Big Ten Football: 2025 Postseason Statistical Review, Part 1

This article is a continuation of last year’s entry in which I compiled the charting data from every Big Ten game since 2021 to track the progress of each team in the most recent season in their fundamental metrics. I still have a backlog of about a quarter of the 2025 Big Ten season to chart, mostly the non-conference and bowl games for teams Oregon didn’t face in the Fall, but I have the preliminary logical tests, garbage time exclusion, QB scramble separation, etc. done for every game so the numbers herein should be very close to final (charting itself reveals information about personnel usage, scheme, and tendencies, which I’ll reserve for my team previews in the Summer).

Last year’s article was quite lengthy; when I was covering the Pac-12 the entire conference fit in a single digestible article but an 18-team conference now seems unwieldy all at once. This time I’ll break the conference up into two parts: next week’s article will cover the nine conference opponents Oregon is slated to see in 2026, while this one will cover the nine remaining teams. To balance the numbers, this means the three teams that Oregon sees in both 2025 and 2026 — Northwestern, USC, and UW — will be next week, while the two teams that Oregon misses both years, Maryland and Purdue, as well as the Ducks themselves, will be this week.

Including the postseason data had the biggest effect on the Hoosiers’ rush offense – the Ohio State, Oregon, and Miami games pulled down their YPC and rush explosiveness considerably compared to their 12-game regular season numbers, while the pass offense and both defensive areas remained mostly unchanged. The most interesting thing about the offense was the midseason change from the heavy RPO style which actually reduced their pass explosiveness significantly compared to 2024 — most Big Ten defenses just couldn’t handle it — but which made them more resilient for the post season as they were much more versatile and less easily solved.

On defense the heart of their performance was absolutely stellar rush defense numbers. Almost every Big Ten team has a better-than-average explosive rush defense figure (which really means simply that most Big Ten offenses are terrible at explosive rushing, and defenses are doing nothing special), but Indiana’s number goes well beyond that by nearly three times the standard effect. Pass defense was very good on an efficiency basis, particularly on 2nd or 3rd & long, though both film and the numbers indicate they had a vulnerability to explosive passing and opposing OCs often made mistakes in their strategy … and no one can afford mistakes against this team.

Despite injuries all season long, Oregon’s depth of skill talent kept efficiency rushing and explosive passing nominal for this team. But the catty-corner aspects of the offense, explosive rushing and efficiency passing, fell significantly, to basically FBS average levels which are well below the championship threshold that this team has come to expect over the last couple of decades. These were predictable effects from Oregon’s offensive line situation and a caution to teams believing they can outrun the data on the transfer portal effect or any other well documented statistical phenomenon – math is undefeated.

The Ducks’ defense continues to be very “minty” with very low explosive plays surrendered, very good 1st down, 2nd & short pass defense, and 3rd & long pass defense numbers, while the short-yardage rush defense numbers are comically poor. In the Big Ten, short yardage is an invitation to game-theory deprived OCs to run so this “vulnerability” comes up a lot and drags the overall rush defense figure down, but is of little consequence for the same reason that it is to DC’s Parker’s squad at Iowa (discussed below). To the extent that the Ducks have a concern on defense it’s that they’re going backwards on explosive pass defense – at long last the staff has introduced top talent potential into the equation on the secondary but it’s very young and half the group was still made up of capped-out transfers, and the linebackers (a key element of pass defense in this structure) seem to have stagnated.

Careful observers knew that the preseason talk about Penn State being a contender was well overblown since their longrunning structural problems at the skill positions weren’t addressed and they’d lost a generational tight end through whom the lion’s share of the passing offense went in 2024. But two new problems emerged that were shocking – their linebacker corps fell apart, and their OC changed up their run scheme to a dog’s dinner of perimeter runs and gadget plays. Both of these things turned Penn State’s biggest foundational advantages into liabilities, and their slide into a six-loss skid was sudden.

But other than a road loss to Ohio State, all of those losses were by single digits – they’d gone from a B+ team (trying but never quite making an A grade) into a C+ team, but they didn’t fall all the way into failing territory. They still possessed a strong pair of running backs and therefore a good efficiency run game, the same average passing game as before their TE revelation in 2024 (and FBS average in the Big Ten is ahead of the curve), a great pass rush, and to my surprise they improved on their explosive pass vulnerability. I haven’t caught up on all of PSU’s film yet and I’m most eager to watch their DBs in total, because in the games I have they’ve looked as poor as usual to me, so I’m curious to find out what the explanation for the four-point improvement in that metric is about.

Of the remaining six teams in this article, the Scarlet Knights are the only one with above-water rushing and passing offensive numbers – although they’re just barely treading water in rush explosiveness and pass efficiency, they’re quite good the other ways, very efficient rushing and very explosive passing. This looks somewhat like Oregon’s numbers, but it’s a different cause – Rutgers was highly effective between the 20s but completely clammed up inside the redzone.

The defense, however, was just bad at everything. 2024 constituted a big slide in most categories and was shocking enough for Coach Schiano given his long career on that side of the ball, but 2025 completed the collapse with the final redoubt of the defense crumbling as well, that being pass efficiency with a massive falloff of 10 points and over 1.2 YPA allowed. The back end under the new DC (actually a re-tread) seemed disorganized on tape even though the players weren’t without talent or experience, and I think my counterpart Andrew Rice at On the Banks is right in his assessment that they’re in trouble until they make a change.

