College football can be a numbers game. So as we continue to preview Wisconsin's 2018 schedule, here's a look at five key numbers to know about the New Mexico Lobos before they make the trip up to Madison on Sept. 8.

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New Mexico: Beat Writer Preview

That's the number of times the Lobos ran the ball in 12 games last year, which works out to 45 rushes per contest. That's high, to say the least - the Lobos ran the ball 69.1 percent of the time in 2017, using their triple-option based attack to average 5.2 yards per carry. But the Lobos changed offensive coordinators during the offseason, hiring a Rich Rodriguez protege in Calvin Magee to take over for Bob DeBesse. With the way their roster is currently constructed the Lobos will probably keep some of the triple option in their 2018 offense, but in the long run it would be silly to hire a spread offense guru and not expect to throw the ball a lot more often farther down the road.

That's the number of junior college transfers the Lobos signed in their 2018 recruiting class. Head coach Bob Davie was clearly looking to fill some holes on his roster with instant impact players - particularly on the offensive line, where the Lobos need to replace four of last year's top six linemen. The Lobos signed three JUCO offensive linemen in their 2018 class, so we'll see if they can effectively patch those holes before the start of the season.

That was New Mexico's turnover margin last year. Only three teams had a worse margin in 2017: Kansas (-17), Rice (-23), and San Jose State (-26). Bad luck played at least a small part there, but it's still a big part of why the Lobos finished the season at 3-9, losing each of their final seven games. It's hard to win many games when you're giving the ball away like that, to say the least. We'll see if a new offensive scheme will help them cut down on the turnovers, but it's not a good sign that a run-based triple option offense still lost 15 fumbles and threw 14 interceptions when they did try and pass the ball.

That was the average margin of victory for New Mexico's opponents during their final seven games of the season, when they went 0-7 against Fresno State, Colorado State, Wyoming, Utah State, Texas A&M, UNLV, and San Diego State. And while no team wants to finish the season on a losing streak like that, an impartial observer probably wouldn't have been too surprised - with the exception of UNLV, all of those teams were ranked at least No. 61 by FootballOutsiders.com's S&P+ metric, while New Mexico was ranked No. 104. So the loss to UNLV stings a bit more (the Rebels were ranked No. 95, and the Lobos played them at home) but for the most part New Mexico won the games they could expect to - there just weren't very many of them.

That's how often New Mexico's defense allowed opposing offenses to score when they got down in to the red zone last year. That's ... not good, to put it politely. Out of 130 FBS teams only one defense allowed offenses to score more often than New Mexico did: Georgia Tech (97.3 percent). How Georgia Tech managed to go 5-6 last year is a thought experiment for a different time. You can make a case that Georgia Tech's red zone defense was better than New Mexico's though, because when the Yellow Jackets allowed teams to score in the red zone they did a better job of holding teams to field goals instead of touchdowns. New Mexico's defense had 38 red zone chances last year - they gave up points on 36 of them. 30 of those scores were touchdowns. Georgia Tech allowed points on 36 of 37 red zone trips last year - but only (!) 22 touchdowns and 14 field goals.

To put that in perspective, the Badgers had the No. 5 red zone defense last year - allowing points on just 25 of 35 attempts. But they only allowed 11 red zone touchdowns, and 14 field goals. Needless to say, if the Lobos are going to improve on last year's 3-9 mark, or have a chance to beat Wisconsin in early September, that red zone performance is going to have to improve.

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John Veldhuis covers Wisconsin football, basketball and recruiting for BadgerBlitz.com on the Rivals.com network. Follow him on Twitter at @JohnVeldhuis.