What the stats say about the Ticats
One of the revealing, and often cruel, moments in the CFL week is the release of the updated league statistics. It either confirms what your eyes have told you or sends you immediately to the optometrist.
Here’s the portrait this week’s stats by Steve Daniel and his staff paint of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
That’s not Hamilton Mountain, it’s Everest:
Give this metric a long look before you judge quarterback Jeremiah Masoli too harshly. The difference between where the Hamilton offence starts with the ball this season and where its opponent’s offence starts with the ball is a cumulative 980 yards — to the negative. This means Masoli and his crew have had to make up an average of 122.5 yards per game (or nearly 10 yards every possession) just to get back to the same starting points as the other team.
Conversely, Bo Levi Mitchell has an average field-position head start of 100 yards per game on whichever quarterback his Calgary Stampeders are playing against.
The Ticat offence has taken the field 106 times, 102 of those on their own side of the field. In the four drive starts they’ve had from the other guys’ side of the 55yard-line, they’ve scored three touchdowns.
Two of those right-side-up possessions were in the 50-11 annihilation of Montreal. No other offence has started fewer than 11 times in the opponent’s end.
So why not make the climb steeper?
It’s obvious — how could it not be? — that the Tiger-Cats suffer from field-position issues. You’d think they wouldn’t want to compound the problem with preventable yardage losses. Yet, they are being flagged for an average of 97.8 yards in penalties per game, second to only Edmonton’s crime rate of 111.9 yards.
Of the 72 Hamilton penalties accepted by the other team, a league-high 23 have been for procedure or offside, among the leading causes of coaches’ health problems.
Close only counts in … well, actually it doesn’t count at all:
So far, there have been more large-margin wins than usual this year, with just as many CFL games being decided by 11 or more points as by fewer than 11. Paradoxically, though, a greater percentage of games have been decided in the final three minutes than in any of the last five years. Of the 11 league games decided by a margin of five to 10 points, the Ticats have played in — and lost — three. They lost another
(to Saskatchewan) by 11.
Hamilton is the only team in the league which has not won a game decided by 10 points or less.
Some damning CFL statistics:
The Ticats are tied for second last in forcing turnovers with 13, just two more than bottom-feeding Toronto and have surrendered the third-most turnovers, at 18.
That’s a negative differential of five — the same number of games they’ve lost. And they’ve lost all five games in which they’ve given up more turnovers than they’ve created . ... Hamilton has given up 21 sacks, with only the 27 by Montreal’s cheesecloth protection ranked lower, while creating only a dozen sacks itself. That is not good math.
Neither is the 6.0 yards it has given up, on average, every time the opponent rushes.
Some blessing CFL statistics:
Hamilton and Edmonton are the only offences which have more than 20 big plays (runs of 20 or more yards, passes of 30-plus). Each has 24. The Ticats and Winnipeg each have rushed 11 times for 20 or more yards while no one else has more than five . ... The Ticats possess the ball nearly four minutes longer per game than their opponents . ... Courtney Stephen, who lost his starting safety job to Mike Daly, leads the CFL in special teams tackles with 13 . ... Jeremiah Masoli has thrown for 2,465 yards, second to Mike Reilly (but has as many interceptions as TD passes, eight), and leads the league in rushing average (8.7 yards); Lirim Hajrullahu, at 10-for-10, is the only kicker in the league with more than five attempts at field goals of 40 yards or longer who has not missed one.