Fun with obscure statistics! (Well, sort of.)

Jump to Comments

It would definitely shock my STT 421 professor (who gave me a 2.5 — and scheduled a midterm on St. Patrick’s Day!) that I’m a big fan of random and obscure sports statistics. I think OPS tells infinitely more about a baseball player’s productivity than regular old batting average does (ok, well maybe that statistic isn’t obscure anymore), I think the tempo-free basketball stats the Big Ten Wonk used for years are fascinating . . . and so on.

So, this post from the Blue-Gray Sky definitely caught my attention a year ago.

Don’t tell Maryland’s Ralph Friedgen that “Defense wins championships.” The chalkboard Xs and Os guru might simply laugh. Over the span of his lengthy coaching career, Friedgen has invented a formula, based entirely on offensive statistics, that he and his staff argue directly correlates to winning football games. Last fall, as his team was making a run toward the ACC Championship game, he sat down to discuss this winning formula with the Washington Post.

Fridge calls his formula Major Offensive Errors (MOE). To calculate it, you count up:

• sacks
• offensive penalties
• fumbles
• interceptions
• dropped passes

Then, count the number of total plays you had in a game. (Don’t forget to add in the number of no-play penalties like false starts, illegal shifts, and delays of game to the total.) Finally, divide the errors by the total plays. What you end up with is a rating of your team’s efficiency — or inefficiency – that Friedgen relies upon heavily.

The goal is to keep the team’s M.O.E. below 12% each game; Friedgen estimates that, for him, the statistic has been an accurate predictor of wins and losses 95% of the time.

So, naturally, I set out to calculate how accurate the statistic was for State last year. The answer: not very, albeit with several caveats.

(Click to enlarge.)

So, we won one game (Pitt) in which our M.O.E. was significantly over 12% — although Pitt’s was much higher — and in 5 of our 6 losses, our M.O.E. was under 12%. However, bear with me for a second here. In the Iowa (11.1%), Ohio State (9.7%), and Michigan (9.7%) games, we were in shouting distance of the 12% threshold; in actuality, I think we exceeded it. I culled the raw data from the play-by-play statistics from msuspartans.com; I don’t know if they’re trying to not hurt anyone’s feelings, but the statmakers there seem especially loath to deem an incompletion a “dropped pass.” In the OSU game, no dropped passes were recorded; and we were given only one and two in the Iowa and Michigan games, respectively. Surely, there were more than that — I’m willing to bet that if I was able to look at the tape of any of those games, I’d be able to say without a doubt that we were over the 12% threshold in all of those games.

So that still leaves the two outliers — Northwestern and Boston College. I think these can be explained away pretty easily as well — Northwestern’s M.O.E. was still extremely low, and there were no turnovers in that game (!), and conversely, all of our M.O.E. points against Boston College were extremely damaging turnovers — a lost fumble and four interceptions.* Dammit, Brian.

Game-by-game M.O.E. MSU in green, opposition in blue.

*The one other clearly oddball game on that graph above was OSU, where our M.O.E. was significantly lower than theirs. However, if you recall — we didn’t lose that game because of unforced errors, we just couldn’t move the ball on their defense. Todd Boeckman, on the other hand, nearly blew the game for OSU with two awful turnovers that we returned for touchdowns.

The actual M.O.E. percentage aside — I think the raw data pretty clearly shows that, at the very least, Dantonio succeeded in instilling discipline into the team. We committed only 31 offensive penalties all season — 2.4 per game — and 14 of those came in 2 games (Iowa and Pitt). I don’t know exactly what that number was in 2006, but I guarantee it was a lot higher.

We still need to work on our turnover margin a bit: our offense gave the ball away 2 fewer times than the opposition offense did, but one of the advantages of running a more conservative office should be greater ball control and dominance in turnover margin. Devin Thomas and Jehuu Caulcrick accounted for half of our lost fumbles in 2007 . . . but they’ll be replaced by younger players, so that number isn’t necessarily going to improve as a result of their departures. It’s an area which can be improved.

So anyway, I think I’m going to personally keep track of the number of our dropped passes in each game this year, so maybe I can come up with an accurate M.O.E. number. I’m interested to see how accurate this really is — one more thing to look forward to this season. Until then, I’m the guy who spent his entire afternoon figuring out a statistic that really wasn’t all that descriptive or predictive of our season. Blogging is awesome.

4 Comments

Filed under football, i'm a dork