Week 5 Preview - Wake Forest

It seems this week that most people are assuming GT will have an easy win up in Winston Salem. There are still a few Tech fans who are holding out, saying we are so bad that every game is losable and they expect a dogfight.

I am not really sure that I understand why those Tech fans think we are so bad. Nobody was saying things like that in 2008, and if you think about it, this season isn’t all that much different. The N.C. State team we just lost to is probably at least as good as the VT team that we lost to early in 2008. Yes, that was on the road and a close game, but its not like State blew us out. It was a 3 point game with ten minutes to go. And a few games after that, we almost lost to Gardner Webb. Surely that loss would have been worse than losing to Kansas this year. Later on that season, we barely beat a Clemson team that was 3-3, had a loss to Wake Forest, had been embarrassed by Alabama, and just got its coach fired.

I expect the reason people are so much more up in arms now is a combination of things. First of all, we have raised expectations since then. Second of all, the 2008 defense did not look so weak. The offense looked very weak at times, but people tend to get more upset by bad defense. Third, Clemson and VT are better names than Kansas and N.C. State. But if you think about it, we are in position to get 3 wins and be 5-2. In 2008 we were 6-1. That team finished ranked in the top 15 and won in Athens, against a better UGA team than the one we will play this year. So its not like we can’t still have a good year.

There are more similarities between the two teams. Both teams had young players in key positions. The 2008 team at least had a very experienced, and good, defensive line. But it had a very young QB. This team has a very experienced, and good, QB, but a young and bad defensive line. The skill position players on both teams were pretty young. The 2008 team did have the advantage of having Dwyer and Thomas. But Thomas wasn’t nearly the player in 08 that he would be in 09, and this 2010 team has better runners at A-back in my opinion, like Smith and Bostic.

The point of all this talk is not to defend the 2010 team’s performance so far. It has been real bad. I am only making the point that we have a history under Johnson of playing better at the end of the year than at the beginning, and this team has plenty of room to grow. I will confess that I thought we would start the year being pretty good. You can go read that in my season preview. Looking back on it, I probably made the mistake of assuming that “experience” in spring games and practices was almost as good as experience on the field. Turns out it isn’t.

Let’s look at each position group.

The O line. I thought they would be the best we have had under Johnson. On paper they are the most talented. But I probably underrated the importance of having experience playing together in real games. They are better than our 2008 O line was, but are probably not quite as good as the 09 version.. yet. They may still end up being better, but for now, they are young, and they look like it.

We pretty much know about the QB’s. As for the running backs, we don’t have anyone as talented as Dwyer. Then again, Dwyer is probably the most talented runner Tech has had in 10-20 years. We do have some pretty good young recruits, and we probably have the best A backs we have had.

The receivers really need to start making plays. We need to find that guy who can consistently get open and make catches. It should be Hill, but until he starts to figure things out, someone else may have to step up.

The real problem on offense though, I think, is our blocking up front. At times it has been good, but it is very inconsistent. This has made our offense resemble the 2008 group more than the 2009 group. We hit some very big plays, but we also have too many bad plays that kill drives. We can’t rely on being able to get 3 yards on third and 3. The 2009 group seemed to always get at least 3 or 4 yards when they wanted. Hopefully, as the season goes on, we will make fewer mistakes and missed assignments up front, and we can see what this offense looks like playing behind a consistent, and pretty big and talented, O line, because I still think this O line is pretty talented. But we will see.

Defensively, it’s pretty much the same thing. We have a significant amount of freshman and sophomores getting serious playing time at all three position groups. That is promising for the future, but for now it means a lot of youthful mistakes. Of course, our veterans have been making some dumb mistakes as well, but hopefully they will shake that off and play with more focus.

Another ironic thing about all of this in my opinion is that many pessimistic GT fans, and plenty of UGA fans, are jumping on the “Paul Johnson was only winning because he had Gailey’s talent” bandwagon. Well, sure, Dwyer and Thomas and Morgan and Burnett were Gailey’s guys, and losing them hurt. But what does it tell you that so many of Johnson’s freshman and sophomore recruits are beating out Gailey’s seniors and redshirt juniors for playing time? (That Paul recruits better than Gailey did…) The simple fact is that young players are rarely good enough to be consistently good players right away.

