Collegiate Stadiums

NCAA FBS College Football Stadiums, Attendance, Stats, History & Travel Blog

Tag Archives: Adam Taliaferro

How the Site Started

Penn State Beaver Stadium Field Entrance

Penn State Beaver Stadium Field Entrance taken 11-14-2009

When I started college in 1997, I had never been to a college football game, and actually only a few sporting events in my life. Of course, going to Penn State would change that in a hurry, thanks to a few of my friends. Luckily, I had been smart enough to purchase student tickets and after attending a few games at Beaver Stadium, I quickly became obsessed with college football. Throughout my five years in college I never missed a game despite having two jobs, and had some great friends who often camped out overnight and wore crazy outfits at games such as a wig made out of pom poms and a braveheart outfit. This group was basically the predecessor to Nittany Nation and the infamous Paternoville.

I was first or second row for most of the games, with some of the most memorable being the game where Adam Taliaferro led the team onto the field against Miami and Joe Paterno’s win number 324 against Ohio State. I cried when Minnesota kicked the winning field goal against us in 1999, ending the dreams of a guy who gave up millions to try and win a national title, Brandon Short. This obsessive love for the game led me to want to attend some of Penn State’s road games.

My first visit to another college football stadium was on December 1, 2001 to the Carl Smith Center, home of David A. Harrison III field at Scott Stadium for the Penn State @ Virginia game that was originally scheduled as a Thursday night game on September 13, 2001. I vividly remember seeing a line in our student newspaper advertising that student tickets were going on sale at 10am. I immediately sneaked out of class and called my wife to tell her to go get us tickets (yes, I eloped to Las Vegas and was married in college). I remember her trying to tell me why the game probably wouldn’t be played, with me quickly dismissing her as silly since they don’t cancel football. It was only about 45 minutes later that we started to learn about the 9/11 attacks and many hours more before we discovered how it would affect all of our lives, including the sports world.

Looking back, 10 years later it seems kind of funny how it took so long for the news to filter down to us, but I bet we didn’t have three people in that class with a cell phone, and text messages were rarely used, while today’s staples like facebook and twitter were years away from being invented.

I enjoyed my time at Virginia and while work and living in Baltimore limited the amount of home Penn State games we could attend in 2002 and 2003, I managed to get to a few games each year. Unfortunately I had to miss the 2002 game versus Nebraska for a wedding, but at least my wife’s cousin was kind enough to make sure I had a TV with the game at the reception.

After a few years of having terrible teams, Penn State was good enough to make a bowl game in 2002, so my wife and I drove to Orlando for our first ever bowl game, the 2003 Citrus Bowl versus Auburn. Certainly a different experience that included witnessing drug deals and guns, not to mention a stadium in need of repairs. As with all of my stadium travels, I will be posting more in the coming weeks as a lead-up to the 2011 season, but believe it or not, this experience doesn’t even rank as one of my worst three!

We were finally able to get season tickets in 2004, starting my string of consecuatively attended home games. 2004 was also the first time I ever attended a college football game that didn’t involve Penn State. It was the Florida State at Maryland game at Capital One Field at Byrd Stadium. A unique experience as we got the tickets from a Maryland booster who seemed to know everyone at the game that day. We got a nice tour of the Comcast Center including a chance to meet head coach Gary Williams and player Ekene Ibekwe. 2004 was also my first time attending a Backyard Brawl game, between West Virginia and Pitt, at Heinz Field.

In late 2004, my wife and I moved back to State College, making it even easier to make all of Penn State’s home games, except for when our business got in the way and she skipped the 2010 game versus Illinois to keep things running smoothly. This is when I started to really make a push to try and get to a few different stadiums each year, making it to games at Northwestern, West Virginia and Michigan in 2005, plus the 2006 Orange Bowl at (at the time named) Dolphins Stadium.

