The five factors: College football's most important stats

http://www.footballstudyhall.com/2014/1/24/5337968/college-football-five-factors

The five factors: College football’s most important stats

By Bill C.

@SBN_BillC on Jan 24, 2014, 9:00a 110
Thomas Campbell-USA TODAY Sports

College football comes down to five basic things, four of which you can control.

Due to sheer numbers, football is a pretty damn complicated sport. In basketball, you’ve got 10 guys on the court. In baseball, the most you’ll ever have are 13. But like soccer, football’s got 22. And unlike most of soccer, football’s players all follow different sets of rules. These guys are allowed to touch the ball downfield. These guys aren’t allowed to move beyond the line if the quarterback’s still planning on throwing. The holder can have his knee on the ground, and it doesn’t really count. These guys over here are 5’10, 180. Over here, 6’3, 215. And over there, 6’6, 315. In theory, you wouldn’t expect a game so complex to get boiled down to its essence in a few short steps.

You’d be wrong, however. For years I’ve tossed around this “down to its essence” idea; in 2010, I wrote one of my favorite Varsity Numbers columns, “Four Truths,” in which I discussed the importance of fast starts, big plays, passing downs, and field position. To be sure, those things are all quite important.

But over time, I’ve come to realize that the sport comes down to five basic things, four of which you can mostly control. You make more big plays than your opponent, you stay on schedule, you tilt the field, you finish drives, and you fall on the ball. Explosiveness, efficiency, field position, finishing drives, and turnovers are the five factors to winning football games.

If you win the explosiveness battle (using PPP), you win 86 percent of the time.
If you win the efficency battle (using Success Rate), you win 83 percent of the time.
If you win the drive-finishing battle (using points per trip inside the 40), you win 75 percent of the time.
If you win the field position battle (using average starting field position), you win 72 percent of the time.
If you win the turnover battle (using turnover margin), you win 73 percent of the time.

This is from 2013 college football game data. It’s very, very similar from year to year.

These are good odds. And they speak to the fundamentals of football itself. You want to be efficient when you’ve got the ball, because if you fall behind schedule and into passing downs, you’re far less likely to make a good play. You want to eat up chunks of yardage with big plays, because big plays mean both points and fewer opportunities to make mistakes. When you get the opportunity to score, you want to score. And when you give the ball back to your opponent, you want to give them to have to go as far as possible.

And you want that damned, pointy ball to bounce in a favorable way. Again, you control four of the five.

The title says college football, but in fact the concepts apply to professional football and really, in a broad sense to many games. This article seems to cover a lot of ground.

The bye week is coming up. That means football news will be slow. I will use the time to delve deeper into strategies. I will add to this thread as time progresses.

Conventional wisdom says that TOs and yards per pass attempt are the 2 most important stats. Let’s take a look at how that stacks up with the stuff in this article.

We can try to compare this stuff to what the Rams do.