Points per drive and the weak Central schedules

Brian Beaudry
Friday June 17, 2011

As I mentioned in my First to Five column last week, I’ve been working on a spreadsheet to account for points per possession for every offense and defense in the league. Here are the raw rankings, based on a simple (team points/drives) - (opponent points/drives) equation:

Points per drive are more important than points per game when measuring a team – Cleveland appears to have one of the worst offenses in the league until you take into account the fact that they only have 116 drives so far this season, while teams like Kansas City and Dallas have 148 and 147, respectively. Of course they’re going to score fewer points if they are slowing the game down. A 10-minute drive that ends in a touchdown is better than two short drives that end in one touchdown.

Now, I don’t feel offenses should get credit for points they didn’t score, so I removed defensive and special teams scores from the equation (extra points still count, but returns and safeties don’t).

For similar reasons, I don’t count end-of-half or end-of-game drives in the following situations: End of half if the team gets the ball with under 10 seconds remaining on their own side of the field, end of game if the team is ahead and killing the clock and they successfully kill the entire clock. If there’s no expectation of scoring or the goal of the drive isn’t to score, I also don’t want to hold it against a team.

Here are the rankings for adjusted points per drive:

This means that even without taking into account defensive and special teams scores, the Sharks are gaining 1.6 points per exchange of drives with their opponents. Good luck to anyone playing in the Shark tank; you’re going to need it this year. 

The most interesting drop from the first table to the second is just one position, but huge numbers-wise. Chicago drops from getting over a point per drive to getting under a half-point per drive. A huge part of their success is from return touchdowns and a lack of returns surrendered. The Rush have scored 81 D/ST points, tied for second most in the league, but have given up only 11, less than half of the next fewest allowed (Jacksonville, 23).

While I can’t take everything into account, at least not without doing a lot more unpaid work in addition to this unpaid work, I can take one thing into account: schedule. While this has its flaws, - as a Shock fan, I’d like to point out here that the Shock are the only team that had to play Cleveland with Dutton, which makes a big deal in their scoring offense ratings, and that Pittsburgh with Bernard Morris at quarterback has failed to score 50 in one game while in the four games without him, they failed to score 50 in three – it can provide a bit more insight to who is fattening up on the most cupcakes.

So I measured each team against their expected output per drive against each team on their schedule (offense against expected defensive numbers from opponents, defense against expected offensive numbers).

Here are the rankings when adjusted for opponent strength:

Ironically, I started calculating points per drive and factoring in opponents in order to defend Spokane’s defense from those criticizing it when starting quarterback Kyle Rowley was benched after a poor performance in Pittsburgh. Since the Dallas game, however, the Shock’s strength of schedule has dropped precipitously with games against Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Tampa Bay, and strong teams from the early part of the schedule like San Jose and Utah have tripped all over themselves in a race toward the cellar. Now Spokane’s schedule actually hurts their rankings.

Orlando’s numbers don’t quite indicate that they’re as good as they are until we notice what a tough schedule they’ve played. Their losses are to Arizona, Jacksonville twice, and a Spokane team that has slayed most of the giants they’ve come across this season. 

Chicago and Dallas, the leaders of the Central Division, are most hurt by the schedule inclusion, however. Once again, Chicago’s advantage over opponents is cut in half and Dallas drops from a top team to a team that is actually giving up more than they should and scoring less than they should against the weak competition they’ve faced.

Unless the Vigilantes can step up their returns, it seems as though they’re a prime candidate to fall apart down the stretch and open up another playoff spot to one of the four 5-7 teams in the conference that are all ranked higher than Dallas.

It seems as though there are four tiers of teams and for the most part, upsets really only seem to work their way one level up. On the first tier is Arizona and Jacksonville, the only two teams that are earning an extra point per possession. The next tier is comprised of teams between .1 and 1 point per drive, Orlando through Chicago. Tiers three and four are the middle and right columns, respectively. The only upsets of more than one tier this season are New Orleans over Cleveland, Spokane over Arizona, Kansas City over Chicago, and Philadelphia over Georgia.

With that in mind, let’s test this theory out by predicting games this weekend and throwing my own natural bias into cases where upsets could take place.

Tulsa: Better team, quarterback that wants to prove himself, hot recently.

Orlando: Two tiers above Tampa Bay. As much as Tampa is improved recently and the War on I-4 means that record goes out the window, I can’t make up a system and disregard it two games into picks.

Georgia: Two tiers. Also, “beats New Orleans” is something that just sounds right no matter what team you put before it.

Jacksonville: Three tiers. Similarly, “Jacksonville beats” sounds right no matter what team you put after it.

Iowa: One-tier upset. Dallas is bad on the road and their record is better than the numbers indicate they really are. Doesn’t help that the only full game of theirs I’ve seen was against Spokane, and they were awful.

Utah: One-tier upset. The Blaze can’t lose another consecutive game, can they? Going with them because it’s in Utah and that should provide a boost.

Arizona: Two tiers, not to mention San Jose’s tailspin.

Spokane: It’s just one tier, Chicago isn’t as good on the road, and hey, I believe in Erik Meyer.

Cleveland: Two tiers.

On the season, the system is 0-0, since I just made it up while writing this.

Week notes: Congratulations to Tulsa, who scored 26 defensive/special teams points against Utah to upset the Blaze. The Talons had scored a combined NINE defensive/special teams points for the season entering the game. Spokane won by 21 and didn’t so much as move up a single spot on the board, thanks to Tulsa’s leap in the points per drive standings. The Talons’ unadjusted nine points per drive (thanks to the defensive and special teams points, their 81 points came on nine offensive drives) is now the top performance of the season, replacing San Jose’s 8.45 points/drive dropped on Spokane in Week 1.