Boston College v. Florida State: Advanced box score and breakdown

The Florida State Seminoles beat Boston College this weekend, 22-21.

FSU had a post-game win expectancy of 86 percent. That is a number which takes into account all of the factors, and compares it against thousands of games, finding ones with similar performances and looks at the outcomes.

If played again with similar stats, FSU would be projected to win by 10.5 points.

The game entered garbage time when...

Yeah right, this team has to fight every second of the game.

Let’s go over the five factors from Bill Connelly.

Efficiency edge: Florida State (small)

OMG, FSU actually beat a team in success rate (35% v. 31%). This has happened so rarely over the course of this season. This is a pretty big shock.

FSU had a 38% success rate in the run game, and a 32% success rate in the passing game, though I think that should probably be a bit more skewed because two of the bump passes which are basically jet sweeps are recorded as passes.

FSU had a 47% success rate on standard downs and just a 14% success rate on passing downs (2nd & 7+, 3rd and 5+). That is a huge split, but indicative of this offense largely being unable to pass protect, some poor throws by Deondre Francois, and some drops. 14% is absolutely horrible.

FSU’s defense, however, played well from an efficiency standpoint despite the consternation of the fan base.

FSU successfully took away BC’s run game, allowing just a 28% success rate. It may have had to sell out to do so, but it got that job done.

And BC had just a 35% success rate in the passing game, which isn’t great.

While it seemed that Boston College was having a lot of success on passing downs, that wasn’t actually the case (26% success rate). Some of that is perception bias due to FSU forcing a lot of passing downs because it was good on standard downs (34%).

I took the extra step of pulling out all passing downs. Success is defined as an offense gaining 70% percent of necessary yardage on second down, and 100% on third or fourth.

FSU’s defense faced a ton of passing downs.

Explosiveness edge: Florida State (significant)

FSU had the overall explosiveness edge, 1.54 IsoPPP to 1.23.

FSU’s offense had a rushing explosive rating of 1.03, and a passing explosive rating of 2.04. The rushing stat is nothing special, but the passing rating is very solid.

FSU hit its explosive plays on standard downs (1.64), when BC had to respect the run (including the bomb to Tamorrion Terry), but it was not explosive at all on passing downs (0.98).

Defensively, FSU was tremendous at preventing explosive runs (0.61), but it did not do a good job preventing explosive pass plays (1.81). It was very good at preventing explosive plays on standard downs, which is surprising because BC is usually good at hitting play action shows. FSU did allow 1.65 explosiveness on passing downs, which is not extreme, but is higher than everyone would like.

Turnovers (and turnover luck) edge: Close

Both teams had 2 turnovers, and were close in expected turnovers.

Field position edge: Boston College (significant).

BC had a 7-yard FP edge per drive, which over 15 drives is 105 yards.

Finishing drives edge: Even

I would not have expected this, but FSU had 3.5 points/opportunity (drives inside the 40), while BC had 3.29. Both of those numbers are bad, by the way.

Any questions? Just ask.