Imagine this team with a, say, 38th ranked defense. Better defense = more offensive plays. It's not even that our D is bad, it's the worst kind of bad: bad enough that they always score, but good enough to make the opponents drive take forever
I don’t expect a strong correlation here. If you averaged 60 yards per play, your plays should be down as you would score every two plays. We have scored quickly a few times, but not excessively. I would guess most of our lack of plays comes from the defense letting the opposing offense hold the ball forever. Our turnovers might help a little bit too.
Defense can't get off the field so we don't have a lot of plays, 5th in yards per play would mean a fantastic offense if we actually got to run more plays.
Looking at the FPI measure of offensive efficiency, we are ranked only 34th, so part of our sky high ypp stat might be helped by relative weak opposing defenses faced. https://www.espn.com/college-footba...iciencies/sort/efficiencies.offefficiencyrank
