I keep hearing about how great Penn St is, and how we’ve only looked good because we haven’t played anyone. This prompted me to take a look at Penn St’s schedule to see where it shows they’ve played Alabama every week. Turns out they have not played Alabama every week (I was as shocked to discover this is you likely are reading it).

This got me analyzing their schedule, to see how good the teams they’ve played are, and further led me to analyze their relative performances against the teams they’ve played.

Turns out, Penn State’s vaunted Defense has yet to play a team that averages 400 yds per game of total offense (Northwestern has the best offense they’ve played at 393.76 yds per game). They’ve also not played anyone who averages 27 pts per game. Iowa is thus far the scoring juggernaut on their schedule at 26.1 pts per game.

I then looked at the actual results of each game each team has played, and compared their performances to how their opponents have fared throughout the season. I think this gives a better indication of the relative strength of the statistics, as opposed to the raw stats. My version of advanced metrics, if you will.

For example: Ohio State has averaged 47.29 pts per game. The defenses we’ve played have allowed, on average, 28.31 points per game. Therefore, our relative strength of scoring is 18.98 pts per game better than our opponents have allowed.

By seeing how each team performed relative to their opponents, I found the following:

Offensive Per Game Differentials:

• Scoring: Ohio State +18.98; Penn State +16.06; Advantage Ohio State
• Rushing Yards: Ohio State +73.91; Penn State +25.82; Advantage Ohio State
• Passing Yards: Ohio State +101.41; Penn State +60.75; Advantage Ohio State
• Total Offense: Ohio State +175.33; Penn State +86.57; Advantage Ohio State

Defensive Per Game Differentials:

• Scoring: Ohio State +14.13; Penn State +14.59; Advantage Penn State
• Rushing Yards: Ohio State +97.35; Penn State +19.48; Advantage Ohio State
• Passing Yards: Ohio State -2.55; Penn State +62.44; Advantage Penn State
• Total Defense: Ohio State +94.78; Penn State +81.93; Advantage Ohio State

So, while Penn State’s defense leads the country in scoring, by adjusting for the strength of opponent you find that they actually give up 14.59 fewer pts per game than their opponents score on average, while Ohio St gives up 14.13 pts per game fewer. So relatively speaking, they are less than half a point better than us. Meanwhile, we are allowing 97 rushing yards per game less than our opponents have averaged, and 95 total yards per game less than our opponents average, while Penn State gives up 20 rushing yards, 62 passing yards and 82 total yards per game less. In other words, when adjusting for opponents, our defense compares very favorably, if not better.

When looking at offense, our scoring offense outperforms theirs by 3 pts per game, our rushing offense by 48 yds per game, passing by 40 yds per game, and total offense by 89 yds per game.

Now, I realize you don’t win games on paper, and isn’t meant to guarantee a win. It was really to illustrate how the idea that OSU looks good because of opponents is really just lazy reporting. If you are going to analyze and judge one team that way, you have to do the work to judge them all fairly.