RII Sports Technology announced its annual 2023 Graphite Award winners recognizing the most efficient offensive play caller in each Division I football conference, and for the second-consecutive year Lindenwood football offensive coordinator Dusty Hovorka was a recipient.

Each year RII Sports Technology analyzes play-by-play data for all Division I FBS and FCS football programs and assesses the degree to which offensive play callers made decisions that best aligned their team's strengths with their opponent's weaknesses. This assessment is quantified in a Play Calling Efficiency Ratio (PCER) – a measure of how frequently a play caller put their team in advantageous strength-on-weakness positions while minimizing the number of times they operated from a disadvantage.
 
Tom Woods, RII Sports Technology's founder, explained - "This award is about recognizing the coaches that are getting the most out of what they've got, not wasting plays, knowing well their opponents, and being smart in the creation and application of their gameplans. Some of the best play callers aren't necessarily associated with the highest-ranked offensive teams, but they are the ones that didn't hold their teams back, the ones that helped their offenses maximize their potential in ways that few other play callers were able to do last season."
 
The Graphite Award's name is a nod to RII Sports Technology's deep engineering roots in the Aerospace & Defense industry; graphite is a highly efficient engineering material – with a very low coefficient of friction and high electrical conductivity – and embodies the spirit of the play calling efficiency demonstrated by this year's winners.
Hovorka enters his eighth season as Lindenwood's offensive coordinator in 2024. During the 2022 season, their first in Division I, the Lions Lindenwood ranked atop the conference in eight offensive categories during the year, including: scoring, total offense, pass offense, pass efficiency, first downs per game, third down conversion percentage, time of possession per game, and red zone offense.

Hovorka was one of two coaches to earn the Graphite Award in back-to-back seasons along with Shannon Dawson, current offensive coordinator at the University of Miami

The Lions will open the 2024 season on Thursday, August 29 at 7:00 p.m., taking on FBS opponent Kansas at Children's Mercy Park in Kansas City, Mo. Lindenwood will play six games inside Hunter Stadium in 2024. Tickets can be purchased at luboxoffice.com.