What Saith The Geek?

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My apologies to The Geek. I received this post at 5:47am (that's one hard working dude) and didn't get it up on the site till about 9:30pm. My bad. Doesn't make it any less awesome though...

We had another great week at TheGeekSheet, going 6-1 on our recommended plays, including a pretty easy winner on the free nugget we gave you all last week with Nebraska destroying Iowa State. We are now a paltry 13-1 the last two weeks, with our only loss coming on Stanford last week when UCLA marched 87 yards with 2 minutes to go, scoring with 15 seconds to go…but hey, you can’t win ‘em all right. We actually have two recommended plays this week on SEC games, which doesn’t happen often for us as we tend to be overtly critical about SEC games, including a play on the ole hotty totties (the other game is the UGA-LSU game). Click here for our recommend plays this week, hell it’s only $40 bucks, which doesn’t even cover the cost of your case of beer and bottle of boone’s farm for the old naggin hen.

08:00PM	181	Penn State Nittany Lions	2
Saturday 10/25/2008	182	Ohio State Buckeyes

Ohio State continues to be very bad on offense, averaging only 322 ypg (5.1 yppl), which is even worse considering they’ve done it vs average at best defenses (otherwise allowing 362 ypg @ 5.3 yppl). Even last week in their 45 pts showing, they only racked up 332 yards offense and had it not been for 5 MSU turnovers would have been lucky to post much more than 24. Much is made about how good OSUs defense is (which they are as they are only allowing 4.3 yppl), but statistically speaking PSUs defense is better, allowing only 4.0 yppl and slightly better than OSU vs average (+1.1 yppl for PSU to +1.0 yppl for OSU). PSU is only allowing 11 ppg, and in typical Tressell ball fashion, OSU is defying the odds of what their average score should be considering their paltry total offense and yppl statistics (they are averaging 27 pgg despite just 322 ypg). That is mainly due to a 21-8 turnover margin in favor of OSU (that equates to a little over a 1.5 Turnover / game margin in favor of OSU). If you normalize that and evaluate OSUs offense to PSUs defense we come up with a projection of 10-14 pts for OSU on 242 yards offense (4.0 yppl). Even using the entire season’s statistics we come up with 15-17 points, which is in line with our model projections of 15-20 for the Buckeyes. I noted this in my recap last week, but after the egg PSUs defense laid in the 1^st quarter of last weeks game they allowed only 2 Michigan drives to gain 1^st downs and one of those was Michigan’s last drive, so this is definitely a D capable of completely neutralizing a mediocre offense.

PSUs offense is the best OSU has faced, and outside USC it isn’t even close. Penn State is now averaging 482 ypg (6.9 yppl) this season at 45 ppg. They are really getting it done on the ground where they are averaging 5.7 ypr. OSU (as mentioned above) is pretty solid on defense again (allowing only 4.3 yppl), and pretty decent vs the run allowing 3.5 ypr, but have been roughed up a little vs the good teams they’ve faced who’ve made a commitment to run the football. Wisconsin and USC both rushed for over 150 vs OSU and not surprisingly USC blew them out and Wisc almost beat OSU. My projections call for 4.9 ypr, and 383 yards total offense at 5.6 yppl for PSU. My scoring projections (28-34) are right on top of our models (28-35), and I just can’t see OSU keeping PSU in check the entire game here, particularly with an offense that doesn’t look to be able to get much of anything going. Penn State 30 Ohio State 17.

Good luck to everyone this week, come check us out to see what we have on the big SEC games this week as well as a couple other not-so large contests (we make a living off the MAC, MWC, and SBC). Good luck, and wager wisely…till next time.

The Geek

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