Five Takes: Trying to make sense of the slow starts on offense

Following Saturday’s 17-6 win over Wake Forest, our Ryan Clark wrote a story about FSU’s early game struggles on offense. I decided to dig a little deeper statistically to determine just how bad the offense has been during the early portion of games.

To give the most accurate picture, I threw out the two non-Power 5 games FSU played since they tend to give a distorted view of the offense’s ability to score early. For example, the Seminoles posted a whopping 28 points against a weakling Charleston Southern team that was besieged by massive suspensions. For all intents and purposes, that game was effectively meaningless when evaluating the Seminoles’ offensive struggles.

Overall, the results are pretty staggering when you compare the first-quarter and halftime offensive statistics to the final team averages. The most glaring aspect from this comparison is FSU’s inability to score in the opening quarter. In the five P5 games, the offense has failed to score a single touchdown and is averaging just 1.8 points in the first quarter. To put that into perspective, it means that FSU scores on average 4.7 times more points in each of the other three quarters.

Here’s a breakdown of the offensive statistics in those five games per quarter, at halftime and in the final stats:

Averages for FSU's five games vs. P5 competition

	Quarter One	Halftime	Final

Points	1.8	8.6	27.4
Rushing	33.2	74.4	169
Passing	53.0	139.4	292.6
Completion %	51.3%	52.7%	59%
Ave. Per Rush	3.46	4.13	4.06
3rd Down Conv. %	22.2%	32.3%	39.4%

The rest of the Five Takes for Warchant.com subscribers

Other Four Takes: Keeping the season perspective, FSU's remaining goals, how will the season finish and a stat wrap for week seven.