PAT’s WEEKLY STAT (you likely won’t see anywhere else—and, there’s probably a good reason why): Glancing over the final statistics of Georgia’s 43-14 victory over Tennessee, the first thing to jump out at me was the fact that, although the Volunteers gained 343 total yards, they only scored 14 points, keeping with this season’s trend that the Bulldogs are making their opposition “work” for the points they score.

I've referred before to my opinion of perhaps the most telling “defensive” team statistic in all of college football. It's not entirely the result of a defense’s performance. YPP, or yards per point, or how many yards a team yields for every point it allows.

Unlike any other defensive statistic, Defensive YPP could be defined as, simply, how hard a team makes its opposition work to score points. It's a measurement more telling than Total Defense and Scoring Defense but, virtually, a combination of the two, and a "defensive" statistic for which the team’s offense and special teams share in the accountability.

Something else I appreciate about the yards-per-point calculation is that schedule difficulty really isn't a factor. Whether a team plays Notre Dame or Murray State, in theory, the yards allowed-to-points allowed ratio should be more or less the same when facing either opponent.

Considering Georgia has allowed 1,393 total yards and 54 points through five games this season, the Bulldogs’ Defensive YPP is currently 25.80, which is the 7th-best in the FBS (the average ratio for entire FBS is 14.49):

What all 10 teams above have in common is they’re simply winners, combining for a sparkling 47-5 record. In addition, nine of the 10 are currently ranked in the top 18 of the AP Poll—and the one team not ranked, San Diego State, has a 4-1 record.

Conversely, the bottom 10 teams in the FBS in Defensive YPP (121 through 130) have a combined record of only 21-33 (.389), and none of them are ranked in the AP Poll.

What makes Georgia's current Defensive YPP even more impressive is that the ratio was a lowly 13.64—the 6th-worst in school history—just three seasons ago in Kirby Smart’s first season as head coach in 2016. This was followed by a 17.98 Defensive YPP in 2017 before regressing to 16.37 last season.

Beginning in 1947, when Georgia's annual team statistics are readily available, its 25.80 this season would rank as not only the 7th-best at the school (that's in 73 seasons of football) but a team-high since 1982. The top 10 in Bulldog history:

As expected, the higher Georgia's Defensive YPP, the better, as far as wins and losses. The top 10 seasons indicated above have a combined record of 85-14-7 (.835) compared to the Bulldogs’ bottom-10 seasons in Defensive YPP, which have a combined mark of 68-53 (.562), signifying the lower the Dawgs' YPP—as with this season thus far—the better off the overall team will be.