EMU at Missouri: One last pregame look at the stats

As one does on Friday nights, I finally finished an idea I had in my head for months yesterday evening. I wanted to create basically a one-page, at-a-glance look at ... well, everything. Or almost everything. Everything I say the box score should have but doesn’t, plus most of the stuff you look to a box score for anyway. The only thing missing, really, is something a lot of people find important — this thing called "scoring" -- but I hope this can become a useful accompaniment to all the words you read about your team.

As Rock M has long been a collective guinea pig of sorts, I thought I’d toss two box scores your way for some Saturday morning feedback. Because there’s nothing that prepares you better for a tailgate than some tiny words on a giant chart, right?

(Mainly I want to see how the layout deals with these boxes. In theory clicking on them should make them big enough to read. We’ll see!)

This can give you a multitude of information at one time. For instance, if you hadn’t seen one second of MU-WVU, you now see pretty clearly that a) the pace was crazy-high (I think my "plays" column might be adding snaps that resulted in penalties or something — a couple of the games had different play totals), and b) Mizzou was still crazy-inefficient. However, c) the turnovers row tells us that Mizzou got enough breaks to keep things close and create the same number of scoring chances as WVU, and d) Mizzou was hilariously bad at turning those chances into points.

We know this because we watched, but for a game you didn’t watch, you can glean all that in about 10 seconds.

Speaking of games we didn’t watch, EMU-MVSU:

We basically see that a) the game wasn’t played at a dramatically high or low pace, b) EMU dominated MVSU in about every possible way, c) I made a lot of mention of the EMU run game this weekend, but it was the passing game that brought efficiency to the table, and d) that passing game worked on standard downs, not passing downs.

Todd Porter was brilliant when MVSU had to fear the run, but filtering out garbage time, he was 1-for-6 on passing downs with an INT. I know we are now concerned about Mizzou’s defensive line and everything, but ... going to go out on a limb and say both it and the Mizzou secondary are better than MVSU’s. (There’s a chance that suspended starting QB Brogan Roback will be playing instead, but we’ll just say I’m still confident in Mizzou in that matchup.)

To say the least, you’ll be seeing a lot of these box scores moving forward. That is, if you can actually see them (and they aren’t too tiny on here).