Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

I think that's a better thing to look at over points. After all, isn't more stock put into it among most? For instance, when you say that a team has the #5 best defense or a team has the 21st-ranked offense, they almost always are referring to yardage. And if they do refer to points, then they'll say "points". Points, to me, tells quite less the tale than yardage. I think when they show standings, if they want to include points-for and points-against, then fine. But total yardage gained and total yardage allowed should also be included.

Thoughts?

Still some strange correlations with yardage as well. I got one...2001 Bears! 26th-best offense with 4,694 total yards gained. and 15th-best D with 4,978 given up! That's a 13-3 team with a minus-284 in total yards! This recent 13-4 Vikings installment? Minus-463 yards!!

A slight tangent but I just thought of this... As the 2015 season ended it was commented on the the 15-1 Panthers led the league in scoring with an even 500 points. I got curious and wondered if they truly led the league in offense. (yardage). They were "only" 11th. I figured the only explanation for that discrepancy was they had to have had an amazing turnover ratio. More turnovers = better average field position= less yardage gained per points scored. Sure enough I found they were. I don't have the total turnover stats handy but a quick check of p-f-r shows they had 24 interceptions as a defense. Pretty high. Just goes to show that no one statistic exists in a vacuum.

Speaking of overall team stats, somebody here suggested an interesting system a few years ago. It was a team's total offensive yardage divided by possessions, so the result was called yards per possession or something similar. Of course it didn't take the team's defense into account, but it seemed to work very well at ranking a team's offense -- better than anything else I've seen.

^^^ "like" button

Bob Gill wrote:Speaking of overall team stats, somebody here suggested an interesting system a few years ago. It was a team's total offensive yardage divided by possessions, so the result was called yards per possession or something similar. Of course it didn't take the team's defense into account, but it seemed to work very well at ranking a team's offense -- better than anything else I've seen.

Football Outsiders' DVOA is actually a godo metric. I am not a fan of AV-the metric that grades players with a big chunk of it stemming from being on a good team, but DVOA
for offense, defense and STs makes sense and takes into account a lot of things and smooths out things, accounts for drives, etc.

They've gone back to early 1980s and when you look at the numbers, you go "That makes sense" the teams with great defenses score great but also teams that had poor offenses
that gave up more yards can look better than in counting stats.

Nothing is going to fully capture sports by "numbers" so many things skew them especially football, but to me, DVOA is a pretty good tool to have in the toolbox.

Bob Gill wrote:Speaking of overall team stats, somebody here suggested an interesting system a few years ago. It was a team's total offensive yardage divided by possessions, so the result was called yards per possession or something similar. Of course it didn't take the team's defense into account, but it seemed to work very well at ranking a team's offense -- better than anything else I've seen.

I may have been the individual you referred to. I came up with the system I call Adjusted Yards Per Drive. The yard total is adjusted by subtracting 45 yards for turnovers and adding 10 yards for touchdowns. I have further adjusted the yardage total to compare teams across eras, by inflating the totals of teams who played in more defensive eras. My system actually DOES take defense into account, you just rank bottom to top instead of top to bottom. I ran the numbers for the 50 years from 1950 through 1999. By the time I was done, the 1973 Rams came out as the top offense and the 1954 Eagles came out as the top defense. This causes me to think my system might be flawed. Back to the drawing board to try to figure out where I went wrong.