K-State Football: Is There a Flaw with the Wildcats Offense
The K-State football offense has, statistically, improved dramatically over last year. Despite the better numbers, something doesn’t feel right.
I am the first one to admit that i love the yards per play statistic. It’s not a perfect statistic by any means, but as a stat, it’s one of the most valuable standalone statistics out there. It’s especially valuable for a K-State football team that generally tries to slow down the pace of the game.
By slowing down the game, the Wildcats run fewer plays. This generally leads to skewed “total” stats where it makes the defense look better than it is and the offense look worse. For example, in total yards per game, the K-State offense ranks ninth, but they have run the fewest plays by a wide margin.
The improvements are with both passing and rushing. K-State has improved their rushing attack so far this by going from 5.27 yards per carry to 5.78. More impressively, Jesse Ertz has taken a giant leap in passing, by going from 6.6 yards per pass attempt last year to 8.5 this year.
This all sounds great. However, against the two most recent sub-par opponents K-State has played, I’ve had to grade the offense quite harshly. Sure, they built up some stats against schools like Central Arkansas and Charlotte, but Vanderbilt and Baylor are nothing to write home about either. This caused me to do some digging and to get deeper into the stats. I didn’t like what I found.
Third Downs
This is a complicated thing that is explained by multiple statistics. To begin, the K-State football team has dropped to eighth in third down completion percentage this year at 37.78%. It’s the lowest number for KSU since 2009.
The design of the K-State offense is to control the clock and slow down the game. To do so, it takes some committed designs in the gameplan to get easy third downs so that the team can keep using more plays to run down the clock. When it works, K-State has had years where they got over 48% on 3rd downs like in 2012
It sounds simple, but in an era where everybody in the Big 12 seems to hurry up and sling the ball around, it takes patience and commitment to keep chugging along and running the ball effectively. As I’ve shown, the Wildcats are running well. So what gives?
It’s the passing game. There is no sugar-coating it because the Cats are simply awful at it. The third downs are broken down into distance, so we have third and 1-3 yards, 3rd and 4-6 yards, 3rd and 7-9, and 3rd 10+. Here is the breakdown of the number of attempts and the success rate.
| Attempts | 1st downs | Percentage | |
| 1-3 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 4-6 | 11 | 5 | 45% |
| 7-9 | 7 | 1 | 14% |
| 10+ | 9 | 0 | 0% |
| Total | 28 | 7 | 25% |
If it looks bad to you, it’s because it is bad. It doesn’t get better either. Here are the quarterback ratings for each situation.
| QB Rating | |
| 1-3 | 125 |
| 4-6 | 172 |
| 7-9 | -1 |
| 10+ | 12.13 |
Jesse Ertz’s overall qb rating is 140 so that should give some clues into how badly the offense is doing on third downs. Even Peyton Bender, the KU quarterback is at 120.31, so it’s a bad situation.
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This is where this gets sticky. Part of the blame goes on Ertz because of his inaccuracy in some throws.
Some blame also goes to the wide receivers. However, I think some of the biggest blame goes to the offensive coordinator Dana Dimel.
Because despite the success in the offense, KSU is on pace to get into less third and shorts than in years past. That means the team is moving away slightly from the things that K-State does best.
I tracked how many third and 1-3 yards we’ve had in past years. The breakdown follows.
| Running | Passing | Total | |
| 2017 | 4 | 1 | 5 |
| 2016 | 43 | 14 | 57 |
| 2015 | 37 | 11 | 48 |
| 2014 | 33 | 16 | 49 |
| 2012 | 38 | 11 | 49 |
If you extrapolate the 2017 numbers to 13 games, that’s 16.25 running attempts and 3.25 passing attempts for 19.40 total attempts. As you can see, K-State is way off pace.
If K-State can’t start making third downs easier on themselves, they will end up wasting the benefits of a much improved offense.
Kansas State football is a good team, but their offense is really disappointing this season. Ertz has to step it up and the offense as a whole needs to start converting on third downs. Otherwise, this team won’t be going anywhere in 2017.