FanPost

How is the D doing???

First off, just let me say this, I think the D did a presentable job against Oregon, regardless of how many points Oregon did or did not choose to put up on the board. However, I agree with a lot of people that the Ducks could have put up some more points if they wanted to ... my conclusion, this evens out the blowout that Stanford was so kind to forcefully shove up our collective behinds, and I'll show what I mean by that later.

First, I'll give the numbers.

Week 1 - Eastern Washington

Scored 27 points, Averages 28.7, 1.7 points under Average

Week 2 - Hawaii

Scored 32 points, averages 33.9, 1.9 point under average

Week 3 - Nebraksa

Scored 51 points, averages 34.7, 16.3 points over average

Week 4 - Cal

Scored 23 points, averages 28.9, 5.9 points under average

Week 5 - Utah

Scored 14 points, averages 24.1, 10.1 points under average

Week 7 - Colorado

Scored 24 points, averages 18.6, 5.4 points over average

Week 8 - Stanford

Scored 65 points, averages 48.2, 16.8 points over average

Week 9 - Arizona

Scored 31 points, averages 29.3, 1.7 over points over average

Week 10 - Oregon

Scored 34 points, averages 46, 12 points under average

What does all this mean? Not much. The Huskies are allowing teams to score .9 more points than their opponents' are averaging on offense on a week in, week out basis. The problem is, looking at the Pac 12 as a whole, is that there are only 2 teams in the conference doing worse than the Huskies: Wazzu and Colorado. Even Arizona is posting better numbers, on average, than the Huskies are. What do these numbers reiterate? The defense is one of the worst in the Pac 12, but we already knew that.

Sure the Stanford game was bad ... we let them score almost 17 points more than their average. The nice thing, however, is that these things tend to even out over a long period of time, or over the course of a season. Look at the Oregon and Utah games. What we see over the course of a season is that these numbers tend to follow a line. In the case of the Huskies, the Dawgs have been flirting around the +1 area. After 2 games (following the Stanford game) the Huskies only managed to lower it's points over average by .1, including the Oregon game. Stanford has been consistently floating around the -10 area.

My hope is that the Huskies improve in this area to -3 or -4 on average next year. In my opinion, which only means something to my kids, that would be a great reason for optimism.