re: Q&A w/ Jordan Pugh presented by Old Army FightCast and Aggie Sports Radio!!!

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I've been working on this off and on all for a while. So it is long. Enjoy. A little secret about ASU; they aren't that good. Let's keep that a secret for a while so we can enjoy the national attention on September 5, but it is true. 1. Their defense wasn't very good last year. 61st in yards per play allowed. Especially poor against the pass. 101st in yards allowed per pass attempt. They blitz a lot and do get sacks. They were 17th in sack percentage (we were 21st). They don't just give up big plays on blitzes. They also cover poorly. They were 80th in completion percentage allowed. (For perspective, we were 55th. Pretty amazing considering all the complaining I hear about Devante Harris and playing 10 yards off line versus all of the talk about their aggressive schemes). 2. Although they return a lot of starters on defense, they lost their two play makers. Marcus Hardison had 10 of their 39 sacks. He is a 3-4 d end that went in the fourth round of the draft. He was the only down lineman with more than a handful of sacks. The rest mostly came on blitzes. Damarious Randal is a safety that went in the first round. Led the team with 106 tackles and 3 interceptions. Of their best players they bring back, several are good but none are special. Lloyd Carrington is a projected 3-4 round draft pick. Jordan Simone is a former walk on who is incredibly obnoxious. Does things like swing a sledge hammer after practice in front of the media to "work on his core strength." Basically a wanna be JJ Watt without the talent. Second on the team with 100 tackles. Projected 7th round draft pick. Who is he going to cover? Our guys are going to eat his lunch. They bring back a lot of linebackers. Plenty of production and a solid group but none of them are anything special. Longino will be a 6th or 7th round pick. The rest won't be drafted. 3. Offense actually not that good either. 54th in yards per play. They score quite a lot of points because of tempo (33rd in plays per game) and turnovers (more on that later). They are terrible at pass protection. 114th in sacks allowed percentage and they lost 3 starting o linemen. So yeah. 72nd in yards per rush (although that is obviously brought down by all the sacks allowed). 4. They lost most of their play makers on offense too. Jaelon Strong (drafted by Texans) and Cameron Smith (injured and out for the year) had over half of their receiving yards. DJ Foster is a stud, but otherwise their leading returning receiver had 167 yards. I don't see a ton of talent here either. Foster is legit. The interior line is solid. Westerman and Teofilo will be mid to late round picks. But obviously o line performance was not good last year overall. Running back Demario Richard is pretty good; 487 yards on 5.7 ypc, but he is at best an average SEC West starting running back.. (okay, Fornette, Collins, Henry, Roc Thomas, make that significantly below average). 5. So how did they win so many games last year? All the above doesn't make them a bad team. It makes them a mediocre team. They won 10 games because 1) they won close games (miracle against USC and overtime against Utah, last minute win over Duke) and 2) they had a very good turnover margin. They were a net total of +22 in their 9 PAC games (+1 after taking away the game against last place Washington State). They were 6th in the country in turnover margin per game (+1.2). When they lost the turnover battle they had BAD losses (see Oregon State and a 35 point loss to UCLA). Turnover margin is partly due to scheme/ good play and partly due to luck that will regress to the mean. They were 38th in interception percentage. Will that drop with their best pass rusher and defensive back in the NFL? They were 19th in fumbles forced. This is a stat that can often quickly revert to the mean because we are dealing with a small sample size (ie they forced 13 fumbles all year. With a sample size that small, a couple more "unforced" fumbles can move you way up in the rankings, not to mention win games for you). Hardison and Randall forced 5 of the 13 fumbles. They were also 3rd in recovery percentage. This number appears to be almost totally random so we shouldn't expect it to repeat itself. They were middle of the pack in 2013 before finishing 3rd in 2014. In 2014 Bama finished 100th in this category, Ohio State 90th, Stanford 117th and Auburn 128th (Haa Haa!) so really no correlation between good players/ good teams and recovery percentage. 6. They have some young talent but MUCH less than we do. They have a total of 3 four star recruits left from the 2012 and 2013 classes (of course they have some proven players in those classes as shown above). They have 0 five star recruits and 13 four star recruits in the 2014 and 2015 classes. We have 6 five stars and 22 four stars. 7. Summary At this point you are probably thinking that "Yeah, you could pick apart A&M like that too." Which is true. Both teams have to project major improvement from lots of individual players or major contributions from new players to move from a bowl team to a legitimate contender. The difference is we have a much better talent pool in the lower classes and therefore much more legitimate reason to expect that improvement. If we call the upper classes of the two programs a wash (Bercovici, Foster, Kelly, Teofilo, Westerman, Longino, Carrington, Simone vs Ifedi, Matthews, Cheek, Tra, James White, RSJ, Daeshon, Alonzo, Washington, Devante, B Will). And by the way, we have 10 four or five star recruits left in those classes versus their 3. Then we have a huge advantage in the lower classes as just mentioned below. There is no excuse to not blow these guys out of the water. 122

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