Part II | Part III

Regardless of what happens to Michigan State against Penn State next weekend or in its bowl game, the 2008 season is one of the Spartans’ most successful in recent memory. Not only is State winning games, but the team is slowly shedding its reputation for inconsistent play and the tendency to blow winnable games, especially late in the season. You know: Same Old Spartans.

This is the first in a series of posts that will look at Michigan State over the last six seasons: John L. Smith’s four-year run and Mark Dantonio’s 2007 and 2008 seasons. The idea is to see if there’s been a meaningful change in Michigan State’s play or if this has been a fluke year of good fortune and bad opponents. That’s right: despite my intense dislike of math, I’ve decided to play with stats. So something really rewarding and meaningful had better come out of it.

As a first step, let’s look at how well Michigan State controls ball movement. Total yardage seems like a good indicator of a team’s performance because the goal of almost every play in a football game is yardage. The offense wants to move down the field and the defense wants to stop that advance. It also makes sense that the team that is most successful at gaining yards should win the game most of the time.

In the John L. Smith era, though, the correlation between yardage and winning isn’t that strong. In fact, it’s alarmingly unstrong. We can survey the damage as soon as you trudge through the following paragraph on methodology:

A word on methodology: I’m covering the 2003-2008 MSU seasons — 2003-06 for John L. Smith and 2007-08 for Mark Dantonio. My totals only include results from Big 10 games, bowl games, and games against BCS conference opponents (I count Notre Dame in this group as well as Rutgers and Pitt from the Big East and Cal from the Pac 10), because I removed patsies to eliminate statistical run-ups against overmatched opponents. (Sorry, directional MAC schools.) Also, I divided games into three categories — toss-ups, when the two team’s yardage totals are within 50 yards of one another; games in which State was outgained by 50 yards or more; and games in which MSU outgained its opponent by 50 yards or more.

Ok, that’s over. Now like I said, in the John L. Smith era the correlation isn’t that strong. JLS went 22-26 in four seasons at MSU, and worse, only 16-25 in the non-patsy games that I’m including here. You’d think that means State wasn’t competitive, but in fact the Spartans were usually either neck-and-neck or ahead in total yardage. Here’s the deal:

1. When they got beat on yardage, they got beat on the scoreboard. JLS went 1-12 when his team lost big in the yardage battle.
2. When yardage was close, he lost games anyway — to the tune of 4-11 when total yardage was even.
3. When MSU significantly outgained opponents, often it still got beat. JLS was just 9-5 in those games. Ouch.

Even as Dantonio Fever gripped Michigan in 2007, MSU’s tendency to lose games while moving the ball better than its opponents didn’t immediately evaporate. In his first game leading State against a ranked opponent, Dantonio lost to Wisconsin even though MSU outgained the Badgers by 103 yards. Then, at Iowa, MSU lost despite a 185-yard advantage. Against Michigan, State squandered a 41-yard edge. (That difference puts it in the toss-up category, barely, but it bears mentioning because the Michigan game seems to be kind of important in East Lansing.) But where Dantonio’s teams really stand out is in the other categories:

1. When the opposition significantly outgains Dantonio’s MSU teams, the Spartans are 3-4. JLS only one game like this during his four full seasons.
2. When yardage is even, Dantonio has a 3-2 record.
3. And thanks to a 3-0 mark this year, Dantonio is 6-2 when MSU wins the yardage battle handily.

So it looks like Mark Dantonio is better able to exploit the correlation between gaining (or denying) yardage and winning games. But why? It likely has something to do with JLS’ spread offense, which was good at creating plays but not so good at converting the short-but-sure, cloud-of-dust plays that keep drives alive and make Bill Cowher-types happy. But there are other reasons, too, and in the next post we’ll look at turnovers and penalties (traditional MSU specialties!) to see if they are factors.  After that, we’ll investigate the letdown-game theory — the idea that MSU often fails to recover from big games and trips up the following week against inferior competition or even goes into the tank for the rest of the year — and see if the Spartans are making headway there as well.

Part II | Part III