Was Austin the Problem with the Defense?

[CJD]

I was reading the NFL draft forum threads and someone mentioned, as a reason not to draft the LSU LB White, that Austin was the problem and that once we fired him, our defense improved to the point that we don't really need to overhaul the defense anymore.

I found this to be an interesting topic for discussion. I also noticed an improvement in the Defense once Austin was fired, but how substantial was it?

Well, this conversation could go on for hours if you break every single statistic down and relate them to the competition faced and the averages of those teams (it really could go on forever). I wanted to do some sort of analysis without getting into the nitty gritty with things like 3rd down percentage and strength of opponent etc.

So, instead, I boiled it down to 4 basic categories:
Pass Yards allowed
Rush Yards allowed
Points allowed
Time of Possession Allowed.

That final one, granted, is also a factor of your offense. If your offense keeps going 3 and out, your defense will inevitably allow a longer time of possession. But, really, you could say that about ANY defensive statistic that is measured quantitatively (such as yards or points allowed), so I will disregard that for now. If you want to dive into the qualitative stats such as 3rd down percentage, I would love to read what you have to say.

But anyway, this is what I came up with:



This grid is set up in three sections. Each section is used to compare what we allowed while Austin was our DC (in red) to what we allowed after he was fired (in green).
The first section is listing our opponents and how many yards/points/minutes we allowed to them. "Our Game"
The second section is each of our opponent's stats over the course of their season. "Opponent Average"
The final section compares the difference between what we allowed and what they averaged over their season. "Difference"

I did this in order to add a measure of consideration to when we allowed a bunch of yards to a team that just...gets a lot of yards (like New Orleans, Tampa Bay or Kansas City) compared to when we allow a ton of yards to a team that doesn't typically produce that many yards (such as allowing 105.9 more yards to Atlanta than they averaged over the season.)

Obviously, this doesn't account for a team that changed dramatically at some point in the season, like Baltimore and Cleveland switching QBs. For example, we did allow 493 yards to Cleveland in the penultimate game, but their average was pulled down by several weeks of Tyrod Taylor at QB, so we weren't as blatantly horrible against them as it appears (though we still sucked ass in that game).

But...it's the best I got.

For the third section, I color coded the cell red when we allowed more yards/points/time than their season average and green when we allowed fewer.

Below the entire grid, I added a single line: Difference between time periods. This is a straight subtraction of what we did under Austin vs what we did without him. Without Austin, they allowed 91.7 fewer yards per game and 8.1 fewer points per game. They didn't get off the field any easier, as their average TOP allowed was only ~1 minute less but, keep in mind, they had an absolutely anemic offense in the second half and still held onto the ball longer...so that indicates the defense did succeed in getting the opponent's offense off the field more often.

Finally, I put a grid at the bottom comparing our seasonal rankings for the total of 2018 to the period with Austin and the period after Austin. I compared each set to the end of the year rankings, as I did not have the rankings available from Week 1 to Week 10 and Week 11 to Week 17. So it isn't perfectly accurate, but it's something to compare to, at least.

TL;DR
Here are the basic results that I see:

We improved in every way once we got rid of Austin (32nd to 9th passing, 31st to 28th rushing, 32nd to 19th in points, 32nd to 22nd for total yards.) But, it's worth pointing out that we did face 3 of the best offenses while Austin was employed (New Orleans, Tampa, KC). So take that information with a grain of salt. But our latter half schedule did have better rushing teams, so it almost balances out (a net difference of 14 yards per game and 3.5 points on average more for the first half vs the second half opponents' offenses)

The thing that sticks out the MOST is the fact that our passing defense jumped from 32nd to 9th once we removed Austin. But, like I said, not having to face NO, KC and Tampa probably had an awful lot to do with that jump.

In the third section, you can see that, for the 5 categories (pass, run, points, time, total), over 9 games, the Bengals defense held their opponent's below their season average a total of 11 times (a total of 45 chances, or a 24.4% success rate).
For the final 7 games, the Bengals held a team below their season average a total of 20 times (a total of 35 chances, or a 57.1% success rate).
Those numbers may not mean a whole lot, depending on the context in which you view them.
But what is clear is that we did, in fact, dramatically improve once Austin was ousted.

If Marvin had been our defensive coordinator for the entire year of 2018, who knows what we would be saying right now. The good news is that it is clear that Austin was causing some sort of problem.

Was he the whole problem? It's hard to say. But what we do know, based on these numbers, is that he is a bad defensive coordinator, or at the very least, did not match the personnel we have here in Cincinnati in any way.
I'm glad he's gone