In the offseason, when I heard Coach Johnson say things like “we have so much depth that it is creating lots of position battles” I was thinking “oh good, our young players are talented like we had hoped”. I was happy they were competing. I didn’t really want them to win the battles though. I didn’t want to hear a true freshman was going to win a starting spot at safety when we have 4 upperclassmen available at safety. That means our experienced guys just aren’t real good. If they were, their experience would make them better, even if they were not quite as talented as the young guys. The fact that the experience does not more than make up for the talent gap indicates that the talent gap is pretty significant.

I also made the mistake in the preseason of assuming Groh could do more than he really could. I do think he has done some good things, and I see promise from this defense. If our offense had been as good this year as it was last year, I am confident our defense would be statistically improved. It is improved in some areas. We are giving up fewer yards per play, and remember this is pretty much the same terrible D we had last year except minus our two NFL caliber players. I believe we have given up more total yards and points simply because we are on the field much more than last year’s defense was. That is a function of the offense not playing as well. So I am not sure I am ready to fire Groh just yet, as many other GT fans seems to be.

Anyway, all of that is just to say there is no reason to panic. I still expect us to have a good year, and to at least be a factor in the coastal race. But we will see.

I want to begin the preview of the Wake Forest game with a quick discussion about how the season has gone so far, according to the Sagarin Ratings, which I find to be pretty useful. A quick word about computer ratings – many people dismiss them. They say things like computers don’t understand football. And they don’t take into account games that are flukes, when teams show up flat etc. Furthermore, you cant base rankings on just comparing scores of so few games, etc. What I think these people overlook is that human rankings are plagued by most of these same problems. And the “problems” human polls are free from often just cause more problems. For example, humans are capable of taking into account that a team like VT may show up “flat” for JMU 5 days after the big loss to Boise. So they are better right? Well what happens with a game like GT Kansas? Were we flat, or are we just bad? This is where human bias comes into play, which is a huge problem that does not affect computer polls.

And that explains why I like computer polls. They don’t care if its Michigan Notre Dame or Eastern Michigan Army. When 2009 FSU and Miami, both coming off mediocre years, played a close game early, the computer does not assume both are “back”. They simply compare the scores of every game played by everyone, which is what people are really trying to do anyway, computers just do it better.

Sagarin’s polls are very simple. There are two, and he averages them equally for his overall ratings. One looks at who beat who, that’s it (no bonus points for how much you win by), and the other looks at scores, that’s it, (no bonus points for winning or losing the game). Sagarin calls this second poll, the points poll, his “predictor” because, not surpringly it is the best predictor of future games. That poll is the one I use most often. Is it perfect? Of course not. Its computed on a very small sample size (indeed the whole season in football is a small sample size) and obviously teams can skew their ratings by playing a really good or really bad game. But it is something, and it’s better than most other opinions, in my opinion.

So what does it tell us about GT? Well, at this point in the season, comparing every team based on a network of results, Sagarin says that on a neutral field, GT would perform as follows:

We would beat Kansas by 8.

We would lose to UNC by 1.

We would lose to NC St. by 3.

So, not terribly surprisingly, we played poorly against NC State and Kansas, and well against UNC. That’s not exactly breaking news, but it is good to some objective evidence that we are playing up and down. Others have contended that UNC is simple terrible and Kansas and State are in fact better than we are. Sagarin agrees that State is better than us, but only slightly, and at GT we should actually play to a tie. Hopefully that means we played badly, not that we just are bad.

The good news is that we don’t often (or really ever under Johnson) play two bad games in a row. So I expect us to come out and play well. For the record Sagarin has us winning by 8 (11 on a neutral field) so I would expect a win by more than that if we do play well.

We are 9 point favorites even coming off the big loss to State. That is probably because Wake has looked terrible the last two weeks. I think Wake is better than they look. Stanford is a very good team, but they embarrassed Wake so badly in part because they played the game at 11:15 pm Eastern time, which really isn’t fair. I imagine its hard to play D1 football at a high level when your body is telling you to go to bed. And then Wake lost 31-0 to FSU, but that game was only 10-0 deep into the third quarter. However, even though Wake may not be as bad as they have looked, they are still pretty bad.

