Outside the Hashes

Football is finally back as college football kicks off its season tomorrow. As an early present, I’m unveiling an expected points model for the collegiate game.

First, due respects need to be paid. This is heavily influenced by the work over at AdvancedNFLStats.com, where Brian Burke has done the same thing for the NFL. Many others have done similar work in football as well. And most of the football work is based off work done in baseball, where, while not the first, tangotiger at The Book Blog is arguably the most well-known for his run and win expectancy work (for those familiar with baseball, run expectancy by base-out state is essentially equivalent to the expected points concept in football).

What Expected Points (EP) does is provide a baseline for a given situation based on what we’d expect the average team to do. My EP system, like Brian Burke’s, is based on Down, Distance, and Yardline, but other things like time remaining in the half, timeouts remaining, etc. can be included. By putting everything on same scale we have an easy way to compare any type of situation, and by using points as that scale, we have something that is both intuitive and informative. When I say that that 1st and 10 on your opponents’ 20-yard line is worth 3.9 points, you immediately have a sense of what that means.

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Neil Paine over at the PFR blog wrote basically what I was going to follow up with  (albeit much better than I would have). I just wanted to add in a couple other correlations with current metrics that I looked at (correlations are for all stats from 2008-2010).

All the EPA and WPA metrics are from Advanced NFL Stats (leaderboard here, if you don’t know what they mean check out my last post). As you can tell, EPA per Play correlates best with Total QBR, and is on par with VOA according to Neil’s article. This makes sense: the way QBR handles Clutch Index–first multiplying by it, then dividing by the sum of it–essentially cancels it out, leaving us with EPA per play and the division of credit. The Clutch Index serves to reward QBs who make their best plays in relatively clutch situations, but this appears to be minimal.

Whether or not QBR turns out to be more useful than EPA per Play or VOA probably lies in how well the division of credit is handled. At one extreme, it could be the next step in advancing QB metrics, rewarding those QBs who can get the ball downfield and put the ball on the money while punishing those who don’t. On the other end of the spectrum, if not handled correctly, it could end up adding unneeded complexity and throwing out useful information. As of now, we have no way of assessing which it will be as ESPN has yet to release any details on how their division of credit is handled. Let’s hope we can get a peek inside at some point and see exactly what’s going on.

Earlier today, ESPN released (some) details of their brand new rating system for quarterbacks dubbed Total Quarterback Rating, or Total QBR (or even further abbreviated, just QBR), aimed at replacing the popular yet flawed Passer Rating. So what is it? And is it a worthy replacement?

To answer that question, let’s first take a look at what is currently out there, which will let us compare Total QBR and pinpoint the major differences.

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