Blue White Illustrated

ames Franklin has made no secret of the identity he would like his teams to project. The basic blueprint has been tweaked and revised over the years, but its core has remained largely the same. "We want to protect the football," Franklin said in 2016. "We want to play great defense. We want to be explosive. We want to eliminate explosive plays on defense. "This is the model. This is how we want to play consistently." The Fremeau E>ciency Index illus- trates Penn State's evolution in these de- partments. Described as "a college football rating system based on oppo- nent-adjusted possession e>ciency, representing the per-possession scoring advantage a team would be expected to have on a neutral ;eld against an average opponent," the system e=ectively creates an analytical basis from which to evalu- ate a team's strengths and weaknesses. That's the jargon-free explanation, anyway. A deeper dive shows analytical models aimed at assessing everything from "unadjusted o=ensive possession e>ciency" to "busted drive rate" to "available yards percentage." Teams' performances in those categories are all tabulated to create a ranking system. Last season, the Nittany Lions were 10th nationally in the FEI. They ;nished even higher in two other sets of data-driven rankings, placing sixth in the S&P+ and seventh in the combined Football Out- siders F/+ Ratings. One of the more illuminating ways to assess the Lions' o=ensive evolution over the six years in which Franklin has been their coach is by focusing on their o=ensive explosiveness. The metric is called Explosive Drive Rate, or OED, and re

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