Dropping Money

From the N&O:

Strong safety DaJuan Morgan said the Wolfpack's goal is to pick off one pass for every 22 attempts. Face 400 passes in a season and that's 18 interceptions.

I wondered how often secondaries put up those sorts of numbers...

First let's just have a look at the raw INT totals; here's the list of I-A schools that had 18 or more INTs in 2006:

School INTs
Western Mich. 24
Wake Forest 22
Boston College 21
California 21
Florida 21
Ohio St. 21
Boise St. 20
Nevada 20
Arkansas St. 19
La.-Monroe 19
Georgia 19
Brigham Young 18
Oklahoma 18
Fla. Atlantic 18

That's 14 schools, or 11.8% (14/119) of division I-A.

One INT per 22 attempts is an interception percentage of 4.5%. The number of schools that had an INT% equal to or better than that last season: 21 (17.6%).

All together, I-A schools averaged one INT thrown for every 29.6 attempts in 2006.

Since we've only picked off one pass in 81 attempts seen thus far, we're well behind the curve, although according to Mike Archer we dropped four picks in the Wofford game alone.