Stats That Determine Games

The winning teams usually have the best statistics.

They have the best statistics and win because they have the better players.

"Football games are hard to win, but easy to lose."

Or as Bear Bryant put it, four out of five games are lost, not won. So avoid losing first.

That means eliminate self-inflicted wounds like turnovers, penalties (especially pre-snap and procedural), missed assignments, poorly called plays, and bad strategic decisions.

On the flip side Big Plays - on offense, defense, and-or in the kicking game - win football games.

That's why I think these discussions may be interesting, but not useful.  What is the reason stats are "meaningful"?  Unless I'm misunderstanding, it's knowledge you can use to improve your team's game, i.e. their W-L.  In other words, predictive -- cause, not effect.  Like can you keep stats on your team -- or even use the results of stats around football generally -- to tell you that practice time spent on X is going to make you more competitive than practice time spent on Y?  I doubt it.

Most of the things your team does wrong are either so obvious you don't need stats on them, or hidden in a way that something like merely increasing work on them won't reveal them.  The rest of the things are close calls -- so close that the data would be too noisy, as has been said here, to be meaningful.

The other issue is that even if you did find a predictive stat, how do you know that shifting practice emphasis to improving that one facet will actually make your players better at it?  Maybe the amount of work you'd have to do to improve it just a smidge would require taking so much time that the rest of their game would suffer.

Once my job as an assistant was to chart plays in a game and their results.  Presumably this was to help find out which plays (or players) were more, or less, productive.  Putting aside the issue of execution, and also variation in results aganst different opponents (and whether against their starters or scrubs), you could look superficially at these stats and conclude you should call certain plays more and other plays less.  But how do you know whether running an "unproductive" play often enough preserves the threat that makes a "productive" play more productive?

And yet, you can't reduce the time you spend practicing a "constraint" play -- one that you'll never call unless the opponent makes it a "gimme" -- to exactly 0.  I coached on a team for an all-star game which didn't come off because the opponents didn't show up, so we chose up sides and two coaches to play each other.  All the players were familiar with the offenses and defenses, which there'd been little time to put together and which had been practiced just before sides were chosen up.  One formation was a total tip-off in that only a cross-buck play was in for it, so the defense could just pile up at those two points if that formation were ever shown.  It's the sort of thing that can only work if your opponent doesn't know what you don't have.  So one coach tried to put in a pass play from that formation during a time out; it should've been a gimme since the other team had sold out to stop the only plays they knew were in, but the unpracticed play, easy as it seemed, failed miserably, twice.  (The other coach wisely never showed that formation.)

I am a little surprised to hear these sentiments.  Other than 2 posts suggesting the scoreboard that were clearly tongue-in-cheek- the posts in this thread didn't seem dismissive or chiding. 

Never thought of it from that point of view...but if "belief in self" is a need for the program, then many of the things the OP is looking could absolutely be helpful.   

MEANINGFUL STATISTICS to win any football game are:

1) TAKE CARE OF THE BALL & GET THE BALL - +2 turnover margin.

2) SCORE A NON-OFFENSIVE TOUCHDOWN - preferably on Defense.

3) HOLD THE OPPONENT TO LESS THAN 16 POINTS.

4) SCORE MORE THAN 25 POINTS

It is, but in HS ball my experience has been that it usually doesn’t matter due to talent disparities. If the teams are matched close to evenly, it is a big deal, but how many times does that even happen in HS football?

Where I’m at, the HS and MS football teams don’t often pull out 15 yard drives, but it seems like about half of the scores are on big breakaway plays that could go for 1,000 yards if the field were long enough.

If a team starts at their opponent’s 30 or 40, then that might be a 20 or 25 yard play to score, but if they start at their own 20 or 30 the same dude would still outrun everybody and score on a 60 or 70 yard run.

A lot of playing successful defense around here is just limiting those big plays and making a few of your own.

Along with what’s been said earlier about squat numbers, I’d say an even more meaningful predictive stat for HS ball would be the 3-5 fastest 40 times on each team. I’d wager the team with the most speed, especially at the top of their lineup, is probably going to win the majority of games. When your top times are in the 4.6-4.8 range and the opponent’s dudes are 4.4-4.5, you have very little margin for error. However, those aren’t the kinds of numbers you can get from a box score or roster.

Another big one for HS ball, in the same vein, is probably how many 3rd and 4th year players are on the field relative to the opponent. This would likely be correlated to both speed and strength. I’m not just talking about juniors and seniors, but how many of those guys have a few years’ experience and lifting under their belt to match the physical maturity that comes with being a 17 year old young man.

Not to mention, much like with a lot of these other stats, what really can you do in terms of decision making to affect starting field position, both maximizing your starting field position and minimizing the opponent's starting field position? It's like, sure, i'd love to start on the +1 YL every time out, but what can i do to make that happen? Not a whole lot. A lot of stats, as others have said, are largely like nuggets of gold in a plexiglass case, you can see them, but you cant do anything with them.

This is what is a bummer when it comes to HS sports. It can be a rewarding challenge to get the best you can out of the bottom of the barrel and spare parts, but it's still a bummer, because in a perfect world, every game would be perfectly, evenly matched, across the board, at every position. I mean, if you take Usain Bolt and line him up in a 100 against your average HS track team, he is probably going to beat all of them 10/10...Like what else did we expect? 😄

As a no huddle guy, time of possession isn't all that important, but # of plays is absolutely huge! Of course this does not take into consideration explosives by either team, but it's still a pretty darn good indicator of how the game is going. In every game we have lost in the last 4 seasons, the opponent has had more snaps than us.