Washington's Yardage Efficiency vs BSU

Full disclosure here: I initially saw this done by our sister SBN site TomahawkNation, and I was curious to see what it looked like for the Huskies. So I took their idea and plugged in numbers for the Huskies.

The skinny is that during the course of the game, there is a limited amount of yardage that an offense could have gained based on the starting field position of their drives. So we get to look at how well the offense performed vs the best they could have performed, using only yardage as that barometer.

As in SFWNole's post, I omitted garbage time (the Cyler Miles drive) because it's not really a fair assessment of the offense to include that in the data set when they had clearly taken their foot off of the throttle.

That's picking up yards and driving at a really really good clip. Those are not numbers you'd expect to put up against a ranked opponent.

If you eliminate the disjointed drive at the end of the first half -- where the offense was altered by trying to score before the end of the half and then left the field with downs still to work with -- the total % of yards gained jumps up to just under 81%.

Perhaps the most impressive thing is that the Huskies picked up at least one first down on every drive. That goes a long way in keeping the defense rested and off the field.

Yes, folks, the Husky offense was every bit as efficient on Saturday as we thought it was.

Here are the numbers for BSU's offense (and UW's defense):

By this metric, the defense still played really well, but you'd like to see a couple more three-and-outs forced, though it also seemed like the Huskies were content to allow BSU to gain short yardage routinely as long as everything was kept in front of the defense, which they succeeded at. With that strategy, you're going to give up more first downs.

The real number here to key on though, is the 4 yards per play allowed. That's a fantastic number, and one that should net the Huskies a win in any game they play.