Matt’s Musings | NFL Data Study, Week 12

Every Monday, I find myself in a bit of NFL data purgatory. We’re waiting for the week to come to a proper ending, and the data is still yet to be finalized. It’s a great time, however, to look at some historical trends and do some digging on some things we can leverage in the upcoming week.

This piece will be out Tuesdays but won’t have the same format or topic each week. The formula will change as I poke around with the data we have access to here. It’ll just be my musings on something that caught my eye. If there’s something to it, I’ll give you some way to leverage the conclusions in fantasy for the upcoming week.

Checking in on aYFOG

For the uninitiated, you can head back to the first edition of this piece for reference. YFOG (“yards from own goal”) is just as it sounds — 1 YFOG would be your own 1-yard line while 99 YFOG would be the opponent’s 1-yard line. This data point is entered into the play-by-play data for each play. Running a simple average on those numbers can help you get a feel for where a team is running the majority of their plays; we’ll call it aYFOG. The tl;dr version is that a team’s aYFOG is correlated to scoring opportunities and captures a lot of information about a team into one metric. If a team is running many plays on their opponent’s side of the field, they’re more likely to score points.

Updating Scoring Expectation (Relative to aYFOG)

Back in Week 8, I revisited my metric aYFOG to look at how offenses were performing at the halfway point. This is how things looked then.

We would expect some shrinkage toward zero as the sample becomes larger. Historically, if we look at season-long aYFOG we can explain about 40% of a team’s scoring. 

The range has begun to shrink toward the mean. We had the Bengals all the way at +9 PPG and the Bears at -7 PPG, now the spread only goes from +6.5 to -5.5. Cincinnati is still overperforming by a healthy margin. The Bengals and Vikings are the only teams that are 4 or more PPG over expectation. 

Playoff Races to Watch

It should come as no surprise that six of the eight division leaders are positive in this metric. The lone exceptions are the Patriots and the Packers. The Patriots are a game ahead in the win column but have played one more game than the Bills, who are a half-game back in second place for the AFC East. The Packers are (and have been) underperforming in this metric all year. Part of that has to do with their ability to generate big plays with Davante Adams, but it doesn’t explain all of it. In theory, they’re either going to see some major regression up to where they’re supposed to be scoring, or they’ll fizzle out rather quickly when it all catches up to them.

The Bengals continue to overperform thanks to a couple of high-scoring games, and they’re in a tight race with the Ravens for the AFC North. The Steelers and Browns both outperform the Ravens and Bengals in aYFOG but have been scoring under expectation and have some ground to make up to get back into the race for the division. 

One of the most interesting divisional races is the AFC West. The Chiefs are 7-4 and have a one-game lead for the West. You’d never know that because of the panic surrounding Kansas City at the moment, but they’ve still been above average in this metric. The entire division sits with somewhere between five and seven wins, though, so if they do have an extra gear now would be the time to turn it on.