Put on your tuxes and your helmets, TSL'ers, we're here to award our Third Annual TechSideline.com Football Defensive Player of the Year Award.

For the last three years, we have done a defensive performance calculation and awarded points to defensive players based on their defensive stats. This is strictly numbers-based performance, no opinion or subjective analysis allowed. Last year, based on these calculations, we awarded the first-ever TSL Defensive Player of the Year Award to Ben Taylor, for his performance in the 2001 season. And we retroactively awarded Ben the 2000 award as well.

If you read TSL's football game analysis articles, then you're familiar with the concept. The idea of a defensive performance index is simple: award points for certain defensive plays (tackles, sacks, interceptions, etc.), multiply a player's stats by those point awards, and total them up.

You can then rank the defensive players by total points, and for a different twist, you can divide their total points by the number of plays they were on the field to get a "points per play" statistic that truly measures a player's productivity.

As with many of the "Inside the Numbers" things we do, we accumulate more and more data as the years go by, and we can compare historical data across multiple years. I'll say this: the defensive calculations say a lot about the 2002 defense and why it struggled so much. Read on to find out what the story is.

If you're not a numbers person, and you want to jump straight to the results and commentary, then scroll down to the section titled "And Now, the Results." If you've got the time and the mind for it, then just keep reading, and we'll tell you all about how the calculations are done.

We need two sets of data: defensive statistics and plays from scrimmage.

1.) Defensive statistics were taken from hokiesportsinfo.com at the following address:

http://www.hokiesportsinfo.com/football/stats/teamcume.html

2.) Number of plays from scrimmage and special teams plays were taken from the season-ending depth chart found on page 7 of the December 20, 2002 edition of "hokiesports.com the newspaper" (Vol, 20, No. 16).

Note that statistics are for the regular season only and do not include the San Francisco Bowl. This required us to take the hokiesports.com cumulative stats from the 2002 season, which did include the bowl, and subtract the bowl stats out.

The reason we did this was two-fold: (1) to make it more consistent with 2000 and 2001; and (2) because a season-ending depth chart, which included plays in the bowl game, was not available.

The defensive statistics posted on the hokiesportsinfo.com web site also include special teams plays and tackles, and that complicates things. I took the list of players included in the "defensive stats" and eliminated all of the players who are not on the defensive two-deep roster. This got rid of the special-teamers like Jared Mazetta who appear in the defensive statistics because they have made plays on special teams. I also deleted defensive players who did not play more than 100 plays on defense.

I wound up with the following 23 players, all of whom played more than 100 plays on defense in the 2002 season:

DT: Jason Lallis, Kevin Lewis, Jonathan Lewis, Tim Sandidge, Jimmy Williams, Jason Murphy.
DE: Nathaniel Adibi, Jim Davis, Cols Colas, Lamar Cobb.
LB: Mikal Baaqee, Vegas Robinson, Brandon Manning, James Anderson, Mike Daniels.
CB: Ronyell Whitaker, DeAngelo Hall, Garnell Wilds, Vince Fuller.
S/ROV: Willie Pile, Jimmy Williams, Michael Crawford, Billy Hardee.

Note that DE Darryl Tapp and LB Alex Markogiannakis, who both had 89 plays from scrimmage, just barely missed the cut. (Funny story: Tapp had 282 special teams plays, and next to that figure, in hokiesports the newspaper, it says "not a typo" in bold print.)

Here are the points awarded for the defensive plays included in the statistics:

Notes:

1.) Tackles are complicated and are calculated like this: when a player makes a tackle, he gets 1 point (assisted tackle) or 2 points (unassisted tackle). If it's a tackle for loss (TFL), he gets an additional 2 points, plus 0.2 points for every yard lost on the play. If the tackle for loss is a quarterback sack, it is calculated just like a TFL, but the player also gets 2 bonus points for the sack.

2.) Points for fumble return yardage are double what is awarded for interception return yardage because fumble recovery statistics typically include less return yardage than interceptions. Most fumbles are recovered on the ground, whereas most interceptions are made standing up with a chance to run. Fumble return yards should therefore be awarded points at a premium over INT return yards.

The fact that special teams plays are included in the defensive statistics provided on hokiesportsinfo.com complicates things and skews the results in many ways. For example:

1.) There are not as many defensive "plays" available to a special teamer as there are to a scrimmage defender -- sacks, QB hurries, interceptions, etc. are not available in a special teams play, except for the rare instances where the opponent runs a trick play.

2.) Sometimes the special team plays are plays like kickoff returns or field goals, where making any type of defensive play is impossible.

