Does Running Help a Team Score in the Red Zone

I've heard people say for a long time that you have to be able to run well to score in the red zone. It always seemed to be intuitively true. Passing games rely on space, and you can't stretch the field vertically in the red zone (as much), and so, it seems logical that you would need to be able to run the ball....where you MAKE space with lineman clearing it.

I decided to test this idea. I took the red zone scoring data for every team in FBS and put it into a spreadsheet, along with their running yards per play, passing yards per play, and total yards per play. These are sack-adjusted, meaning sacks count against passing yards and not running yards, which is how official stats are done.

More notes.  I then broke teams into quartiles by their yards per play passing, running, and in total.  So, Pass 1 is the top quartile of passing teams, Pass 2 is the second quartile, etc.

Finally, I don't really believe in using red zone percentage, because it counts a FG and a TD as the same thing.  I prefer to use points per RZ Trip.  For each of calculation, I don't use the XP.  A TD is worth 6 and the FG is worth 3.

Run TD % is the percentage of touchdowns gained by running the ball.

So, let's look at what that yielded.

A few notes.  First, it does not appear to matter if you are quartile 1 or 2.  What appears to matter is that you are in the top half of the teams in each area.  If you are, by and large, you score just as well in the red zone as anyone else.

The overall range is a lot narrower than I would have thought.  The lowest is 4.4 points per trip and the highest is 5.1 points per trip.

The percentages have similar issues....the lowest is 78.5% and the highest is 85.3%.

One bottom line conclusion...teams score in the red zone, even if they are lousy on offense.  In fact, I always had some idea that the defense picked up a small advantage in the red zone, but that does not appear to be the case.

Our ultimate question was whether you score better in the red zone with a running team.  As you can see below, as long as you are in the top half of the category, is really doesn't matter very much.  In fact, the most points per red zone trip came from the top passing teams, followed by the best defensive teams.

Top running teams were barely over the FBS average, in fact.  If you are going to be bad at something, it is better to be bad at running--in quartiles 3 and 4, running ranks ahead of the other two.  But, again, these differences are pretty small.

In my view, the final analysis is that as long as you are proficient at moving the ball somehow, you can score in the redzone.  It does not require a strong running game---it is just as easy to do it with passing ot even just having a good yards per play.