Last week, the first Oregon Audit came out of a 34-27 win over Boise State with a slightly different conclusion than the scoreboard suggested. Oregon had obvious problems, particularly with execution and defensive consistency, but there were enough things underneath the final score to suggest the Ducks had played better football than a seven-point home win might indicate.
Stillwater went the other direction.
Oklahoma State beat Oregon 39-31, and the eight-point margin makes this look like a competitive road loss in which a handful of plays decided the outcome. The deeper numbers do not support that interpretation. Oregon finished with 281 yards, averaged 4.8 yards per play and spent only 22% of its offensive snaps in Oklahoma State territory. The Cowboys finished with 554 yards, averaged 6.7 yards per play and ran 57% of their plays on Oregon’s side of the field. Oregon’s two interceptions — one returned for a touchdown and another returned to the 1-yard line — were enormously valuable plays, but they also did a lot of work keeping the scoreboard from reflecting what was happening everywhere else.
That is really the purpose of this exercise. The Audit is not intended to replace what we saw Saturday or find an advanced statistic that tells us our eyes were wrong. It is supposed to test what we thought we saw, separate the occasional spectacular play from the things Oregon was doing repeatedly and then assign grades based on the entire performance rather than whichever moment is easiest to remember.
This week, the numbers mostly confirm the uncomfortable version of the game.
A quick reminder about the numbers
I am going to use EPA quite a bit in these reports, so the easiest way to think about it is still this: Expected Points Added measures whether each play leaves an offense in a better or worse position to score than it was before the snap. A six-yard gain on third-and-12 is not particularly valuable. Four yards on third-and-3 is. EPA attempts to distinguish between those two rather than treating all yardage equally.
Success rate works alongside it. Instead of asking how explosive an offense was, success rate asks how consistently it produced useful plays. That distinction becomes especially important in this game because Oregon did create several explosive plays. The Ducks simply produced far too few successful ordinary snaps between them.
Game on Paper had Oregon at
