Though Oklahoma and Texas Tech both came into their game last night with records of offensive explosiveness, only the Sooners kept the scoreboard operators busy, shellacking the visiting Red Raiders, 65-21. As the following brief excerpts from this morning's Lubbock Avalanche-Journal detail, Texas Tech was outplayed in all facets of the game:

Every element that the Raiders had deployed on the way to a 10-0 start – pass protection, the run game, Graham Harrell-to-Mike Crabtree and timely defense – fell flat on senior night at Owen Field/Memorial Stadium...

Tech had allowed only one 100-yard rusher all season, but OU had two. Tech had allowed only five sacks all season but, against OU, gave up four. The Raiders’ usually prolific offense was 1-for-13 on third down.

The latter bit of faltering, in particular, is highly amenable to statistical analysis; it will thus be the focus of the rest of this entry. Prior to last night, Texas Tech had a .64 (48/75) third-down conversion rate (i.e., success at getting first downs) in Big 12 conference play.

Using this online calculator for binomial probabilities (i.e., events that can have two outcomes, such as success and failure), one can ask what the probability is of a team with a prior .64 success rate achieving at a level of 1-for-13 (or worse) on third-down opportunities. Because any one specific occurrence, such as 1-for-13, is likely to be rare, statisticians add in the "or worse" element (or in other scenarios, "or better").

The answer is .00004, or 4-in-100,000. This fraction can be simplified further, allowing us to say that the Red Raiders' third-down performance last night would occur around once in 25,000 games!. Allowing for the fact that Oklahoma's defense (last night, at least) is better than that of Tech's other Big 12 opponents, the odds would be somewhat less astronomical. Still, the Raiders' dismal third-down conversion rate was pretty surprising.

This calculation can be broken down into different components. To estimate the probability of Texas Tech going 0-for-13 on third down, we simply raise .36 (the team's prior failure rate on third down) to the 13th power, yielding .000002.

For the probability of exactly 1 success and 12 failures in 13 opportunities, we take .36 to the 12th power, times .64 to the first power. This yields .000003. However, there are 13 different ways a team can go 1-for-13, namely getting its single first down on either its first, second, third,..., twelfth, or thirteenth opportunity. We thus multiple the previous .000003 by 13, yielding .00004. We would also add in the aforementioned probability of a 0-for-13 performance (.000002), but the solution would still round to .00004.

There would seem to be two major factors that determine success on third-down opportunities: whether a team finds itself with long distances to go to earn a first down; and how well the team moves the ball, even on short-yardage situations.

According to the OU-TTU play-by-play sheet, the distances to go on the Red Raiders' third downs were: 9, 10, 22, 3, 4, 2, 18, 10*, 11, 7, 21**, 6, and 1 (the single asterisk denotes the one successful conversion, which actually resulted in a touchdown, whereas the double asterisk indicates where an Oklahoma personal foul gave Texas Tech a first down, which apparently is not credited as an "earned" first down).

As can be seen, both of the above suggested factors appeared to be operative. The Red Raiders were left with several long third-down situations (7 with 9-or-more yards to go), but they also failed on several short opportunities.