Last Thoughts: Oklahoma's offensive line
by Payton Guthrie & Davis Dunkleberger
Welcome to Last Thoughts, a weekly article featuring insights from Payton Guthrie & Davis Dunkleberger on the Oklahoma Sooners’ upcoming opponents and other interesting thoughts about the Oklahoma football team.
For the debut edition, Payton & Davis breakdown the Sooners’ offensive line performance against Temple in relation to the other SEC teams and their OL performances during week one.
Davis created the above graph plotting the SEC teams and their OL performances across week one. PPA or Predicted Points Added is an attempt to measure the success of each run and assign a value to the overall performance by equating the success to points scored.
Line Yards is the average amount of yards created by the offensive line across the entire game.
A lot has been said about the poor performance of the OU OL, but the graph shows a bit more under the hood. Oklahoma is the fourth “best” OL in producing Line Yards, but the offense isn’t able to convert that yardage potential into PPA at a rate that keeps with the trend line.
What does this mean?
On the whole, the Oklahoma OL is performing within expectation of a good offensive line. The issues are the assignment busts or bad reps that tank the scoring opportunities for the offense.
Once those mistakes are corrected then I would expect the OL to perform better across the board since the overall production seems to be there already.
The next graph is a little messier but tells a similar story as the first one. Oklahoma is producing a good amount of raw rushing yards, but is in the middle tier of success rate.
Again, this speaks to the Oklahoma OL performing admirably while suffering injuries that kept them from a clean game.
This is an item that we will keep eye on throughout the season.