Midseason Check-in: 'Advanced' Report Card

I've been dropping advanced box scores for the last few games, so I decided to put everything into an 'advanced report card' that summarizes games 1-6, hopefully to see trends. Here are screenshots:

Glossary:

  • Scoring Opportunities = Trips inside your opponents 40 yards line
  • Success Rate = Percentage of plays where you get 50% of first down yardage OR 70% of second down yardage OR 100% of third or fourth down yardage
  • Standard Down = any down where the defense does not know if you will run or pass (*insert offensive coordinator joke*), such as any first down, any second down with 7 or less yards to gain, any third or fourth down with 4 or less yards to gain
  • Passing Down = any down where the offense needs to pick up significant yardage to stay 'on track' - this includes any offensive snap that is NOT a standard down
  • Power Down (AKA 'Money Down') = 3rd or 4th down with 2 yards or less to gain OR any goal line play 2 yards or less to go.
  • Explosiveness is calculated based on Collegefootballdata.com's PPA metric (same thing as EPA). Basically:
    • Every possible down, distance, and yard line is assigned a point value based on historical data (I think 5 years of every FBS snap goes into this particular model), this is called Predicted Points (or Expected Points). Here's a good piece if you're interested in the specifics of calculating PP.
    • The delta between your starting PP and ending PP is PPA. It can be positive or negative
    • Explosiveness is the average of the positive PPA; a small PPA represents a minor situational improvement. A big PPA represents a significant situational improvement. For context, against Marshall, Tuten had 27 yard rush on 2nd & 9 from our own 42 that had PPA = 2.73. In the same game, Jaylin Lane gained 7 yards on 1st & 10 from the Marshal 39, resulting in a PPA = 0.41.
  • Line Yards attempts to measure the number of running yards which are attributed to the offensive line. Yards are weighted as follows:
    • losses - 120%
    • 0-4 yards from LOS - 100%
    • 5-10 yards from LOS - 50%
    • 11+ yards from LOW - 0+
  • Second Level Yards = the average yards per carry that are between 5 and 10 yards from the LOS.
  • Open Field Yards = average yards per carry that comes from over 10 yards past the LOS

Callouts:

  • Sacks are counted as pass plays (because typically if a QB is sacked, they are trying to throw downfield.
  • None of this is opponent adjusted (like SP+, for example)
  • On Money/Power Downs - the service providing the national average doesn't include punts. I think that's dumb, because IMO a punt is not a 'success'. That's why the VT average is significantly lower than the national average. I'll update this soon, but I'm annoyed by it.
  • I'm creating this from scratch from play-by-play data. I'm seeing some (small) differences between sites (ESPN, Collegefootballdata.com) - specifically in Yardage, and Success Rate, etc

Other:

  • This is my first time putting all this data into this 'Report Card' format, so I'm open to feedback.
  • If anything looks fishy, let me know and I'll take a look. There's a lot of spreadsheet mapping going on, it's very possible mistakes were made.
  • If you want to poke around the master spready, you can view it here.
  • I really wanted to use conditional formatting to color code based on how far VT is compared to the national average, but that was too tedious for now
  • I honestly haven't had a chance to digest/reflect on this information, so no takeaways yet, but I will at some point this week. Looking forward to others' thoughts.
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