When trying to accomplish anything in life, it is smart to pay attention to efficiency. By definition, being efficient is “achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.” Any coach in the NFL will tell you that being efficient is vital if a team wants to be successful. When it comes to anything from practice to traveling, it is smart to do the most with the least. There are plenty of efficiency statistics recorded in the NFL; they range from defensive efficiency to yards per reception. From an offensive standpoint, gaining yards is arguably the most important objective of any team. Scoring is the end goal but the cannot be accomplished without driving down the field and racking up yards. Machiavelli said, “the ends justify
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This dataset records every single play from the 2015 regular season and breaks each play into over 60 categories. During the 2015 regular season, without a doubt, the most successful team was the Carolina Panthers. Lead by Cam Newton and a stifling defense, the Panthers dominated their schedule, finishing the with 15 wins and only one loss (best in the NFL). After putting them through my model, I found that they also had the highest YLS% at 80.8%. Despite their offensive and overall success, Joe Mahoney, a writer for “SBNation” give the majority of the credit to the team’s defense and their weak schedule. Mahoney claims a large reason for their offensive success was the defenses they matched up against. He points to the fact that they only faced two of the NFL’s top 10 defenses. His argument is that the Panther’s offense slows down against formidable defenses. Mahoney’s is summarized when he writes “The Panthers offense only faced two elite defenses during the regular season and they faced them both when they were "weakened." Their offense is good - they had 26 touchdown drives of 75 yards or more this regular season. Their offense did score 24 in their playoff rematch against the Seahawks, but they were held to 295 total yards by the Seahawks in that game (221 of that came in the first half). I like the match-up of our defense against their offense particularly with Wade Phillips …show more content…
An efficient team is a better team. The offense should be near the top of the list of aspects of the game a team wants to be efficient in. There are already plenty of statistics that involve offensive productiveness but none of them are like my statistic. Offenses will always be striving to score points which why a telling statistic must include scoring. You cannot score without gaining yards while going down the field. However, many drives end in a team not scoring. From a critical stand point, all the yards gained in those drives are wasted. It seems logical that a team that limits the amount of wasted yards would be a winning team. This is why I thought of this statistic in the first place. To test create the statistic I took the play by play data and broke it into drives where the team either earned a touchdown or field goal and added up all the yards from those drives. I then divided that number by the team 's total yards. Once this percentage was paired with each team 's record it seemed evident that they were related. To find out exactly how related they were I ran a correlation function. The result was very convincing at 0.695. The high correlation shows a strong relationship between winning games and yards leading to scores percentages. At 48.3%, the coefficient of determination explains for almost half of the win percentage. These results are very convincing and
This dataset records every single play from the 2015 regular season and breaks each play into over 60 categories. During the 2015 regular season, without a doubt, the most successful team was the Carolina Panthers. Lead by Cam Newton and a stifling defense, the Panthers dominated their schedule, finishing the with 15 wins and only one loss (best in the NFL). After putting them through my model, I found that they also had the highest YLS% at 80.8%. Despite their offensive and overall success, Joe Mahoney, a writer for “SBNation” give the majority of the credit to the team’s defense and their weak schedule. Mahoney claims a large reason for their offensive success was the defenses they matched up against. He points to the fact that they only faced two of the NFL’s top 10 defenses. His argument is that the Panther’s offense slows down against formidable defenses. Mahoney’s is summarized when he writes “The Panthers offense only faced two elite defenses during the regular season and they faced them both when they were "weakened." Their offense is good - they had 26 touchdown drives of 75 yards or more this regular season. Their offense did score 24 in their playoff rematch against the Seahawks, but they were held to 295 total yards by the Seahawks in that game (221 of that came in the first half). I like the match-up of our defense against their offense particularly with Wade Phillips …show more content…
An efficient team is a better team. The offense should be near the top of the list of aspects of the game a team wants to be efficient in. There are already plenty of statistics that involve offensive productiveness but none of them are like my statistic. Offenses will always be striving to score points which why a telling statistic must include scoring. You cannot score without gaining yards while going down the field. However, many drives end in a team not scoring. From a critical stand point, all the yards gained in those drives are wasted. It seems logical that a team that limits the amount of wasted yards would be a winning team. This is why I thought of this statistic in the first place. To test create the statistic I took the play by play data and broke it into drives where the team either earned a touchdown or field goal and added up all the yards from those drives. I then divided that number by the team 's total yards. Once this percentage was paired with each team 's record it seemed evident that they were related. To find out exactly how related they were I ran a correlation function. The result was very convincing at 0.695. The high correlation shows a strong relationship between winning games and yards leading to scores percentages. At 48.3%, the coefficient of determination explains for almost half of the win percentage. These results are very convincing and