We started out our 30-Day Countdown yesterday with a look at the under-the-radar reasons that Washington might be better than people think. Which means today we’ll go the other direction and look at the reasons why Washington might struggle more than expected.
Opponent Bye Weeks
Every year, Warren Sharp posts an article (here’s this year’s) that shows the teams in the NFL with the most and least rest advantage. The idea being that consistently playing with less time off than your opponents results in a hidden negative
lying there in the schedule that smart gamblers can take advantage of and normal bettors don’t see. The team with the worst rest differential in the NFL last year was the 49ers who greatly underachieved and had -22 days over the course of a 17-game schedule.
That brings us to Washington. The Huskies are a -19 this year with all of that net disadvantage occurring in a 6-week period in the middle of the season. The Huskies do get two instances with a net advantage. They have a bye before playing Washington State while the Cougars play that Saturday prior so that’s a +7 to add to the column. The Dawgs also get a +1 advantage before travelling to Michigan so that gives them a +8 total.
Then come all the bye weeks for their opponents. People noticed when the schedule was released that Washington somehow plays 5 conference opponents coming off a bye this year. Every team gets two bye weeks this year because the first game starts in August. And the B1G conference office is trying to help ease the burden of travel for teams going cross country bye giving them time off before or after. But how in the world is that remotely fair? Why does Maryland get a bye before playing UW at home when the Huskies are the team going on the 2nd longest road trip possible!?!?
But I digress. The end result is that Washington gets a -7 before playing Ohio State, Maryland, and Illinois and a -6 before playing Rutgers (they get a bye but the game is on Friday). If Washington ends up going something like 1-4 in those games then expect the administration to cry bloody murder towards the league offices. And expect the Big Ten not to do anything.
Washington’s Drop Rate
Demond Williams Jr. put up some eye-popping stats in his limited time as a true freshman starter last season. Most Husky fans are understandably focused on his 9.0 YPA, 8 TD, 1 INT plus his elite speed. Those are all good things and there’s no taking them away from Demond. I’m in general an optimist when it comes to both his overall ceiling and what I expect this season. But this is kind of the pessimist article so let’s get into it.
There are two stats that I think most fans are either willingly ignoring or are just dismissing for semi-legitimate reasons. The one I think hasn’t been considered as much is the drop rate. Per PFF tracking, Demond Williams Jr. had 0 balls dropped all of last season in 105 attempts. The full Blutarsky: 0.0.
That’s not exactly common. There were 73 P4 quarterbacks last year with 150+ dropbacks and Williams was the only one with 0 drops. Fellow true freshman Dylan Raiola was the next best at 2.5% and #3 was none other than fellow Husky Will Rogers before he was benched in favor of Williams. The fact that both Williams and Rogers were low on the list says something about both the scheme Washington runs and the quality of the receiver play.
That offense isn’t likely to change a ton but it seems unlikely to think that over an entire season that Demond will be able to do any better than that 2.5% through no fault of his own. At some point, someone will just drop a ball. Denzel Boston is back but Washington lost Giles Jackson, Jeremiah Hunter, and Keleki Latu so some of those sure hands are gone and being replaced with unknowns. Expect Demond’s yards per attempt number to drop by at least 0.3 next year just because of some untimely drops that didn’t happen last year. That’s going to make the offense just a little bit less efficiency than it seemed with at the controls late in they ear.
Demond’s Pressure-to-Sack Rate
The other metric was a bit more visible. Demond’s pressure-to-sack rate (P2S%) last year was 32.4%. Everyone knows Washington did not have a good offensive line. Williams also had to play almost 40% of his snaps on the road at Penn State and at Oregon and there were free rushers coming on almost every drop back. But by using P2S% instead of just pure sack rate we’re adjusting for how often Williams was under pressure and the results weren’t good.
Williams was sacked on 32.4% of his pressures which was substantially higher than any of those other 72 P4 quarterbacks last season (next highest was 27.6%). If you could control for quality of opposition then Demond would certainly look better but it’s not a good start to be quite a bit worse than everyone else with at least that large of a sample size. It doesn’t control for opponent quality but we do have one control comparison: Will Rogers. He played behind the same offensive line all season and had a P2S% of 15.4% which was 32nd of 74 and less than half of Demond’s total.
There’s an easy reason for that. Rogers got rid of the ball the 7th quickest while Williams held onto it the 4th longest. Rogers knew he couldn’t run away from defenders and got rid of it while Williams danced and weaved to try to scramble. Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn’t. But if Williams tries the same thing this year and once again gets sacked on 30% of his pressures then it’s going to negate a lot of the good things that Demond does and greatly hinder Washington’s offense.
More from uwdawgpound.com:
- Husky Coaches Are Busy On The Recruiting Trail
- Friday Dots: Will the Huskies find snaps for all their running backs?
- Husky Softball pulls off legendary comeback to finish statement sweep at Utah
- Dots: Comeback Kids
- Friday Dots: Who are the Huskies’ top draft prospects for 2018?
- Dots: Ross inks Rookie deal with Bengals
- Dots: Madden-ing
