A Better Box Score: Simple Ways to Improve the Basic Game Recap

Box scores are intended to give a snapshot of games, and, for the most part, they work. If I look at the box score for West Virginia’s 70 to 63 victory over Baylor, I have a pretty good inkling of what kind of game it was; similarly if I look at the box score of Auburn’s infamous 3-2 win over Mississippi State. But there’s an awful lot I can’t tell from those box scores. Mississippi State had 38 rushing yards, but was that because their running game was stoned or because they took too many sacks? West Virginia and Baylor combined for over 1,000 yards passing, but were those short passes receivers took the distance or long ones down field?

Run or pass? Or neither?

Run or pass? Or neither?

I’m against overwhelming the classic box score with a variety of so-called advanced statistics. I’m a fan of these and I think they are great, but the box score is not the place for unpronounceable acronyms. So below is a non-exhaustive list of very basic, very simple, hopefully very clear changes I think would greatly improve the quality of the traditional box score.

  • Sack Yards: This is an easy one, and is unique only to college rather than the NFL, but there’s no reason that sacks should count against rushing yards. It makes quarterback rushing yards extremely difficult to decipher, especially in the age of the dual-threat quarterback, and often makes passing look more productive than it is in reality. (It also penalizes quarterbacks who do the smart thing, and throw the ball away instead of taking sacks.)
  • Tackles for Loss: Sack yards should come out of passing but all box scores should also have a simple table of negative plays as its own stand alone category. You can tell a lot about offensive and defensive styles based on the number of negative plays.
  • Completions Behind the Line: Bubble screens, rocket screens, now screens, touch passes and swing passes are an increasingly large part of offenses, and, given that these plays are nominally forward passes but are typically “packaged” with running plays, they really should be their own quasi-run/pass category. (In college and high school in particular, the rules for linemen downfield are entirely different depending on whether the pass is completed behind or past the line of scrimmage, thus further arguing for different treatment.) Call it the Percy Harvin/Tavon Austin category of plays which “all-purpose” players typically thrive on. The other goal is to remove these plays from traditional passing categories (though I think it is fair to count incompletions against the quarterback), to make passing statistics more purely a measure of downfield passing.
  • Yards After Catch/Air Yards: Brian Burke at Advanced NFL Stats has done great work on yards after catch and the corollary statistics, “Air Yards” or the amount of a quarterback’s passing yards which come purely from how far the ball travels in flight, ignoring what the receiver does after he catches the ball. Although I still abide by the belief of Bill Walsh that accurate passing is a big part of yards after the catch, Burke’s studies of the NFL seems to indicate that Air Yards is very consistent by quarterback (i.e., better quarterbacks tend to, on the whole, get more of their yards from the ball in the air versus yards after catch) while YAC is very consistent by receiver — some gets lots of YAC and some don’t. This doesn’t seem any more difficult to track for a game than measuring yards themselves, and could really illuminate both the strategies each team employed and simply the flow of the game.
  • Average Starting Field Position: Hat tip to Matt Hinton for this one, but this simple and self-explanatory statistic would explain more outcomes than likely any of the other additions I’d proposed.

 

I’d love to hear of any additional changes (or arguments against these proposed changes) any of you may have in the comments in the comments.