Two Beaver football teams this season?

The statistics to date this season suggest that there are two markedly different football teams – a home team and a road team.  There’s usually a differential performance of a football team depending on whether the team is at home or on the road and most folks know that once the strength of the opponent is taken into consideration, it’s generally easier to win at home than on the road.

Jonathan Smith Fiesta Bowl

But there’s a pretty big dichotomy in the nature of this year’s Beaver football team.  The home team persona sports a powerful defense that’s only giving up a stingy 6.5 points per game while the offense has certainly controlled the clock at home, scoring by the offense is low at 14.5 points per game.  Without two penalty aided drives, the OSU defense should have only given up 3 points at home rather than 13 – the defense has been truly special and I’ve been amazed at the diversity of looks and schemes presented by the defense so far.

The road team features an explosive offense that scores 35.7 points per game while the road defense makes stops when they need to secure the win but the defense gives up 26.3 points per game on the road.  While this disparity in team performance is very large and in part, can be explained by the opponents played to date, one cannot argue the effectiveness of the defense in particular this season in improving the fortunes of the OSU football team.

Overall, scoring defense has dropped from 2011’s terrible 30.8 points per game to 18.4 points per game – a value that only trails the 17.7 points per game given up by the 2000 team (Fiesta Bowl).  On the other side of the ball, the scoring offense has improved to a lesser extent, from 21.8 points per game in 2011 to 27.2 points per game so far this season.   This season’s offense is similar to the one fielded in the 2006 and 2007 seasons where the team scored 27.8 points per game.  Those teams finished with 10 and 9 wins, respectively.

With the great start, fans inevitably want to compare this season’s team to the Fiesta Bowl team of 2000.  That offense scored an OSU record 33.3 points per game en route to an appearance in a BCS bowl game.   The OSU defense is playing at the same level this season as the Fiesta Bowl team but the offense has some more work to do to get to that point.  With the play makers available on the offense this season, that improvement could be a matter of when, not if.

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