I could go on and on about past few years as I have managed to add another 30-plus stadiums to my visited list by working around the home Penn State schedule, but I’ll save that for each of the individual stories about my trips. I think my real passion for this began when I started to look at each schools tradition, rituals and fans. I began to wonder why not every school could fill a stadium with fans like Penn State and why some schools didn’t worry about putting a good product on the field. This is why I keep attendance records of every game I can find (coming soon).

Then, I figured out that I wasn’t the only person who liked to visit various stadiums so I decided to share my travels.

In general travel, people like the guys at The Ultimate Sports Road Trip, who have attended a game at every stadium and arena across the four major US sports, in addition to a couple of hundred other venues; all of the ballpark chasers I have met on twitter; or the team at Stadium Journey, who do reviews of stadiums and arenas all around the world. In fact, my affiliation with Stadium Journey has allowed me to experience some really unique things as I have covered college football, college basketball, NASCAR, NHL, minor league hockey (AHL & ECHL), and minor league baseball so far, with many more to come. While my official, FANFARE reviews are located exclusively on the Stadium Journey site, I will be including some other tidbits on this site, especially when it concerns college football.

Specific to college football, there are people like Andrew at College Football Tour and Jarrett at My College Football Quest who share the same goal as me to attend live games at all 120 (soon to be 122) home stadiums for FBS schools. I’m sure there are more that I am unaware of, so if you know of any, please let me know on twitter.

Hopefully you will enjoy following along on my travels and will join in and share some of your own experiences either here or on Stadium Journey.

Statistical Breakdown of the Greg Schiano Kickoff Replacement Plan

Rutgers Eric LeGrand Greg Schiano

Rutgers Eric LeGrand & Greg Schiano

An interesting article by Steve Politi came out this morning on an idea by Rutgers coach Greg Schiano on a way to eliminate kickoffs in football. As most of you will remember, Rutgers player Eric LeGrand was paralyzed last year on a kickoff in a game against Army at New Meadowlands field, prompting Schiano to have a strong opinion on kickoffs. As evidenced by our Adam Taliaferro entry into the ESPN Fanwiches contest, I feel strongly about spinal cord injuries as well and am all for listening to ideas on how to reduce the risk in football. At the same time, I am a traditionalist and would hate to see the game severely altered, so I wanted to do a statistical breakdown of coach Schiano’s idea and see what might be the outcome of the Schiano plan versus the current kickoff system.

As outlined in the article by Politi, the Schiano plan calls for the ball to be placed on the 30 yard line in a 4th and 15 situation for the team that just scored. Then the team that just scored has two options. The first option would replace your normal kickoff with a punt play. The other option would replace the onside kick, and would allow the team to attempt a conversion of the 4th and 15 for a first down. If the conversion is successful, the team gets to keep possession, otherwise the defensive team would take over where the play was whistled dead.

It is an interesting concept, but lets get to the stats and see what kind of impact such a plan would have on starting field position. Thankfully, the site cfbstats.com exists, making most of the statistical data I needed for a quick comparison relatively easy to find. I was able to do some quick manipulation in Excel and get what I wanted in less than 30 minutes.

ASSUMPTIONS NOTE: I know that the stats aren’t perfect in accounting for all possibilities, but I think the following is a fair look at the plan as best we can so here are the assumptions that I had to make.

  1. Not every kickoff from the 2010 stats occurred from the 30 yard line due to penalties and safeties, but the same would be true under the Schiano plan, so you have to assume that such occurrences would happen at the same rate, so I just assumed that every kickoff came from the 30 yard line. There were 8,340 kickoffs in FBS in 2010 and only 209 went out of bounds, resulting in a starting position of the 40 yard line, so I am convinced that we can basically ignore this situation, as it would move the average starting yard line by less than .25 of a yard.
  2. Another is that sometimes punts are purposfully shortened in an effort the pin the opponent deep in their own end, so we will add 3 yards to the average punt to account for this.

2010 Kickoffs:

In 2010, the ball was kicked off from the 30 yard line, meaning that a kickoff that resulted in a touch-back went at least 70 yards.

