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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GoPGo" data-source="post: 580880" data-attributes="member: 9064">I do understand the importance of getting your own offense back on the field.  And at a glance, one might think it has a big impact on TOP.  It seems to make sense, right?  I didn't know for sure if it did or not, so I let the math do the talking.  But the fact is, for whatever reason, it doesn't.  It's a very small factor.  If you rank every team by TOP and then rank them by third down %, there's not much overlap.  The strongest factor I was able to find was plays per drive, which is a very strong correlating factor.  Now obviously, a strong correlation does not equate to causation, but it certainly can rule out causation such as the case with defensive 3rd down %.  I'm not sure why.  But the great thing about statistical analysis is that it lets you know when further investigation is required regarding what was once a foregone conclusion.  So instead of arguing against the data, you ask yourself, "Why might that be?"  For starters, I would suspect if you have a very poor defense, your opponent might not see very many third downs to begin with, whereas a good defense, even if they allow a slightly higher percentage be converted, would force opponents into more third down situations.  Here's another strong possibility.  What do most teams try to do in the 4th quarter when they're ahead by 3 scores?  They run the clock.  Teams will frequently run the ball 3 times in a row - even on third and long, and even the worst defenses are able to stop a pretty high percentage of 3rd down plays when they know the play is going to be a run and they stack 8 in the box.  Would that not pad that 3rd down % statistic?  Now on the other side of that same coin, what do teams often do on defense when they have a 3 score lead?  They guard the sidelines and drop an extra DB or two into coverage.  So what happens?  They're content to let the team that desperately needs 3 touchdowns throw the little **** and dunk passes over the middle.  And while that might mean they give up some first downs late in the game, it also means the clock continues to run.  Clearly, 4th quarter play can skew that 3rd down % statistic up for bad teams and down for good teams.So now we have a new hypothesis we can test.  If 3rd down % does not correlate well to TOP, what if we took the 4th quarter out of the equation?  I suspect there would be a stronger correlation there, but I'm not saying that's the case either because I have not tested it.  The bottom line here is that overall 3rd down % for a full game is not a good predictor of overall TOP for a full game.</blockquote>

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