One look at the Hawkeyes’ offensive metrics should be enough to understand why I have derided the Joe Moore award committee as “vibes-based” since 2023 and consider their leaving Miami off the finalist list this year a laughingstock. The most interesting aspect of Iowa’s season happened in the last six weeks, in the late emergence of a young WR and TE who gave them vertical stretch threats. Catching up on tape, the difference between these guys and the rest of the passing targets — particularly the latter group’s inability to create any separation from even standard fare Big Ten secondaries — was stark.

The defense was the possibly the deepest into DC Parker’s “Iowa trap” that I’ve ever seen him get. I’m more convinced than ever that it’s a deliberate strategy to allow opposing offenses to get a very specific amount of rushing yardage — but crucially, no more — on each run play in order to bait them into thinking they can sustain a very long drive all the way into the endzone, only to find out that there’s no such thing as a college offense that can successfully execute a 20-play touchdown drive without making a mistake. There’s a clear way out of the trap — hitting shots on zero-risk short-yardage situations to score from outside the redzone — but few teams seem to figure it out, or perhaps they do but want to beat Iowa at their own game for the street cred.

I’ll need to catch up on tape to nail down the reason why Purdue’s rush efficiency fell — it could be about an injury to their starting QB who I know is a big part of the run game, though his backup is also a running QB … or it could be about the offensive line changes, but then why would the passing game get such a bump — but otherwise new Coach Odom held the Boilermakers at least steady or made major improvements in 11 out of 12 of the metrics I track. It’s true that they were underwater in those metrics, but they weren’t at the seafloor … that is to say, there was plenty of extra depth to sink if Odom had done a poor job, but that’s not what happened.

That being said, there’s also still a long way to go to actually being a good team, or even average at most categories. But they’ve righted the ship, stopped taking on water, and started bailing a lot of it out.

I understand that the Gophers have a young QB they believe in and have essentially put the franchise tag on, which forgives some of this lousy offensive performance. But the majority of it is the handiwork of the staff for which there’s no excuse – they’ve got a great RB they don’t use enough, the play sequencing is inelegant and at times baffling, the head coach is approaching Ferentz territory both in longevity and lack of WR talent, and the OL coach lost the plot sometime in the 2023 to 2024 offseason.

The defense employed an extreme high-risk, high-reward strategy which the above table — exclusively displaying play-based, not drive-based stats — doesn’t fully capture. The Gophers’ defense gave my predictive algorithm some fits, actually, because they’re so boom-or-bust in terms of drive efficiency: they go all-out to generate negative plays (for the offense, that is, so sacks, TFLs, big penalties, turnovers, etc.) and get them, thereby killing drives, at a much higher than average rate. But on the flipside, they so overcommit resources to it that if they miss they all but guarantee giving up a super-explosive play and surrender a touchdown, again at a much higher rate than average. The weird thing is that this means they almost never give up sustained drives to the offense (why would they, the offense is off the field immediately one way or another, in smiles or tears), so understanding the true risks they’re taking requires some more human intuition.

I was a bit surprised that the Terps went with their true freshman QB instead of the transfer it seemed they’d specifically brought in so that the kid could redshirt. He performed as true freshmen are wont to, especially in 3rd & long situations where his substandard accuracy really created problems in sustaining drives. The kind of funny thing about Maryland’s offense is that the one metric that showed improvement is explosive passing, but when I checked that out it’s not actually from passing itself – I categorize QB scrambles as called passes, and any long scramble that achieves sufficient yardage goes down as an “explosive passing play” (these don’t count against the YPA number, however). The young QB was so much more effective out-of-structure with his legs than he was with his arm, that he was better off breaking the pocket and running for a big play than anything else.

The Terps were replacing a lot on defense, including virtually everyone on the defensive front who were longtime veterans and I’d built up an appreciation for over years of charting. In the games I watched so far I thought it was clear why there was a dropoff in rush efficiency defense from their absence, and then doing no worse in explosive rushing surrendered is simply the Big Ten of it all. Pass defense is quite interesting, however. For several years prior to 2024, Maryland had successfully produced NFL-caliber DBs from local and unheralded talent, but it seemed they’d missed in their 2024 crop. I thought they might have trouble again in 2025, but this looks like rebound.

The Badgers’ terrible run of QB injuries continued in 2025, not just to a third straight transfer starter early in the season, but one of the two backups as well, to the point that a fourth QB finished the year. The calamity spread to the RB room and OL as well, although I think many of the OL problems preceded the injuries. There’s more afoot with Wisconsin’s offense than just injuries, which I’ll explore later this Summer, but the injury situation meant they were snakebit regardless.

On defense, there’s a very stark split in the numbers with the dividing line being, of all things, halftime during week 8 against Ohio State. After that point, Wisconsin’s defense jumps three points in rush efficiency, eight points in pass efficiency, about a full yard in YPP allowed, and five points in explosiveness, all of which are incredible … and they do this against what is without a doubt the tougher part of their schedule. I believe I had figured out a good part of the reason for this in time for my in-season preview, but there may be other causes which require catching up on the last two games of their season against Illinois and Minnesota.

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