Josh Heupel's Penalty Rates

Despite Josh Heupel’s success as a football coach at both the University of Central Florida (UCF) and the University of Tennessee (UT), and also despite perennial gaudy offensive numbers, Josh Heupel’s teams have been among the most penalized in college football over his six years of coaching. I will look at the extent of this, but I won’t get into why this is true; someone else can do that.

I took data from https://www.teamrankings.com/ to look at how Josh Heupel’s team did with penalties at UCF and UT. By comparison, I wanted to see how Gus Malzahn’s UCF teams have done the past three years, and I also wanted to see how Jeremy Pruitt’s UT teams did the previous three years before Heupel became the coach.

Because penalties aren’t the complete picture, I also wanted to look at winning percentage and the number of plays per game. Just taking a look at 6 years of UCF and UT, it’s obvious that penalties are not having any causal effect on winning percentage for a season.

So what is the reason Josh Heupel’s teams commit so many penalties? His teams’ penalty rankings seem to be inversely proportional to number of play rankings. Heupel shows an average ranking of 116.2 (out of 133 teams most years) in terms of penalties per game (a lower ranking meaning more penalties per game). Conversely, he shows an average ranking of 20.7 for plays per game, even having the number 1 ranking in 2020-2021. Because of this, I wanted to see if there was a relationship between plays per game and penalties per game.

I scraped all the penalty per game and plays per game data from https://www.teamrankings.com/ to get the data for all college football teams for both categories. I combined all the data into one data frame that included the average penalties per game, average plays per game, and the rankings for both. To look the relationship, I wanted to see a scatterplot of average penalties per game vs average plays per game, and I also wanted to see the Pearson r correlation coefficient.

scatterplot of penalties v plas

The scatterplot shows that there is a weak relationship between the average penalties and the average plays per game (r = 0.16, p < 0.05). Even though the relationship is weak, it is a statistically significant relationship. Ultimately, the number of penalties are a trend with Heupel-coached teams, and it doesn’t appear that he can blame it on the number of plays his teams has per game.

A deeper analysis of Tennessee’s penalties might show where they are happening. Are they happening more frequently on offense or defense? Are certain players or position groups committing these penalties? Against which teams are the most penalties committed: teams like Alabama and Georgia, or is it teams that aren’t as stiff competition?

The evidence suggests that while Heupel's offensive strategy correlates with a high volume of plays, it does not inherently lead to increased penalties, hinting at other factors at play. The nature of the penalties, their timing, and their distribution among players and game situations are dimensions still to be explored. In-depth examination could offer insights into whether the penalties are a byproduct of aggressive play-calling, lack of discipline, or strategic trade-offs deemed acceptable by the coaching staff.

Understanding the subtleties behind these penalties can be crucial for refining practice strategies and in-game decision-making. It can help in developing targeted coaching interventions to mitigate unnecessary losses while maintaining the aggressive edge that characterizes Heupel's approach. For the University of Tennessee, such insights are not just academic; they could be the key to fine-tuning a powerful offensive engine into a more efficient, disciplined unit that capitalizes on its strengths without succumbing to self-inflicted setbacks.

For now, the data provides a starting point for a more nuanced discussion on the interplay between plays and penalties under Heupel's tenure. Further research may illuminate the path to optimizing performance where it matters most — on the field where every play, and every penalty, can alter the course of the game.