Cowboys Stupid Mistake Rating, Week 2

[fanfromvirginia]

At the beginning of the season, I came up with an idea for a new stat, which I'm calling the Stupid Mistake rating. The formula WAS giveaways x 10 + # of penalties. Based on input I received last week, I've changed the formula to Giveaways X 6 + # of penalties. The Cowboys did very well in Week 1 with 0 turnovers and 4 penalties ( a rating of 4) and terribly last week with 4 giveaways and 4 penalties ( a rating of 28).

You can see the link below for the rationale for this rating but, in short, it's not designed to explain why we're losing; its only purpose is to be an easy way to keep track of and compare our stupid mistakes over time and against other teams. When we've got more games under our belt, I'll compute this year's median averages for the rest of the league.

(http://cowboyszone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=161334)

League best 2008 (the Patriots): 9.0
League median 2008: 15.1
Cowboys 2008 (league worst): 20.0
Cowboys 2009: 16.0

So thus far the Cowboys are doing better than last year but a little worse than last year's league median score. Of course with only two games it makes more sense to view it case by case -- we were quite good against TB and truly awful against the NYG. This stat will become more useful as we get deeper into the season.

 

[casmith07]

Does a "giveaway" account for plays in which the defense makes a great play on the other side of the ball, and counters our offense, a la the first interception on Sunday night?

There should a rating for forced turnovers that has a decimal or fractional multiplier, and then the regular one for unforced turnovers. Unforced errors have a much bigger bearing on being a "stupid" mistake versus a great defensive play, in my opinion.

 

[fanfromvirginia]

Does a "giveaway" account for plays in which the defense makes a great play on the other side of the ball, and counters our offense, a la the first interception on Sunday night?

There should a rating for forced turnovers that has a decimal or fractional multiplier, and then the regular one for unforced turnovers. Unforced errors have a much bigger bearing on being a "stupid" mistake versus a great defensive play, in my opinion.

In short, it should but it doesn't. This metric is far from ideal for the reason you state and others. But I wanted something that was easy to calculate and compare. To get a more accurate stat that could be compared would require someone to watch film of every play for every team.

So it's admittedly far from ideal but it's a quick and easy way to get a very rough measure of stupidity.

 

[Chocolate Lab]

I really like your premise. I guess my only quibble is that so much of it is on the QB. The rest of the players can play a relatively mistake-free game, and the QB can ruin it all by himself. If Romo throws a couple of bonehead INTs, suddenly it's that the entire team is stupid.

But that's the way winning and losing real games goes, so I still like your index. Good job.

 

[fanfromvirginia]

I really like your premise. I guess my only quibble is that so much of it is on the QB. The rest of the players can play a relatively mistake-free game, and the QB can ruin it all by himself. If Romo throws a couple of bonehead INTs, suddenly it's that the entire team is stupid.

But that's the way winning and losing real games goes, so I still like your index. Good job.

One interesting thing to me from this is that we're doing better than last year because our penalties are down. We're averaging 4 per game whereas last year we averaged about 7.5. Our turnovers are pretty much the same -- last year we averaged 2.1 and this year it's 2.

So, this year Romo's mistakes constitute a higher percentage of our mistakes than last year.