Opponent play-caller rankings

The preseason board vs what happened

Before the season this page gave each opponent a High/Medium/Low label. We froze that board on Sept 6 and kept it. Below it sits next to the real games. The board was rebuilt after Utah's first 4 games (Idaho was not on it). The preseason board rated Arkansas High and Utah State and Iowa State Medium; all 3 were held to negative EPA per play, and Utah won each by 14 or more. Every label overstated the offense it described. That is only three games, and Utah led big in each, so the scoreboard shaped them too.

Why it was revised. In the 2026-09-06 preseason snapshot, the old “elite EPA” cutoff (0.15) sat below the average of the OCs we track (0.244), so 31 of 37 OCs cleared it and the label meant little. The old red-zone cutoff (0.10 EPA/play against a league average of 0.196) was cleared by 29 of 37 OCs, so it separated almost no one either. That red-zone measure also only covered yards-to-goal 11–20, leaving out everything inside the 10. And the style-alignment piece compared each OC to a proxy for Utah's defense (Morgan Scalley's career) when Utah's 2026 defense is called by Colton Swan. We removed the defense input, replaced fixed cutoffs and HIGH/MED/LOW labels with plain rankings among the FBS OCs we track, and now call this a description, not a forecast.

Provenance: prod-snapshot-2026-09-06-preseason.json (u-of-u repo, sha256 b5220b2ed5813db9e954ae0efbdd90413359eef8a13a074bbeebe8ee26b12e05) scored with computeThreatScore as of nektar-insights-website ffe521c (threat scoring unchanged since); schedule/slugs from threat/page.tsx at ffe521c. realized = the same computeThreatScore fed each opponent's actual 2026 game stats vs Utah (CFBD play-by-play, pipeline filters); red zone = inside the 20. Descriptive only.

• League average: league_baselines.avg_epa for situation=overall, last refreshed 2026-08-07 (the value the preseason board compared against).
• Red zone: zone=red_zone = yards-to-goal 11-20 only (data-pipeline src/filters.py add_field_zone: <=10 is goal_line).
• Method: per-OC career aggregate of tendency_stats in the 2026-09-06 preseason snapshot (career rows preferred, else play-weighted stop rows), role=oc.
• Realized figures: CFBD play-by-play for each 2026 game, filtered/enriched with data-pipeline main filters (u-of-u ledger.offense_plays); all offensive snaps.