The last two weeks haven’t been the greatest for the advanced stats. From the blowout by Mississippi State to the far too close for comfort victory over a decidedly mediocre at best Syracuse team, LSU has underperformed what the stats expected. Part of that is because at this point, the stats are still incorporating preseason projections, which rated LSU highly, but also LSU just isn’t playing well and probably worse than they should be. We’ll see if that changes this week against a Troy team that is not your usual out-of-conference gimme game.
Last Season: A note on these stats: The offensive and defensive S&P+ marks are calculated as adjusted scoring averages and for the situational ratings, above 100 is good and below 100 is bad. Links to an explanation on the various stats here:
http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/ncaa
http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/fei
http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/fplus
S&P+ (Percentile): 49.5% (63rd in FBS)
Offensive S&P+: 27.4 (80th in FBS)
Offensive Run S&P+: 92.8 (98th in FBS)
Offensive Pass S&P+: 106.8 (50th in FBS)
Defensive S&P+: 26.9 (45th in FBS)
Defensive Run S&P+: 107.8 (37th in FBS)
Defensive Pass S&P+: 113.9 (24th in FBS)
FEI: .083 (44th in FBS)
F/+: 8.6% (53rd in FBS)
Preseason S&P+ Ranking: -2 (74th in FBS)
This Season:
S&P+ (Percentile): 46.4 (69th in FBS)
Offensive S&P+: 26.8 (87th in FBS)
Defensive S&P+: 25.8 (47th in FBS)
F/+: -13.7% (78th in FBS)
The advanced stats aren’t exactly high on the Trojans, but they do highlight what makes Troy tricky. For a Sun Belt team, they play really good defense. Their defense would have been a near top half unit in the SEC last year. And it’s still a Top 50 unit this year. The offense is not particularly dangerous, but it is decent through the air. This could be a good get-well game for an LSU defense that was up and down last week, but it will not be anything like that for the LSU offense. With SEC play on the horizon after this week, they’re essentially looking at an SEC defense this week. We’ll see if Matt Canada’s plans to simplify the offense pay off. This should be, and very likely will be, a win for LSU, but it is not any ordinary non-Power 5 home out of conference game.