Time of Possession

Submitted by Marley Nowell on

Does anyone know what the time of possession was in this game?  I think it was something like 10 min for Michigan and 20 min for Purdue in the first half.  I realize that we scored quickly on the Odoms punt return, but Purdue scored quickly when Odoms muffed the other one in their red zone.   Those should basically even out.  We scored the other 21 points in basically 9 minutes.

I wonder if the spread, even when run at high efficiency, will gives us a solid adavantage in the time of possession.  Here are RR's stats for the last 3 years:

2005 - 30:57min Ranked 36 Nationally

2006 - 30:07min Ranked 51 Nationally

2007 - 30:11 Min Ranked 54 Nationally

Basically is breaks about equally for offense and defense.  Look at the national rankings I saw a lot of bad teams in the Top 50.  I can see why Brian doesn't really like this stat.  I just wonder about it because people always worry about TOP and think it is an indicator of suceess.  I don't think it matters that much.  I just think that the defense gets worn out if it stuck on the field for a long time.  I think things like starting field position for the defense matter much more.  What are people's thoughts on this?

Comments

formerlyanonymous

November 1st, 2008 at 4:19 PM ^

so the michigan 10 minute/purdue 20 minute makes no sense.

brian's dislike of the TOP stat somewhat stems from his own intuition and is supported by SMQB. he did a study on it over the offseason to find its not that much of a deciding factor in W's or L's (statistically).

hat

November 1st, 2008 at 4:21 PM ^

The obsession with TOP, I think, is a holdover from the old days when everyone ran the ball 80-90% of the time, so TOP was usually correlated with the number of plays the defense was actually on the field. Now that teams throw the ball much more, it's become much less useful. Since pass plays take less time off the clock than running plays, teams that throw a lot don't necessarily have great TOP, but they often do end up running a lot of total plays.

Marley Nowell

November 1st, 2008 at 4:31 PM ^

1 Wisconsin 33:44

2 Wake Forest 33:26

3 Arizona St. 33:08

4 Iowa St. 32:50

5 BYU 32:40

6 Oregon St. 32:20

7 LSU 32:15

8 La.-Monroe 32:04

9 Houston 32:00

10 Southern California 31:56

Some great teams, and some really random ones. Teams like LSU and USC make it because they had great defenses that could stop the run. Our problem is when we stop the run we still give up huge 3rd and Long plays. It would be nice if TOP was higher against good running teams.

Magnus

November 1st, 2008 at 5:01 PM ^

Here's why I didn't like the TOP disparity today:

It meant that Justin Siller, Kory Sheets, and Purdue were making enough plays on third down to keep the chains and the clock moving. I don't really worry about conditioning too much, especially because I think Barwis has had a positive (although perhaps overstated) effect on our conditioning. But damnit, we need to make plays on third down. I would almost prefer teams to get 10+ yards on first or second down than wait until third down to gain the yardage. It's demoralizing to watch them play good defense for a couple plays and then have it go down the drain.