Data on common opponents

For you stat-hungry fans, here are a couple of tables that show the numbers between the six common opponents of the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Michigan Child Molesters.

The six opponents (Penn State, Iowa, Michigan State, Indiana, Minnesota and Northwestern) are arranged in each table chronologically according to the order they appeared on each team’s schedule. This allows trends to be observed.

We didn’t want to bury ourselves in stats, so we only included the following ‘important’ stats: total points (Pts), total yards (Yds), total first downs (Dwns), and turnovers (TOs); for each team and its opponent (Opp).

Table 1: Michigan

Table 2: Ohio State

Notes:

We’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. However, there are a few things that jump out from the data.

First, OSU’s offense is clearly in a different league (something we knew). OSU’s margin of victory (33.8 pts) is larger than the number of points the UM offense is putting up (24.5).

But most interesting are the defensive numbers – OSU and UM are almost identical. Kinda odd that all you hear about is the ‘vaunted’ UM defense, but note that, against these six opponents, they’ve only allowed 7 — only seven! — fewer yards per game than OSU. Also, the Bucks’ are allowing a full point less per game than UM, and forcing nearly twice as many turnovers.

In short, against these common opponents, OSU’s defense was better overall than UM’s.

Trend-wise, it’s interesting to see that UM’s scoring defense is improving, and OSU’s scoring offense is improving.

Also, check out how each team performed against a given opponent. It’s clear, row by row, that OSU outplayed UM in each one of these matchups. The one opponent that could be considered a statistical “draw” is Penn State, and it’s worth noting that the OSU/Penn State game occurred during a virtual monsoon.

Feel free to add your own analysis of the tables in the comments.