Statistically Speaking: 2009 Season

When you have to fire your coach, digging into the stats to see what happened is a bit unnecessary. No one needs to look into a box score to understand that while ND's (passing) offense was excellent, the defense was horrendous, and the overall production of the team was not good enough for Charlie to keep his job.Still, now that the bowl games are over and the final 2009 season stats are settled, it's worth finishing up the stat tables if only to provide a baseline of sorts as we head into the Kelly era and identify areas that need the most immediate improvement.Battle for First DownI started this metric because Tenuta stated that one of the goals of his defense was to win first down and force defenses into 2nd and long and 3rd and long situations. The metric was a bit of a trial run to see if the results in some way mirrored what we saw on the field. Well, we don't even need to look at the numbers to know the plan failed. ND's defense gave up more total yards per g...