I’m not sure that points per yard IS a good measure of efficiency. Looking at Pro Football Reference, let’s see what I can dig into.
There are two things I think of when I think about “efficiency” in football. Yards per play, and points per drive.
The first is yards per play, because all things equal, gaining more yards per play than someone else makes your offense more efficient. There are things it doesn’t account for – a team that throws three incomplete passes but then completes a bomb for 40 yards is treated the same as a team that completes 4 straight passes for 10 yards, and I’ll tell you which team I’d want to be behind there, but it’s closer – you won’t have extremes like that very often.
By that metric, San Fran is 20th, in between Tennessee and Baltimore, which aren’t exactly offensive powerhouses. But neither of those teams are bad this year. Baltimore wins on defense, and Tennessee wins on I have no idea right now.
1-4 are New England, Green Bay, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. FO’s offensive stats have them ranked 1, 2, 4, and 10th (and without looking, I’d guess Philly is dragged down by their usual problem, converting short yardage situations).
I have no idea what the points per drive stats would be. I don’t know where to look, and I think that would only partially help – you’d still be rewarding an extreme, because a drive that starts at the opponent’s 40 is much different than a drive that starts at your 20, and this stat wouldn’t account for that.
Return scoring isn’t reliable. In the kick and punt return game, before Devin Hester you never had this kind of consistency. You had players who were talented and routinely gave their teams good field position but few wow plays (Brian Mitchell represent!), or you had guys get consideration for NFL MVP by week 8 and be completely invisible by week 8 of the next season (Dante Hall represent!). Devin Hester has shattered that mark for himself, but I think that rule still applies. And while there are players who bend the edges of that rule, like Deion Sanders, DeSean Jackson, and Jamaal Charles (who started out as a KR in KC), they are soon taken off of returns except for critical occasions to reduce the risk of injury. The Redskins famously used Darrell Green as a playoff returner, and when he retired he had the career mark for punt return average in very limited duty.
Defensive scoring is even worse. In 2009, the Saints had eight defensive touchdowns. The Arizona Cardinals had two. Last year (2010), the Saints had two defensive touchdowns, and the Cardinals had ten. FO did a study on this that I don’t have a link to (might have been in one of the books), and I’m sorry that I don’t because it was pretty interesting, that showed little to no pattern in year-to-year defensive scoring. Getting a pick or forcing a fumble (not recovering) is skill in 9 out of 10 cases. Returning it for a touchdown is luck, and that luck can change dramatically from year to year. The same is true for players – only two active players have shown a remarkable ability to produce defensive touchdowns over their career at a high rate – Ed Reed and DeAngelo Hall. (I believe Darren Sharper may also make this list, but he had a lot in 2009 alone, that could have been an anomaly.)
On San Diego – San Diego was AWFUL on special teams last season. Mike Scifres had four punts blocked (five by FO’s metrics) – that was half the total of the entire league last year. They gave up one punt return for a TD and three kicks for TDs. They were inconsistent on field goals and gave up terrible field position on any kind of return. They were incredibly bad.
The offense ranked 4th in FO, defense 7th, but the special teams 32nd by a mile, and that’s why they kept losing. It’s not why they lost every game, but it is why they lost to Oakland, and it contributed in huge ways to their losses.
My frustration with this article is that in trumpeting their stats, they lie. They make the game fit their stats, and not their stats fit the games. Football Outsiders has their advanced stats, and I swear by them, but you’ll easily find Aaron Schatz and the others talk about the problems in making an 11-on-11 game fit into a simple statistical model, and they’re constantly tweaking it to make it work, and when it doesn’t they’ll talk about it. That article reminded me of empty-headed analysis like “When a team runs the ball 30 times, they’re 25-1!” as if the former caused the latter. You run the ball to finish out games and keep the clock running.
But it’s one thing when the empty space between Phil Simms’s ears fires a few times and produces that. It’s another thing when a stat expert claims it.
Of course, I’m not part of the M1A1 Abrams of Truth, I’m not a Gridiron Guru, I didn’t write for Penthouse (yes, that Penthouse), and I don’t run roughshod over all the hacks, “pundits,” and opinions with reckless, unrelenting and fact-filled impunity.
So what I’m saying is I’m not a douchebag.
(This was really fun, Bill! I had a lot of fun digging into all this stuff and doing some digging. This is what football is all about - ridiculous geekery!)
