Improvement, Sure, But How Much?

The two truisms of the offseason when discussing the MSU offense are:

A. Things can't really get worse

and,

B. It should improve to at least an average performance.

Are these statements true? Luckily, we can use recent history as a guide to set some reasonable preseason expectations.

Methodology

Basically, I want to find teams that came close to fitting MSU's unappealing 2012 offensive profile. As a start, I screened out non-BCS schools as they generally lack the resources, finances, and player bases to match up with BCS programs in these sorts of exercises.

Second, I need to pick a metric and set a upper limit that captures 2012 MSU and a comparable set of BCS teams. Rather than set it at say team's offensively ranking at 100th in the country or below, I set it to a statistical target (because nation-wide, years can be offense-biased or defense-biased overall). I ultimately decided to select yards per play like I did with other columns as an easy, but robust, way to compare team's offensive output while adjusting for pace, and with the reasoning that increased points generally follow increased yards, I decided to set the upper limit at 5 yards per play. So if you, like MSU (4.88) were a BCS team who averaged less than 5 yards a play, we're going to look at both whether and how much you improved or backslid the following season. As cfbstats.com goes back to 2007 and that conveniently happens to be the start date of the Dantonio tenure, we'll go back those six years.

Findings

So, first we've got this idea that last year was as bad as it could really get. Not true (unfortunately)!

Though you'd bet really heavily on MSU's offense improving, about 1 out of every 5.5 teams on the list regressed from their already low total the year before.

But if we're talking improvement, how much exactly?

That looks pretty good!

Any chance this is getting thrown off by some of those big improvements from particularily horrible teams at the top?

Maybe a little bit, but the team in the exact middle of this set is still seeing about a half a yard of improvement.

Now can some context as to where those type of improvements would put a team of MSU's offense last year? Well, if the team's average improvement would be about .58 yards, a reasonable guess would be that MSU's offense will get to somewhere around 5.46 yards per play this year.

Where would that put us in comparison to other teams? Well, historically speaking:

Right about near the national average, and right about near the Big Ten average as well.

It's also a little comforting to see that the leap the Spartans made between 2008 and 2009 was the 7th best improvement in the past six years out of this set of teams.

Conclusion

It's likely, at least based on recent historical data, that the rebuild of the MSU offense takes more than just one year to fully reverse the damages. But if like last year, it holds true that the Spartan defense and special teams are good enough to only require an average offense, well... all signs point to 'probably'!