“In the middle of a difficulty lies opportunity.” – Albert Einstein
The conversation often focuses on adversity, not success. You’ve heard that “Adversity doesn’t build character…It reveals it!”
In this piece, I will present the response of teams in two very particular situations and relate it to season win totals. Let’s start general and quickly focus in
How do units respond to a single good or bad play? How do players respond to a making a mistake?
How do they respond to making a great play? [As a coach, I felt it was this less discussed aspect to play sequence that defined a good/great player. Success can be a poison if not dealt with properly. Phrases like “bouncing back”, “Forget about it”, “We’ll get ‘em this next time” surround bumps in the road but should you deal with success in the same way? You better or you’ll end up saying “how did this one get away?”]
Want more food for thought on response in football?
(You can discuss this on the BSL Board here.)
How do units respond to a bad drive or a bad half? How do teams respond to a 21 point defecit at the start of the 3rd quarter? How do they respond to a 21 point lead in that same situation? How do teams respond to a devastating loss or exhilarating win? How do teams respond to a disappointing season? How do they respond to winning the Super Bowl?
So often the measurement tool used is solely the scoreboard. Put simply, winning validates almost anything. Why worry about possible problems when it is more fun to celebrate wins and “keep it going.” However, there are situations to examine more closely and discoveries to be made about how critical situations relate to game and season outcomes. This is an extremely rich topic and I will take a look at how teams immediately respond to touchdowns and turnovers.
The work I do at The Q5 highlights the extension of the game beyond the 4 quarters on the clock. The 5th quarter allows for reflection and prediction. Hope and despair wallow in this quarter of the game…..
The Q5 works to create meaningful visualizations of football performance. The application of which stretches from fans to coaches to executives to owners. How do I quantify performance? I have created a proprietary metric that takes facts and stats and analyzes them within a contextually meaningful football analysis. It takes tables of numbers and moves them towards visual display through the subjective measure of successful performance. A little bit of a mouthful but this picture replaces pages of clicks and minutes of searching drive and play-by-play logs. It saves you time by packing a huge punch from a 3 hour football game.
As the optometrist says: “Better number 1….
or better number 2?”
More at www.theQ5.com/tutorial
Just as “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, so is football success. Beyond ending the season by determining the Super Bowl champion to be the only successful team and everyone else a failure, the success of “your team” is determined by YOU. Emotions and desires naturally cloud objective analysis. The graphical game summaries and analysis done at the Q5 aides in the reflective and predictive analytics relating to the great game of football.
Now to the Ravens – the 5-11 record in 2015 was not successful on any level. I would be skeptical of any person or analytic that tried to sell it differently. What went into that 5-11 record? Great articles from talented writers on this site explore that topic.
Today, I examine one specific drive-level aspect I know relates to the overall game and season success of a team. Control of the database thru code writing allows the Q5 to perform meaningful situational analysis such as this. How do teams respond to touchdowns and turnovers? The data helps tell the story because possessions alternate back and forth and a certain times touchdowns are scored also turnovers occur. This article will explore the immediate response of teams on the drives right after these events. For example, the offense scores a TD, how does the defense respond when it takes the field on the next drive? The defense forces a turnover, how does the offense to this sudden change?
There are two main components. 1) Number of occurrences of the situation 2) the amount of success responding to the situation. I will deal with these two components on an independent ranking system and combine the results to create a final ranking. I throw some food for thought out in a similar fashion about 3rd down conversions. So many times the success of team is linked to success of their 3rd down conversions. Yes, the chains need to keep moving to be successful but I believe a stronger team is one that moves the chains while dealing with very few third downs. It is not only how well you do on third down but how few of them you have while successfully moving the ball. As the Q5 continues to setup its Moneyball-style database, these studies will occur – please do stay tuned.
Studying 7 years of NFL drive data from all regular season games – almost 40,000 offensive drives. Those offensive drives resulted in almost 8250 TDs and 5250 turnovers. Just looking at possession drives – no special teams plays included in these numbers.
The drives analyzed are subjected to the exact same performance metric. The metric does not account for the situation but these drives have been extracted based on the criteria presented.
First up: The defense responds to touchdowns scored by their offense.
League-wide Avg Q-Score: +20.6
Best: NE 2012, DEN 2013, GB 2011, GB 2015, DEN 2012, SD 2009
Second up: The offense responds to touchdowns scored on their defense.
League-wide Avg Q-Score: -20.6
Best: BAL 2010, SEA 2014, SF 2013, BAL 2009, SEA 2013, KC 2014
Third up: The defense responds to turnovers by their offense.
