More on the Offense; Inside Our Own 20

One of the best features of cfbstats.com is their situation stats link for teams. I love to see how teams are doing in certain situations. After the post over concern about the offense's stagnation in the last 1/3 of the Tennessee game, I decided to take a look at our performance through the season in certain situations.

I wasn't surprised.

Georgia Rushing Stats

Situation	Attempts	Yards	YPC		1st downs
Inside own 20	25	102	4.08		3
Own 21 To 39	49	390	7.96		15
Own 40 To Opp 40	60	442	7.37		16
Opp 39 To 21	35	197	5.63		11
Opp 20 To 1  (RZ)	33	121	3.67		8

That YPC inside the red zone number includes 12 TDs (over 1/3 of all rushing plays inside the red zone results in a TD).

Georgia Passing Stats

Situation	Attempts	Compl %	QB Rating		1st downs
Inside own 20	14	100	223.00		7
Own 21 To 39	37	70.3	209.24		20
Own 40 To Opp 40	32	53.1	103.01		10
Opp 39 To 21	32	59.4	185.68		14
Opp 20 To 1  (RZ)	19	73.7	213.34		6

Stunningly, 3 of the four Georgia Ints happened inside our own 40. At least two I can think of (Aaron's this week and LeMay's) were returned for TDs.

Besides the fairly low number of attempts from inside the 20 (of which 1/3 happened in the Tennessee game), take a look at the disparity between passing the ball and running the ball from inside our own 20. So are teams expecting us to run and committing to stopping it, much like Tennessee did?

One other thing I took away from the situation stats linked above is that offensively, Georgia isn't great in the 4th quarter. Murray is only completing 46.2% of his passes and only has a QB rating of 103.19, going 6 of 13. Rushing the ball, we are way below our averages, as well. We have 269 yards on 58 carries (4.64 ypc) and only 8 of our 53 runs of more than 10 yards.

Either the offensive S&C improvements aren't all that we have thought or teams are guessing what we will do in certain situations, especially when we are pinned inside our own 20 or with a lead in the 4th quarter.  My money is on the second considering we have run the ball twice as much from inside our own 20 and 5 times as much during the 4th quarter.

Yes, we have had a couple of games where we've taken our foot off the gas, but looking at those numbers, is there any surprise we are averaging over 3 TDs/quarter fewer in the fourth quarter than the other three quarters? My worry remains: we get too conservative when we need to keep doing the things that got us a lead in the first place. Our offense is what it is because it is dynamic. We are able to keep teams off balance due to our ability to run or throw from nearly any formation. When we don't leverage that, our offense becomes very pedestrian.

TD
See also:
-Bulldogs focus on late first downs, Marc Weiszer (ABH)
-The Dawgs, the Falcons and endgame mistakes, Michael Elkon (SBN Atlanta)

ED NOTE: In response to a comment, I did some quick calculations on the 4th quarter offense:

BU- 95 yards, 14 pts (Murray finished a TD drive at start of 4th Q)
Mizzu-42 yards, 17 pts (two very short TD drives, last Georgia drive was -21 yards thanks to penalties)
FAU- 74 yards, 7 pt (Murray didn't play 4th quarter)
Vandy- 34 yards, 0 points (Murray did not play 4th quarter)
Tenn- 16 yards, 0 points 

If we are using Mizzou as a guide on how to finish strong, we need the defense to come up with turnovers...which is what we had to have for Tennessee.

We've scored 24 4th quarter points with our starters in. 17 of those came on drives of fifteen (TOD), five (fumble recovery) and one yard (Int). 

By my count, that is a shade under 10% of our total offensive yardage and just over 15% of our scoring offense. Some of that can be attributed to the big leads, no doubt. My concern remains that we will be in a position to have to burn 4 minutes with a less than a score lead and not be able to do so.

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