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Solid Read re: Football Metrics

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I think Awsi has talked about this at length, but yards per play has been pretty important to anyone really digging into the numbers. And, it goes for both sides - offense and defense.
 
This is a very intriguing article.

Here are the five factors:

-Explosiveness as measured by Yards Per Play (YPP) and Points Per Play.
-Efficiency as measured by success rate
-Field Position (LOL!)
-"Cashing in scoring opportunities" (Trips inside the opponents 40 that result in points).
-Turnover Differential

Does anyone have a good site that aggregates this information for college sports?
 
We have the explosiveness part with Duke, Coley, Dorsett..
No surprise that when Duke went down a major part of our explosiveness went with it and the offense subsequently suffered.

Efficiency is where is failed specifically on 3rd down. That hurt the teams chances of winning more then know.

Field position. Off the top of my head I think we fared pretty well here. Duke going down may have hurt our KO returns though.

Finishing drives- I would think this would be correlated to efficiency and 3rd down conversion.

Turnovers- We gained 27 and lost 22 good.
 
We have a few explosive players, but we didn't generate nearly enough explosive plays on offense. If you think back to our games, we would get an explosive play here and there, but we were not a team that I think anyone would categorize as explosive. It will be interesting to see how things change with a new QB. As much as anything this underscores the importance of getting game changing players on your roster.

CaneAlmighty said:
We have the explosiveness part with Duke, Coley, Dorsett..
No surprise that when Duke went down a major part of our explosiveness went with it and the offense subsequently suffered.

Efficiency is where is failed specifically on 3rd down. That hurt the teams chances of winning more then know.

Field position. Off the top of my head I think we fared pretty well here. Duke going down may have hurt our KO returns though.

Finishing drives- I would think this would be correlated to efficiency and 3rd down conversion.

Turnovers- We gained 27 and lost 22 good.
Click to expand...
 
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LuCane said:
I think Awsi has talked about this at length, but yards per play has been pretty important to anyone really digging into the numbers. And, it goes for both sides - offense and defense.
Click to expand...

Absolutely it works both ways. I typically reference defense only because it can be less obvious. Not many fans seemed to notice when Florida State moved into the top handful in yards per play allowed in 2011, and same with Louisville this year.

The happy adjusters are almost always wrong. Never forget that. Once it's middle to relatively late in the season and somebody tries to pretend that the yards per play numbers are irrelevant due to schedule strength, that opinion is misplaced. There is impressive rigidity.

College football is a tricky animal. Some of the best pro stats don't translate perfectly. I still use Yards Per Pass Attempt Differential in college football but you have to throw it out for teams like Georgia Tech, which can have misleadingly high yards per attempt. Knowing the style of offense is important. Same with Rushing Attempt Differential.

Yards Per Point is a good college stat, offensively and defensively. That measures team efficiency. If your offense doesn't require many yards to generate points it means your defense and special teams are functioning well. It also measures if you maximize drives by scoring touchdowns and not field goals. Obviously if you drive 80 yards but settle for a field goal your Yards Per Point will not be nearly as good as if the 80 yards equated to a touchdown.

Field goals are failures for the underdog. I realize the author of that article is not looking at this from a betting perspective but it needs to be mentioned. Underdogs with high energy early in the game do themselves no favors by settling for field goals. Invariably the favorite settles down and swamps them with touchdowns. In the BCS games this year the underdogs did a great job of capitalizing on early possessions with touchdowns, and it allowed them to keep going and pull off the upset. Auburn basically fell one possession shy. After scoring three touchdowns in the first half they were forced to kick a short field goal at 21-20, opening the door just enough for Florida State.

Good article.
 
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Good read. I would like to see the numbers on the 01 Offense. D caused turnovers, we always were working with short fields. Scored super fast (explosiveness).
 
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