Offensive efficiency II

So, one of the off-season projects is to look at different ways you can measure offensive efficiency...and whether there might be some diagnostic tools that can be indicators of whether an offense is likely to be productive.

The first question?  Diagnose what?

The first idea is this:  teams that gain more yards per play should score more.  If they don't then, is there something we can learn about two things...did they make key plays or did they stop drives by turning the ball over.

To do that, we look at 3rd and 4th down conversions, red zone efficiency, and turnovers.

A few notes:

• What you see below are rankings for each team in the MAC, conference games only.
• I use 3rd and 4th conversions combined because it makes sense to me to use the terminal down in the series.  If a team might go for it on 4th down, they play differently on 3rd down.  And, the key thing is to make the first down.
• Red Zone efficiency is not the percentage you usually see, but rather, a measure of points per trip.  I calculate 7 for each TD and 3 for the FGs and divide by the number of red zone trips.
• The idea is if a team scores more points or fewer points than you would expect by their yards per play, you look at the other stats for possible clues.

So, some observations:

• Miami is a perfect case in point.  4th in the MAC in yards per play and 7th in scoring.  Why?  Here, we can conclude the poor 3-4th conversions and poor red zone scoring are the culprits.
• Bowling Green is another good case.  BG was, in fact, LAST in the MAC in yards per play and actually scored a little better than that.  Why?  BG was very efficient in the red zone (perhaps due to a complete lack of confidence in the kicking game, but BG was efficient, nonetheless).
• NIU is a good case...pretty bullet proof right across.
• Kent presents a reasonable approach--their lack of turnovers allows them to overachieve slightly.
• CMU underperformed slightly, probably because of turnovers.
• OU was helped slightly by being the best red zone team in the MAC.

Now, there are some other views that are not as clear cut.

• Ball State is inexplicable.  They outperform their offensive production by 3 spots, but they do not excel in any specific area and turned the ball over a lot.  (I checked...they were -6 in turnovers for the season).
• Western's relatively weak red zone and turnovers numbers were not enough to bring down their overall productivity.

Anyway, just some off-season doodling...I wonder how these stats would look on a game by game basis, but that will have to be for another day.