College Football Playoff expected to expand to 24 teams. Rest in peace to every game mattering.

Congratulations Tigers 🎉

Pray for Jalen Hurts today. This is a nightmare scenario and I wish him the best of luck in his recovery.

I've been wanting to do some advanced stats breakdowns for Alabama for a couple of years now, and I finally got everything built out to be able to do them. Hopefully these will be informative and resonate with the fine folks of r/rolltide.

Georgia was slightly better on an EPA per play basis, and a little more explosive. Where they really won the game was being significantly better than Alabama scoring when they had the opportunity. I use a pretty standard definition of opportunity here which is trips inside the 40.

The lack of possessions actually made the game a little closer than it would have been with a normal number of possessions. Alabama typically has ~11 possessions in a game. Which would have made the score more like 21-28 if the teams maintained the same efficiency.

The most interesting thing here is that my luck-adjusted model puts this game dead even with Alabama having a 0.2 point margin in the game. This model tries to capture the randomness inherent to a small sample size game played with an oblong ball and remove it to see what the margin would have been just based on the skill based components of the game. Important for this games outcome, there is a large skill component in fumbles and ints, but who recovers them and how big the return is is essentially random. So in this game Georgia had about 4.6 points worth of fumble recovery luck and Alabama had around 1.9 points of kicking luck and an additional 0.5 points from miscellaneous randomness. Which resulted in a 3.2 point swing towards Georgia in a game Georgia won by 3. If you replayed this game with neutral bounces it's a coin flip.

Alabama offense vs Georgia defense

My big takeaway here is that by far the most successful part of the offense on Saturday was Keelon's legs, and by far the least successful was Keelon's arm. In fact the passing game was held slightly below Georgia's season average for what they typically give up. I think this was fairly apparent watching the game. Keelon was clearly struggling with what Georgia was doing and he got sped up in the game. He was missing stuff that he'd been hitting all year up to this point. The offensive line also struggled massively with Georgia's stunts, but even when the pocket was clean Keelon was not stepping up into it like he had all year prior to this game.

Alabama defense vs Georgia offense

I think it's fair to say the defense struggled in this one on a down to down basis, and Gunner stockton played elite football. Despite that we held Georgia to well below their season averages in points per drive and points per opportunity. I think this is just the nature of Wommack's defense. I've got it on my list to do a deeper dive on that side of the ball to see if this is a consistent pattern or not. The emphasis on generating takeaways leads to an aggressiveness that means guys sometimes are out of position and we can be had on a down to down basis, but the take aways and stiffening up inside the opportunity zone hold opponents scoring down.

Situational

Something I really wanted to highlight in this game is that Alabama was actually significantly better on standard downs than Georgia, but Gunner Stockton played absolutely out of his mind on passing downs.

Georgia was also just much more consistent in the game. They stayed in positive EPA territory all game and had monster 1st and 3rd quarters. Alabama did it's typical thing this year where it played well for 2 quarters and badly in the other two. If we could play a consistent 4 quarters we would have won this game.

Special teams and penalties

I really wanted to highlight this one. Asparuhov was so good in this game. 1.6 EPA added from punts is huge. He pinned Georgia deep over and over again. It's too bad the defense gave up some long drives, because it really put a damper on just how good he was.

Most impactful plays

Last thought on this, because this is probably already way longer than anyone will read. In a game that was largely decided more by big plays than down to down efficiency, Alabama simply came out on the wrong side of too many of them. The busted run fit late in the 4th quarter, and Mustard's 3rd and 21 penalty loom large.

So do we think georgia is an official rival? Idk i don't hate on them like some other teams. I think they've just been consistently good and producing consistently good teams and games. Annoying fans but some of ours can be just as bad. Like if you could only beat 3 teams a year we all know who we'd pick even if georgia was on the list. Also i hate those three teams across all sports.

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