Matt’s Musings | NFL Data Study, Week 8

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 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 (average yards from own goal) 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.

Current aYFOG leaderboard

When we started looking at this metric about a month ago, there was a pretty similar list at the top. At that point, the Bills were more than two standard deviations above the historical league average. That has since regressed a bit, but they still occupy the top spot. Tampa Bay has leapfrogged into the top 5, while the Chargers have slid down the board from third to ninth place. 

Regression candidates

There’s a lot going on here, so let’s start with a quick explainer for the viz. Anything within the white squares is inside of a standard deviation of the historical league averages for each metric. There are outliers in every metric every season, but we’d expect some of the teams that are very far from the regression line to regress at some point. A key understanding of this viz is that regression can occur in different directions. A team that is outperforming their aYFOG in points per game can improve in aYFOG just as easily as they can come down in points per game. We’d think that teams should score more or less based on their aYFOG, but if there’s enough of a signal that they’re a strong offense, their aYFOG can increase to match their PPG.

The Bengals are the biggest outlier in that regard. Based on their aYFOG, we’d expect them to be scoring about 18 points per game. They currently sit just above 27 PPG. That difference is the largest, by far, of any team in the NFL.

Most of that has to do with the fact that Ja’Marr Chase is making defenders look foolish every single week with long plays. My guess would be that some of those long plays aren’t necessarily going to repeat, and the Bengals start sustaining longer drives, thus increasing their aYFOG and scoring closer to their expected PPG. 

The Bears and Lions are down at the other end of the spectrum. They’re scoring a full touchdown less than expected. Neither team shows much of a signal that would lead us to believe that they can improve on that output. 

From Tennessee to Cleveland, we’re looking at variation within one standard deviation which is pretty normal. A field goal made or three fewer points isn’t necessarily make-or-break. The Packers being low on the list is interesting, but they should regress upward in the coming weeks.