Because those metrics adjust for things like strength of schedule, field position, plays run, etc.
Ex:
Lets say your defense gave up a TD the first play the other team ran, every single time they had the ball.
How many points would your offense score a game?
The answer is a sh*t ton. You’d have the number one scoring offense in college football.
But that doesn’t mean you have the number one offense in college football. You could have a horrible offense, and you’re going to still have the number one scoring offense due to number of plays run in a game.
The ranking I’m using is an analytic model that tries to adjust for other things that artificially inflate (or deflate) an offense’s numbers.
The ranking I’m citing is FEI combined with S&P+ (hence F+).
I’m not cherry picking a stat to make Arroyo look like sh*t. The opposite is true. I’m using a stat that combines two analytic models to try to provide a balanced number.
It’s the model I consistently cite on this board. Do a search for F+ and I promise you’ll see a bunch of my posts show up.
Look, you know and I know that NO football statistical model every comes out that way, where a team is scoring on the first possession every time.
As I pointed out, over a 14 game schedule, all of those little "single-game" anomalies even out. So you devoted a helluva lot of space to hypothetical BULL****.
The reality is simple. If your scoring rank exceeds your yardage rank, you are more efficient at scoring, particularly in the red zone. Conversely, if your yardage rank exceeds your scoring rank, you are less efficient at scoring. Meaning (if I take your wackadoo example to the extreme), if every scoring drive was a 98 yard drive that takes you to the 1 and you settle for a field goal, you will have AMAZING yardage rankings and crappy scoring rankings. But that doesn't happen all the time...or even very much at all...it's a bizarre extreme example that RARELY happens.
Soooo...again....nobody denies that there is a ROUGH correlation between yardage and scoring points. But when your rankings are diverging by 20 or more spots, then you don't need to micro-analyze every drive, you just have to understand what the data is saying. And the data will tell you that some teams are better at cashing in drives for 7, and some teams have more struggles.
That is not a fundamental denial that yardage has an impact. It is saying "who cares about all the yardage in the world, if you can't turn it into points.
Take one final example. If you had the Dallas Cowboys kicker who missed every single extra point, you would DEFINITIONALLY be leaving 1/7 of your total potential touchdown points on the board WITH NO IMPACT TO YARDAGE WHATSOEVER. Same thing is true for "missing FGs", they can turn a long drive into zero points.
So stop the the F+ nonsense, and just use your head. Some of you stats nerds are acting like this is infinitely variable, and it's not. The games are played, **** happens. You don't have a season dictated by short 1-play drives, just as you don't have a season dictated by 98 yard missed-FG drives. It all evens out over an entire season.
