There are several disturbing long-term trends in football performance at OSU.  These trends are evident across the present winning period that followed the 28-year losing streak that ended in 1999.  In evaluating the direction of the program as fans and observers of OSU football, one question needs to be asked – are we making progress toward our goals?

The programmatic goals are to:

1. Instill a winning philosophy
2. Foster and maintain competitiveness
3. Win conference championships

Let’s review the progress over time by using three important metrics: national scoring defense ranking, national scoring offense ranking, winning percentage.  National scoring defense and offense metrics permits comparisons of two essential characteristics of on-field performance across years and offensive and defensive philosophies.  These rankings illustrate how a program’s offense and defense perform in relation to peers and are elemental in nature – good teams score more than opponents and hold their opponent’s offense to lower scores regardless of the style of offense or defense.  The other metric, winning percentage, should be self-explanatory and is a function of the other two metrics.

While there is some variation in year to year ranking over time starting in 1999 through 2013, the overall trend (linear regression) in national ranking in scoring defense is downward (see figure below).  In other words, OSU’s defenses are declining in their ability to keep scores down in relation to their national peers.  With the advent across the nation of high scoring spread offenses there has been a trend in increasing scoring, but OSU’s defenses have not been able to keep pace with these changes as have their peers.

OSU National Scoring Defense Ranking and Trend (click to enlarge)

A similar downward trend is noted for national scoring offense ranking during the 1999 through 2013 period (see figure below).  The ranking of OSU’s offense in terms of scoring ability is declining in relation to national peers.

OSU National Scoring Offense Ranking and Trend (click to enlarge)

With both scoring offense and scoring defense rankings dropping over time, it should not be surprising that OSU’s winning percentage is also declining since our first winning season back in 1999 (see figure below).

OSU Winning Percentage and Trend (click to enlarge)

Will this year be different?  Will this year mark a change in the trends?  Future articles will examine other competitiveness performance metrics.