
Slowly but surely, we're moving past total yardage as the end-all, be-all of football.

Jerome Miron - USA TODAY Sports Explosiveness And when you give the ball back to your opponent, you want to give them to have to go as far as possible.Īnd you want that damned, pointy ball to bounce in a favorable way. When you get the opportunity to score, you want to score. You want to eat up chunks of yardage with big plays, because big plays mean both points and fewer opportunities to make mistakes. 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. And they speak to the fundamentals of football itself. It's very, very similar from year to year. This is from 2013 college football game data. If you win the turnover battle (using turnover margin), you win 73 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 drive-finishing battle (using points per trip inside the 40), you win 75 percent of the time.


These guys aren't allowed to move beyond the line if the quarterback's still planning on throwing. These guys are allowed to touch the ball downfield. And unlike most of soccer, football's players all follow different sets of rules. In baseball, the most you'll ever have are 13. In basketball, you've got 10 guys on the court. So what's the football version of the four factors?ĭue to sheer numbers, football is a pretty damn complicated sport. They are the basis for Ken Pomeroy's statistical profile pages, and creates four factors graphs (among others) for every college basketball game. But Oliver's four factors concept has become commonplace. It was the basketball version of the "You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball" quote from Bull Durham: you hold onto the ball, you shoot the ball, you grab the misses, you draw contact.