League-wide Avg Q-Score: -83.1
Best: SF 2012, KC 2010, SEA 2013, SEA 2015, ATL 2011, INS 2013
Fourth up: The offense responds to a takeaway by their defense.
League-wide Avg Q-Score: +83.1
Best: NE 2010, CAR 2015, NE 2011, PIT 2010, ATL 2010, HOU 2011
This analysis quantifies performance after possible game changing events. Emotion and momentum….. In general, offenses perform very well after a takeaway by their defense as compared to when their defense gives up a TD. A Q-score differential of over 100 points. I will continue to put those Q-Scores in context but know that a Q-score scale is developed where a value of zero is neutral – neither good or bad. A push, if you will. Positive numbers are “good” The bigger, the better. The negative side is exactly the opposite. The maximum extreme Q-scores for any drive are +500 to -500.
The Avg Q-Scores are negatives of each other because of the following logic. Tracking the defenses of all teams – All of them over 7 years – is the exact opposite of tracking the offenses of all teams. By definition the response of the defenses to a particular situation must be the exact opposite of the response of the offenses to that exact same situation. This would be true when looking at the entire league in one analysis but clearly would not be true if you were analyzing only a single team.
Looking at the average win totals for groups of teams starts to show how these responses relate to season win totals. This analysis contains 224 entries from 7 years x 32 teams/year.
The top team groupings, showing avg wins/season:
| Bottom teams: last 20 | Bottom teams: #21 to #40 | Bottom teams: #41 to #60 |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| DEF responds to TD by "us" | 3.4 | 5.5 | 5.3 |
| OFF responds to TD by "them" | 3.7 | 5.2 | 6.3 |
| OFF responds to takeaway by "us" | 5 | 5.7 | 7.2 |
| DEF responds to giveaway by "us" | 5.4 | 6.9 | 6.7 |
The bottom team groupings, showing avg wins/season:
| Year | Points FOR | Points AGAINST | Difference | Team Q-score | Wins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 7.0 | 3.0 | 4.0 | 88.0 | 9 |
| 2010 | 4.9 | 2.1 | 2.8 | 20.8 | 12 |
| 2011 | 4.9 | 0.1 | 4.8 | 28.2 | 12 |
| 2012 | 6.3 | 5.7 | 0.6 | 23.6 | 10 |
| 2013 | 4.0 | 3.9 | 0.1 | 0.0 | 8 |
| 2014 | 6.0 | 4.1 | 1.9 | 5.2 | 10 |
| 2015 | 3.6 | 5.7 | -2.1 | -53.8 | 5 |
A closer look at the Ravens over the past 7 years reveals that 2015 was a low point in the categories of Touchdown Response by Offense and Turnover Response by Defense. It was the second worst year for Touchdown Response by Defense and third worst year for Turnover Response by Offense. Interesting to note that over the entire 7 year stretch, the 2010 Ravens offense ranked the highest for Touchdown Response. The 2009 Ravens also sit in the top 6 of that same category.
The response of a team to both drive success and adversity is important. Righting the ship quickly and maintaining focus from success is not easy but good teams will do it. The ability of a team to do it assures you of nothing but does increase the chance of winning.
Besides general statements like the ones in the paragraph above, how is this information actionable? For a fan – besides cheering louder…. not much at all. For a coach – extremely actionable. Off-season film study can be addressed not by down and distance but through the lense of these two situations. Do we have a plan going into the game as to how we will react at the play call level? Most play callers have a “sudden change” box on their call sheet but has proper thought been put into that situation each week? Are you predictable in this situation? Are you creative in this situation? Are you willing to take an unexpected risk or just play it safe and see what happens? Perhaps this is the time to go for it on a 4th down or blitz on 1st down.
This analysis says that the “feel” of the game has a definite chance to change as these two distinct situations arise. The sudden change situation is widely practiced throughout the industry but how often do teams practice the response to a touchdown. Besides high fives or four letter bombs, do teams and play callers even do an off-season self-study in this area? No they don’t. The smart ones would work to quantify drive performance within the context of the game not just within the context of down and distance. These situations matter. Coaches that recognize that fact and attempt to account for it are ahead of the others. Anyone can celebrate or get mad but how you react to it will have a strong impact on the outcome of the game. Keep that in mind during Week 1 of the NFL season.
Dr. Guyader is the Owner / Founder of The Q5.com, which specializes in Football Visualizations and Drive Analytics. Additionally, Guyader has 10 years of Division I football experience coaching top-tier and historic programs. From guiding third round NFL draft pick Ramses Barden for four seasons at Cal Poly to converting 6-foot 10-inch lineman Ali Villanueva to wide receiver at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Andy knows how to coach on the field and how to game-plan in a meeting.