Bill Connelly on college football in 2026

yeah Bill, you have been doing college football analytics longer than anyone, even me.

You've important contributions like looking at success rate.

I think you're one of the first to do that.

Looking at pass defended on defense.

Yeah.

Are there any kind of new metrics or methods that you're excited about in college football?

No, I guess not.

I mean, each year I do find myself kind of leaning on different things for storytelling purposes.

And the whole Yards for Successful play I've learned.

I have my marginal explosiveness measure, which goes into... sp plus but i've learned that with yards per successful play it's just so much of a cleaner thing to explain and it produces pretty similar results um so you know i'll kind of just find myself drifting to to this or that but i i will say the most interesting trend right now uh with college football as a whole and it's analytics related uh adam rittenberg and i did a piece a So basically, we're in a weird spot right now with college football where in terms of points per drive, offenses are pretty much more efficient than they've ever been right now or more effective than they've ever been right now.

Last year, FBS teams averaged 2.24 points per drive.

A decade earlier, it was 2.11. That seems tiny, but that's an enormous leap for over 800 games and whatnot.

So we have that, but scoring is down almost 10% because drives per game in 2015, it was 13.1 per team in each game.

Now it's 11.7. And there are a few different reasons for that.

And it was just kind of fun putting this piece together and talking about how the reasons kind of converge with each other.

For one thing, well, for one thing, three years ago, we changed the clock rules.

And now the clock runs after first downs earlier in the games.

And there was an immediate jump of about 0.7 seconds per play from that.

So that's absolutely changed a little bit.

But the seconds per play had already increased significantly before that because teams just aren't using tempo anymore.

Or I should say not nearly as many teams are trying to find advantages from tempo now.

and i i think part of that is because well because defenses adjust and a decade ago you know hurry up no huddle part of that whole era was based around the idea of like finding an advantage rushing to the line making sure your opponents can't substitute maybe they're not communicating the defenses can't communicate all that well and you can you know create some disarray and and find advantages but i think right around 2015 to 17, teams started really adjusting to that.

Defense is adjusted, and it's just harder to find an advantage from tempo.

And therefore, teams stopped doing it as much.

And then... one thing you have in the in the 12 team playoff era now and ryan day had some quotes in our piece about this that riddenberg got if you're looking at playing 16 or 17 games the difference between averaging like 60 snaps per game versus 80 is enormous like over 300 plays over the course of a season and so if you're ohio state there's a real kind of tension right now because if you have a per play advantage over your opponent, you should want to run as many plays as possible to maximize that advantage.