This means that a defender who plays a lot of plays on special teams is going to have his point totals dragged down by those special teams plays. On special teams, he can't make a sack or an interception, so on average, he gets fewer points from his special teams plays, no matter how good a special teams player he is.

But on the other hand, the tackles he makes on special teams go into his point totals and help him out, versus a player like defensive tackle like Kevin Lewis, who only had seven plays on special teams all year.

You can sum up the effect of playing on special teams thus:

1.) It increases a player's point totals by giving him more opportunities to make plays, most notably tackles.

2.) It decreases a player's "points per play" figure, because special teams plays don't provide as many opportunities to score points.

I tried to compensate for item number two by dividing the number of special teams plays in half when calculating the "points per play" statistic. So points per play = total points / (scrimmage plays + special teams plays/2). You can argue that I should have divided by a larger number or even thrown the special teams plays out completely, but it was hard to figure out exactly what to do, and that's the step I took.

Given all that, let's throw those 23 players and their stats into a spreadsheet and see what comes up. The table that shows each player's statistics and their resulting point totals is too lengthy and cumbersome to print here, but it can be viewed as a web page or a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (see the end of this article to find out how to download the data).

Without further ado, here are the top ten point scorers:

Willie Pile earns his first-ever TSL Defensive Player of the Year Award, after finishing 2nd in 2000 and 3rd in 2001. Willie piled up a personal-best 289.3 points, beating out his 223 points in 2000 and his 231.1 in 2001.

Though Willie benefited from a 13-game regular season (as did all players this year), his points-per-game average of 22.3 is better than his per-game averages for 2000 (20.3) and 2001 (21.0).

Despite the 13 games and the high score, Willie did not beat Ben Taylor's record of 306.2 points, set in 2001.

Down below Willie, we note the following interesting facts:

• This marks the first season that a defensive lineman has cracked the top four, and two of them did it: Cols Colas and Nathaniel Adibi. There are three DE's in the top 10, the first time this has happened in the three years of doing this.

• The lack of a Rover in the Top 10 really leaps out. In 2000 and 2001, the Rovers (Cory Bird and Kevin McCadam) finished 3rd and 2nd, respectively. But Bird and McCadam almost never came out of the game, whereas this year's Rovers, Billy Hardee and Michael Crawford, split time. If you add Crawford and Hardee's scores together, you get 218.2, which would place the Rover position 4th.

• Underscoring the weakness of the DT position in 2002, Jason Lallis is the only DT in the top 10. In 2000 and 2001, David Pugh and Chad Beasley both finished in the top 10. And if Lallis hadn't returned a fumble 59 yards for a TD against Arkansas State, a play worth 36.8 points, his point total would have been just 111.4, plunging him far out of the top 10. Beasley and Pugh racked up top-10 placements without scoring TD's, and like this year's DT's, they split time with other DT's.

• After finishing #4 in 2000 and #8 in 2001, Ronyell Whitaker dropped out of the top 10, down to 16th. DeAngelo Hall was VT's best cornerback this year, finishing 5th.

• More notes on the defensive ends: This is the second top 10 finish for Jim Davis and Cols Colas, who finished 6-7 in 2001 and 10 (Davis) and 3 (Colas) this year. Nathaniel Adibi was #8 in 2000, out of the top 10 in 2001, and #4 this year.

And in the all-important points-per-play category, which is another measure -- and perhaps the truest measure -- of a defender's effectiveness on the field, here's how it shakes out (a score of 0.40 or higher indicates a very productive defensive player):

Things to note:

• This year, only two players logged a 0.40 or higher: Cols Colas (0.48) and DeAngelo Hall (0.40). In 2001, a whopping eight players topped 0.40, and in 2000, only two did. In my opinion, this is one of the data points that shows how strong the 2001 defense was in comparison to 2000 and 2002.

• More on Colas and Hall: this is the second year each of them has finished at .40 or higher. They join David Pugh (2000 and 2001) as the only players to finish at .40 or higher in consecutive years. Next year, each will have a chance to be the first players to do it for three years in a row (in fairness, we'd have to go back to 1999 and beyond to check Pugh's numbers).

• The defensive tackles fare a little better here, with three of them in the top 10.

In reviewing these statistics, I noticed the following:

• Total Points: 13 of the top 14 players in total points will be back next year. Willie Pile is the only one the Hokies lose.

• Points-Per-Play: 14 of the top 15 players in points-per-play will return next season. Again, Willie Pile is the only one who won't.

That, Hokie fans, is a good sign.

We've got enough data from the last three seasons to list the top 10 players in total points and points per play from 2000-2002. Here they are: