Matt’s Musings | NFL Data Study, Week 5

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.

Average YFOG

As with most great things, this started on Twitter. I’ve been actively trying to get a few extra visuals out to followers lately to give context for how a team is performing or how a team is approaching different situations. One thing that caught my eye is the yards from own goal measurement. It’s 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 datapoint 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. 

If this was perfectly correlated to scoring, the darkest blue would be at the top and scale down to the lightest blue down at the bottom. That isn’t the case, so we can use this to identify which teams have been outperforming their expectations. 

It’s worth noting there are obvious confounders here, too. In some sense, big plays will actually give us unintended results. A 60-yard touchdown, for example, would count just as a single play 40 yards from own goal, whereas a three-and-out from your opponent’s 42 would count as three plays from about 60 YFOG. Adding context is key, obviously, and we’ll get there as the season goes on. For now, we’re going to take it at face value with the understanding that it’s just one thing in our toolbox.

The view from the top

Buffalo and both Los Angeles teams are up at the top of this list. The Bills are two full standard deviations above league average in aYFOG. We would expect that number to come down a bit toward the mean. They’ve been efficient all over the field and haven’t been forced to punt much.

The Bills have only punted on 3% of their plays. That might seem like an odd way of viewing it, but it’s meaningful to look at it as a rate for how often teams are punting and comparing it to passes and rushes. For reference, teams like the Texans and Jets are hovering right around 10%.

The Cowboys are also popping a bit in this metric, currently sitting just outside of the top five. Some of that has to do with the fact that aYFOG captures turnover differential, as well. Dallas is also top-10 in plays per drive, which will help teams climb this leaderboard.

Regression candidates

Historically, aYFOG explains about 25% of a team’s points per game. That’s pretty good considering the volatility of the NFL, but it obviously means that 75% of the PPG variance is left unexplained. We should expect some teams to outperform/underperform their aYFOG for a variety of reasons, but we can use it to identify team’s that could see regression toward the mean in either direction.

If a team is significantly below or above the blue line, we’d expect them to move toward the line a bit.

The Bills are the only AFC East team that isn’t severely underperforming their aYFOG. My guess would be that the Patriots and Dolphins start to regress and have some games where they overperform. New England looks like they could be in line for a “get right” spot against the Houston Texans this weekend. The Dolphins, though, may have to wait another week as they face off against the defending champions in Week 5. 

The Browns and Chargers are both below the line at the moment but are in the top five in aYFOG and the points will come. They just so happen to face each other this week. At the time of this writing, that game sports a 49.5 total in a game that has sneaky shootout potential.