I think most of us would probably agree that what we saw on Friday night in the season opener against the Kennesaw State Owls was pretty bad. The Deacs mustered just a 10-9 win over a team that won 2 games a season ago, and they really would have lost if the Owls had competent kicker. That being said, fans are known to overreact and be slightly emotional and biased from time to time, so I figured I’d go to the analytics nerds for a second opinion to determine if what we saw was as bad as it looked.
The shorts answer is yes.
The long answer? Also, yes.
We’ll start with the data from Game On Paper, which does a fantastic job of displaying pretty much anything you would ever want to know about every single college football game for the season.
On offense, there’s pretty much nothing good to say about this one. Considering the opponent, being in the 30th percentile or below (of all FBS games last year) in almost every category is truly terrible. The only good thing in this whole graphic is Wake’s 50% red zone success rate, but the Deacs only ran 6 plays total on 2 trips to the redzone. The explosive play rate coming in at the 3rd percentile of games really shouldn’t shock anyone considering that the offense never tried to throw the ball down the field or generate any big plays at all. We can only hope that this has more to do with it being the first game of the season than it does with the teams’ abilities, because if these numbers don’t improve, Wake will probably only win 1-2 more games this season.
On Kelley Ford’s KFord Power Rankings, where Wake now ranks 98th out of 136 teams, the Deacs were one of the biggest movers of the weekend, dropping 3.3 points in his model.
To win against an FBS team and still drop that many points is a pretty good sign that the game was as bad as we initially thought. Wake nearly dropped as many points as Army, and they lost at home to Tarleton State!
On the QB front, Robby Ashford had a great game statistically, completing 20 of his 28 pass attempts for 218 yards while adding a rushing touchdown. The reality is a little more sobering—Ashford’s PFF grade and QBR put him towards the bottom of Power 4 QBs for the week.
This is not cause for alarm yet, considering Ashford is sitting right there with SMU QB Kevin Jennings, but I’d prefer if he was a little farther from a QB who plays at Iowa (Mark Gronowski completed 8 of his 15 passes for 44 yards and a touchdown on Saturday). Kennesaw State will likely be one of the easier defenses Wake faces this season, so ending up in that lower left quadrant against them is not the best sign.
With all of that, I’m going to say the second opinion confirms that the game was as bad as we thought. The good news is that it is just 1 game and 1 data point. A lot of teams underperformed their expectations in the first week (63% of games went under the expected score total), and it was probably unrealistic for us to expect the Deacs to have everything figured out week 1. As the coaching staff continues to figure out what and who works on the field in actual game situations, Wake will hopefully look more and more like a competent football team.
