What's new
AllBuffs | Unofficial fan site for the University of Colorado at Boulder Athletics programs

This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

  • Prime Time. Prime Time. Its a new era for Colorado football. Consider signing up for a club membership! For $20/year, you can get access to all the special features at Allbuffs, including club member only forums, dark mode, avatars and best of all no ads ! But seriously, please sign up so that we can pay the bills. No one earns money here, and we can use your $20 to keep this hellhole running. You can sign up for a club membership by navigating to your account in the upper right and clicking on "Account Upgrades". Make it happen!

Punt Return Efficiency, FBS Win%, and Offensive Efficiency

Quattro

Club Member
Club Member
BANNED
So there's been some talk about needing a dynamic guy to return punts, so I wanted to see how returns affected win% and scoring offense.

PRE and FBS Win%
11461a9a5d5e8cac1320b602a12dab2d.jpg


PRE and OFEI
809c9f8892f2cef585e4a931bf5ebdb9.jpg


So it appears that punt returns don't have a ton of value at the college level in recent years
 
If we could chart punt return fumbles, that would be the nail in the coffin of this discussion. Unless PRE includes that.
 
All this said, we fans are more entertained when the team has a dynamic punt returner and having someone like that back there does put more pressure on the opposing team (always a good thing).

Ideally, I'd want to have it all. Hopefully a guy like Donovan Lee can become as trustworthy on making the right decision on what to catch, what to fair catch, and ball security. Because I think he's got the tools to be more of a weapon or threat that the opposition has to spend time game planning for.

Spruce is right in the middle of the Pac-12 in punt return yards, but I don't think ST Coordinators are spending any extra practice time prepping for him.
 
So, like the discussion around kick offs, should we just eliminate all aspects of the game that don't correlate to the final score? A team would have the option to go for it on fourth down, or have the ball placed 40 yards away for the other team.

I think this result would need to account for fumbles or dynamic plays (which only happen occasionally) in a different way than just looking at punt return yardage. A player might call for a fair catch 4 times, and then on the fifth one bust a game changing return. Can you run the stats for games won if at least 6 points were earned by a punt return? Or, a fumble recovery?
 
Statistics don't account for outlier occurrences. That is actually the point is to find what happens most of the time with some reasonable sense of confidence (mean, standard deviation). The argument then becomes why do coaches routinely punt the ball on 4th and short (3 yards or less) if the statistics show that by doing so doesn't do anything to improve their chances of winning and most likely decreases their chance of winning by providing the opposing team with another opportunity to score. If the opposing teams likelihood of scoring is the same from their own goal line up to your 10 yard line, why give them the ball instead of keeping it and trying for the first down?
 
If you look at the previous chart, it shows a range of ~2 to 3.9 for everything outside the redzone and only jumps to 4.8 until the 10. So basically the numbers say you are going to get a field goal most of the time you touch the ball. Inside the redzone that jumps to a touchdown occasionally, inside the 10 is a touchdown almost all of the time. Another way to say it is that if you give it to your opponent anywhere inside the 30 yard line, he scores a field goal 50%+ of the time, from the 30 to 50 it looks to be about 70% of the time, from inside the 50 to the 10 it is almost guaranteed to get at least a field goal. So in essence every time you give the ball back, they are probably going to get a field goal out of it. Turn it over inside your own 10 and it is a touchdown.
 
Statistics don't account for outlier occurrences. That is actually the point is to find what happens most of the time with some reasonable sense of confidence (mean, standard deviation). The argument then becomes why do coaches routinely punt the ball on 4th and short (3 yards or less) if the statistics show that by doing so doesn't do anything to improve their chances of winning and most likely decreases their chance of winning by providing the opposing team with another opportunity to score. If the opposing teams likelihood of scoring is the same from their own goal line up to your 10 yard line, why give them the ball instead of keeping it and trying for the first down?
There are some coaches that always go for it on 4th down, and always go for an onside kick on their kick-offs, because that's what the statistics say you should do. So far, those coaches can only be found at the high school level and low level college (JUCOs, DIII, NAIA). Some of them are having a lot of success.

Sooner or later, a desperate AD in DII will give one of them a chance. If they have success, there will be others that follow. Then a desperate FCS AD will take the chance, then an FBS school, and finally a P5.

Not sure the strategy will ever enter the mainstream (or make it to the No Fun League), but some of us will probably live to see a P5 coach that never punts and always kicks off onside...
 
If you believe that good teams tend to do all things well because they have good players and good coaching then you also shouldn't believe that correlation between a particular statistic and winning % means that that factor is particularly important in determining whether or not a team wins.
 
What about the ability to block punts or fgs? We suck ass on those.

Can you chart the same for the top 20% and compare it vs the bottom 20% (where we are)?
 
What about the ability to block punts or fgs? We suck ass on those.

Can you chart the same for the top 20% and compare it vs the bottom 20% (where we are)?

Rutgers has the most punt blocks since 2009. Whatever that means.
 
I was sitting at the bar eating a slice of pie when a bell went off in my head. I draw the line in sports when the saber metric axis of evil intercepts what is good and we go down the slippery slope of evaluating sports performance based on statistics. I just don't get the point. And some of you guys wonder why your ex left you. So I'll throw you a curve. Why not just sit back and enjoy the game?
 
I was sitting at the bar eating a slice of pie when a bell went off in my head. I draw the line in sports when the saber metric axis of evil intercepts what is good and we go down the slippery slope of evaluating sports performance based on statistics. I just don't get the point. And some of you guys wonder why your ex left you. So I'll throw you a curve. Why not just sit back and enjoy the game?

It's hard to enjoy the game when we suck ass. So perennial optimists turn to things that might help them ignore the fact that we suck in an effort to enjoy the games.
 
It's hard to enjoy the game when we suck ass. So perennial optimists turn to things that might help them ignore the fact that we suck in an effort to enjoy the games.
Or you know it provides another way to look at the game because it interests you
 
Back
Top