Takeout pace and how does the D look?

As I wrote, giving up 42 to Louisville was bad. You will not win many games when that happens. Now some -- including some coaches -- might say that when you score 45 and score many of those points quickly, you are bound to give up more points. Even before this scoring outburst, BC was playing faster i.e. uptempo. And there was the belief that the new pace would impact the D. The faster pace was part of the reason for resting players.

But just because BC is playing at a faster pace, doesn't mean that we can't make fair comparisons between different BC defenses. Instead of total D and points allowed -- which are impacted by pace, we can look at yards per play allowed. In this measure, it is about how good you are down to down. Here are the stats of BC's yards allowed per play under Addazio:

-- 2017 yards per play allowed: 74th -- 5.7 per play
-- 2016 yards per play allowed: 26th -- 5.0 per play
-- 2015 yards per play allowed: 5th -- 4.3 per play
-- 2014 yards per play allowed: 33rd -- 5.0 per play
-- 2013 yards per play allowed: 86th -- 5.8 per play

As you can see, the team was most stingy in 2015, when it was near the top of all defensive statistics. Now, I know that you could still claim that pace impacts yards allowed per play. If D has to face more plays, they might still wear down and allow more big plays that skew the numbers. But I think what this does speak to is that the current D is not as good as last year and clearly not even in the same ballpark as the 2015 D.

The remainder of the schedule is not filled with offensive juggernauts, so the stats do have a chance to improve. But by the time we shoot down this argument, we will just be hit with more excuses about injuries.