They gave us a very tough game last year, but that was with their QB Skinner who is now gone, and we gave them a lot of help in that game with poor execution. This year’s Wake team is more of a running team than a passing team. And they run even though their offensive line isn’t that good. Which means they aren’t a very good offense. If Groh and the D can’t get back on track a little bit this week, we may be in real trouble. Defensively, Grobe’s team will be well coached, but I don’t think they have the athletes to really bother us. They will be small up front, and I think that will make it very hard on them. (sound familiar? Well hopefully I am right this week…)

As usual, let’s take a look at recruiting to try to see some objective analysis of the talent differential. (of course, we had a big talent edge on Kansas, UNC had a big one on us, and State and GT were about even talent wise, so take this with a grain of salt…)

	2007			2008			2009			2010
	GT	Wake		GT	Wake		GT	Wake		GT	Wake
Best	81	79		80	78		80	79		80	79
Top 5	79.4	75.6		78	77.4		79.4	77.6		79	78.2
Top 10	78.5	72.5		77.3	76.2		78.8	77		78.2	77.5
Avg.	75.65	71.27		76.53	75.66		76.85	74.55		77.06	74.6
Total Players	20	11		15	12		21	18		16	20

You can see we have clear edges most everywhere. They are pretty close to us in the “Best” category, but we still have a slight edge. The edge either stays roughly the same or increases as you move down the chart, depending on the year.

So we are more talented, at least on paper. As the past three weeks have shown, that guarantees absolutely nothing.

Lets take a look at the stats so far this season:

	GT	Wake
Rush Yards Per Game	320.5	238.5
Rush Yards Per Carry	5.85	4.82
Rush Yards Allowed	155.25	175.75
Rush Yards Allowed/Carry	4.09	5.02
Pass Yards Per Game	80	130.75
Pass Yards Per Att.	7.1	6.2
Pass Yards Allowed	212.5	291.5
Pass Yards Allowed/Att.	7.0	7.6
Yards Per Play	6.1	5.2
Yards Per Play Allowed	5.4	6.4
Points Per Game	31	32.8
Points Allowed Per Game	26.8	40

The biggest thing I am seeing here is that they allow 5 yards per running play to everyone they have played. And “everyone” includes Presbyterian and Duke. Stanford and FSU may be good, but my feeling is that if they allow 5 yards per run against those 4 combined, then we should be able to hit a lot of big runs. Next most important is that they run for 100 yards more than they pass for on average. That would scare me if I thought they were good up front. But I don’t think they are. The way they play, they need to be faster than us on both sides of the ball, and they are not faster than us on either.

Based purely on the fact that I think we will come out motivated, play hard and play at least OK in terms of execution, I expect a comfortable win. Grobe is a good coach and he has really upgraded Wake’s program, but they still don’t have the talent that they really need to be seriously competitive year in year out. On top of that, they have a new QB playing this year. Actually, they have several QB’s playing, but the point is that they do not have an experienced and talented QB like Skinner, who really made their offense work.

Of course, we could play poorly again and lose. We could definitely play poorly and barely win. But for now, I am pretty confident.

Here are my goals:

Offense

Gain at least 500 yards – 400 rushing 100 passing

No more than 1 turnover

At least 42 points

Defense

No more than 21 points (this is a little high, but I think our D needs a cushion)

No more than 300 yards

Force at least 2 turnovers.

I haven’t set those goals as high as I normally do, because I will be happy with less than perfect given how we have played so far. Offensively, we should have success because I don’t think Wake’s defense is very good, so I have set those goals much higher than those for the defense. FSU shut out Wake and Stanford only allowed Wake to score some points after they had piled up over 50 themselves. Maybe the goal should really be that we don’t allow more than 14 or so until the fourth quarter when and if we have scored in the 40’s or 50’s. I don’t really care about giving up garbage TD’s when the game is already decided.

Anyway, time to get back on track with a good performance. We need it.

Go Jackets!