College Football is Back - Jackets Suffocate the Seminoles in a Stunning Season Opener!

Yesterday the 2024 college football season kicked off at Aviva Stadium in Dublin Ireland. The Aer Lingus College Football Classic pitted the Florida State Seminoles against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. FSU faithful were hoping for a strong start to their “revenge tour” after getting left out of the college football playoffs last year, despite going undefeated and winning the ACC Championship (a feat that will gaurantee a playoff berth and first round bye this season). The Yellow Jackets are in their second year of the Brent Key rebuild, after a disastrous campaign from Geoff Collins. 

Admittedly, I have not watched this game in its entirety yet. I listened to much of it on the radio, and watched what I could while I was taking brakes from my weekend mountain bike ride (see what I did there?). If you recall from our first blog post, this is the entire reason I decided to build Drive Charts – so I can get key insights from any game this season without having to watch it. 

Going into this game, I felt the 10.5 point spread for FSU was way too high, given the offensive production that Tech was bringing back this season, and the amount of production FSU lost from last year. I told my friends to take the money line on Georgia Tech earlier last week (receipts available upon request).  

As I was listening to the game on the radio, and following along online when I could the one thing that surprised me was that Georgia Tech was not putting up as much offense as I was expecting. When I loaded this week’s data into Drive Charts this morning everything became clear. Normally, when a team has 2 punts and no turnovers you would think they would have put up a ton of points and yardage.  Georgia Tech did not put a lot of either, but their yards per play tell a different story. Georgia tech averaged 6.5 yard per play – very respectable, but not quite elite.  

But this consistent production enabled the Yellow Jackets to slow the game down to a pace we did not see once last season. There were FOURTEEN possessions in this game. Last season 92 percent of the games had 20 or more possessions, and there were 5 games of 15 possessions (the lowest observation in 2023). Needless to say, this was NOT the pace that the Seminoles over 400 yards and 12 offensive possessions per game last season wanted to play.  

Georgia Tech had 3 drives in this game that went for 6 minutes or longer. Almost half their time of possession was in their last two drives of the game. What’s worse, Florida State’s last possession of the game where they tied the game took 8 minutes and 24 seconds off the clock. With they way Georgia Tech was running the ball on Saturday you can bet your Bama tickets that they were thrilled to trade a touchdown for what they knew would be the final possession of the game.