On Wednesday morning Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer had this pop up on his Twitter feed…
— Urban Meyer (@OSUCoachMeyer) December 17, 2014
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After doing some quick research, I found this to be a very misleading stat. In fact, it’s just blatantly wrong. Not only is Ohio State not first in total sacks since Week 10, but the Buckeyes played more games than any other team among the nation’s sack leaders to get there. As I noted on No 2-Minute Warning this morning;
Week 10 came at the beginning of November, so I included all games played during the week of November 1. Here are the nation’s leaders in sacks since that week, and how many games they played in that span.
22.0 sacks – Arizona State (5 games played)
19.0 – Ohio State (6)
18.0 – Virginia Tech (4)
17.0 – Utah (5)
17.0 – Utah State (5)
15.0 – Washington (5)
14.0 – Boise State (5)
14.0 – Clemson (4)
14.0 – Missouri (5)
13.0 – Stanford (4)
Ohio State likely counted their sack total from the Big Ten Championship Game (3.0 sacks vs. Wisconsin). If you took out conference championship games (I included Missouri’s 2.0 sacks vs. Alabama and Boise State’s 4.0 vs. Fresno State in the above counts), the Buckeyes drop below Virginia Tech (of course they do), Utah and Utah State.
Now, cooking the numbers in your favor is something everybody will do, but if you are going to do it you better make sure your did it right. It’s one thing to stake a claim at a national championship, but to suggest you are number one in a stat that is easy enough to double check and dispute, you better hope nobody does some quick fact checking.
Maybe Ohio State’s research team didn’t have the right feed available to verify any of Arizona State’s numbers.
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