I'm not going back to look at USC or UW, but at Texas, here are the redzone scoring numbers:
TD Scored FG Scored Combined Scoring National Rank
2021 35 (74.5%) 9 (19.2%) 44/47 (93.6%) 6/130
2022 36 (62%) 16 (27.6%) 52/58 (89.7%) 13/131
2023 31 (50.8%) 18 (29.5%) 49/61 (80.3%) 89/133
2024 44 (63.8%) 11 (15.95%) 55/69 (79.7%) 111/134
There's a lot more noise than signal here.
Scoring in the red zone has really only been an issue for Texas in the last two seasons, which are ironically must better than Sark's first two seasons. So it seems like red zone scoring percentage is a poor proxy for overall program performance. It's also important that our scoring opportunities (i.e., trips to the red zone) have gone up every year, while the number of times we score has been "inconsistent" (although if I were charting this, the trend line would up). By inconsistent I mean lingering within a certain range, but jumping around erratically within that range. The ration of TDs to FGs has also been inconsistent.
If we were only looking at national ranking, then we have consistently been getting worse, with a huge drop off from 2022 to 2023, and a significant drop off from 2023 to 2024. So there is a numbers based argument that scoring in the red zone is becoming an issue for Sark, especially in the last two years, but I think that isn't the full story or even really a meaningful way of looking at the numbers. In terms of raw numbers, we scored more TDs and settled for fewer FGs in 2024 than in any other year. in contrast, 2023 was our worst season for TDs and settling for FGs, while the scoring percentage was not significantly different.
Maybe Sark is just going for it more, consequences be damned? Maybe he had less confidence in Ewers and Auburn, and tried to run it more from the red area? Again - I think there' s more noise than signal to this metric, and it seems more like something that pundits like talking about. The numbers just don't seem correlated, and I don't think it matters that much if your red zone scoring percentage isn't impacting your program performance.