Average Kickoff Length: 62.82 yards

Average Kickoff Return: 21.86 yards

So, 70-62.82 means that the average kickoff was fielded at the 7.18 yard line and then was returned 21.86 yards.

Thus, the average starting field position from kickoffs was the 29.04 yard line*.

2010 Punts:

Average Punt Length: 40.92 yards

Average Punt Return: 8.92 yards

So, if the average punt went 40.92 yards and was returned 8.92 yards, the net punt was 32 yards.

The Schiano Plan:

Replacing kickoffs with punts:

The first, and main, portion of the plan calls for replacing the standard kickoff with a punt. Looking at our data, if the punts come from the same 30 yard line as the kickoffs, and using the average punt length from the 2010 season, then that would give us an average starting position of the 38 yard line using the punt plan. If we add in our extra 3 yards** then the average starting position would be the 35 yard line. When we compare that to the average starting position of the 29.04 yard line for kickoffs, then if seems like the average starting position would favor the offense by basically 6 yards.

Replacing the onside kick with a 4th and 15 attempt:

This is the area where stats were very hard to come by, so I used the stats given in the Politi article. He used stats from the site advancednflstats.com showing that the average 4th & 15 conversion rate in the NFL was around 18% in 2010 and the average onside kick conversion rate was 25% . We will use this number for looking at the Schiano plan even though they are NFL stats just because the college stats just don’t seem to exist.

There were 124 onside kick attempts in FBS in 2010, basically an average of just 1 attempt per team for the entire year. So, if they were successful at 25%, then 31 attempts were converted. If you take the same number of attempts at 18% for 4th and 15, then  just 22 onside attempts would be converted.

I am not sure that this changes the game a whole lot, but lets not forget that for this year, the kickoff was moved up the the 35 yard line, meaning that this distance then becomes move like 11 yards. Sure, this could be offset by moving the position of the punt to the 35 as well, but then I think it becomes more enticing for people like Lane Kiffin to always go for the 4th and 15 conversion because even a play that falls just short puts your opponent right around midfield. The next big step would be for someone to do an injury study to prove that a punt play has a substantial reduction in injuries versus a traditional kickoff. If that happens and the stats prove it would be safer, I certainly feel that the Schiano plan will bring dialog, which is the first step toward change. I think the stats could be argued either way and while I hate to see the kickoff disappear, I think it is a plan that if given some minor tweaking could be backed by a number of coaches, especially in the name of safety. After all, no one wants to see another incident like what happened to Eric LeGrand and countless others before him.

*see assumption #1

**see assumption #2

ESPN Fanwiches Contest

Some of you might know that the restaurant my wife and I own received a phone call from ESPN asking us to enter their Fanwiches contest. Since our menu has approximately 120 sandwiches, with most of them named after former Penn State athletes and current Penn State coaches it was incredibly hard to select a sandwich to enter. After a few hours of debate, we decided to enter the Adam Taliaferro sandwich, based not just on the sandwich itself, but also on the Adam’s story.

Adam Taliaferro

Adam Taliaferro

I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who helped us along in getting to 8th place out of 185 with just 5 days remaining. In addition to my family, friends, Sigma Nu fraternity brothers and the fans of bothBlack Shoe Diaries and Boston Red Sox owner, John Henry’s iRacing, I especially need to thank the following people who helped tweet our voting link out to over 10,000 followers.

  • Adam Kramer (@KegsnEggs)
  • Michael Felder (@InTheBleachers)
  • Patrick Stevens (@D1scourse)
  • Kevin McGuire (@CFBExaminer)
  • Bud Bilanich (@BudBilanich)
  • and of course Adam Taliaferro himself (@Tali43)
Adam Taliaferro ESPN Fanwiches

Adam Taliaferro ESPN Fanwiches Voting Poster

 

Of course, if you haven’t voted, please do so here.

Finally, here is a story from our local paper, the Centre Daily Times.

 

Edit: Here is our youtube entry: