A Final Look at the 2011 Oklahoma State Offense Compared to the 2017 Offense

The season is over so all we have to do for the next nine months is think about what could have been break down film, talk about statistics, evaluate depth charts and play the comparison game.

It’s easier to do this now with OSU’s 2017 offense now that a full season has been played. We have numbers to compare against the 2011 offense, and even though we’ve been looking at as the year has worn on, this gives us a truer picture of how this season stacks up.

The one thing that sticks out is the yards per carry numbers for OSU in 2011 vs. 2017. That 2011 team ran the ball when and how it wanted, and it chose its spots well. Justice Hill was obviously incredible for OSU in 2017, and he averaged 5.5 yards per carry, but OSU both rode him too hard (OSU ran it eight more times a game in 2017 than 2011) and wasn’t super efficient with its other backs.

The 2017 offense wasn’t as efficient either. It scored 564 points on 179 drives, compared to 598 points on 185 drives for the 2011 team. It was pretty close, but 2011 gets the nod there and it gets a full Merton Hanks-like neck roll when it comes to swag efficiency.

There’s no way to do this other than going back and watching every drive from both seasons, but I would imagine if you ranked importance of drives by game and score of the game, 2011 would have a much higher PPD than 2017 did. There was just some small thing missing in 2017 that wasn’t missing in 2011.

Ultimately, I think this 2017 offense goes down as the third-best in school history. The 2011 was better, and I think the 1988 one was better, too. That team put up 584 points in an era where scoring 20 a game was considered an affront against the sport. A crooked, progressive blight from the era that must be erased!

Regardless, OSU’s offense in 2017 was probably both overrated and underrated. Overrated because it couldn’t bury teams and score when it absolutely had to and underrated because, man, those are some numbers up there. Unfortunately the only one that matters (10) was less than we all hoped.