FanPost

The Zenith of 2010 and the Nadir of 2005....wait, which year is which?


I'd like to briefly respond to Afghan Dawg's post in which he describes the descent from the 2005 SEC championship team to the 2010 (5-6) team.

Afghan Dawg notes a decline in recruiting and Richt's personnel mismanagement most notably Mike Bobo's playcalling. He says it well, and I think many of his concerns about the program are valid. However, I believe that the criticism of Bobo's playcalling is not supported by the offensive production in 2005 and 2010. The production levels are simply too close to support the criticism and sustain the belief that the 2005 level was acceptable. For the sake of completeness I will show the defensive statistics as well:

University of Georgia 2005 vs. 2010
2005 2010 Ytd Posivitve / (Negative) Change
Offense
Total Offense (Yard per Game) 391 391 -
Points per game 29.50 33.50 4.00
Rushing yards per game 162 147 (15)
Rushing yards per carry 4.63 4.11 (0.52)
Passing yards per game 229 244 15
Passing yards per attempt 8.20 8.90 0.70
Turnovers lost per game (1.38) (1.09) 0.29
Defense
Total defense (yards per game) 313 319 (6)
Points per game allowed 16.40 22.10 (5.70)
Rushing yards per game allowed 144 127 17
Rushing yards per carry allowed 3.85 3.44 0.41
Passing yards per game allowed 170 193 (23)
Passing yards per attempt allowed 6.00 7.80 (1.80)
Turnovers gained per game 2.20 1.80 (0.40)

It appears to me that the offensive performance is virutally identical in 2010 and 2005 with the 2010 team scoring slightly more points per game.

The 2010 defense allows more points per than the 2005 but has otherwise not performed substantially worse. When you net the differences in points per game by the offense by the points allowed per game by the defense the differences is a 1.7 point per game margin in favor of 2005.

Someone show me what I'm missing here? Put another way, could you have distinguished the two teams if I had put team A and Team B on the column headings?

Perhaps this points to a need to re-examine the assumption that the 2005 team was a very good one. Or perhaps the rest of the SEC has simply improved relative to Georgia since 2005. But if the narrative I'm being asked to believe in is that once upon a time in 2005 UGA had a great football program, and then Mark Richt/Mike Bobo screwed up for five years and now UGA does not have a great football program, then I need to understand why the fall isn't showing up in any of the measures of offensive or defensive production presented above; because frankly, other than wins and losses, 2010 looks an awful lot like 2005.

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