bad defense, but progress!
Barry Odom deserves a lot of credit, especially with the lack of talent on the roster. This defense is performing better than the 2018 team that had 6 starters end up on NFL rosters in the next two years. We always knew this was going to be a tough rebound, and were all made optimistic by the start of the season, but now is the time for patience. We need to appreciate the legitimate improvement this team has made, even when the final scores are still sometimes ugly. Things may not always look great, but the defense is trending in the right direction.
Thanks so much for reading this edition of Pig Tales. Thank you to Matt Turner for stopping by to provide these stats and analysis. I truly couldn’t have done it without him. Part 2 will be coming later tonight! In the meantime, leave us a comment and let us know what you think about the defense. Is Barry Odom the answer? As always, be sure to share this wherever you can!
Stay safe, stay healthy, and go Hogs!