20 Random Summer Thoughts, Musings, Ideas and Brain Farts on BG Football #19

The BGSU Athletics people are putting out more interesting stuff than they ever used to. I've already blogged on the cool third down stuff, but they also have some nice stuff on drives.

I have often thought that studying drives would be an interesting way of looking at football. If you can't evaluate each and every play, and total game aggregation is sometimes misleading, than perhaps this is a different way to aggregate the game.

For example, we had 45 TD drives last season (all games). 13 of them, or more than 25%, were over 80 yards.

I think that's surprising. But whether its surprising or not (our opponents were 11 in 48, or roughly the same), I think it raises questions about field position. Such as:

• Would this mean that "going for it" in the red zone makes even less sense.
• Should all punts be fair caught?
• Should we evaluate punters on how they pin teams inside the ten instead of the 20?

The problem is that the data does not list opportunities, so the probability of scoring is not known here. Still, the conclusion is pretty hard to miss....long drives are not a rare occurrence at all, and maybe field position is overrated.