DMN Blog: Football Outsiders: Do Cowboys or Eagles have better cornerback crew?

[AdamJT13]

The Eagles have regularly been the statistical elite secondary in the NFC for the past several years, even when other squads on their team have broken down. This could be the year the torch is passed to Dallas. The pieces are in place for it.

The Eagles' secondary was pretty mediocre last season. They finished 14th in yards per attempt, 20th in AYPA, 13th in passer rating allowed and 18th in total yards allowed.

 

[Skinsmaniac]

All yardage in the NFL is measured in whole yards, so I guess any statistical system using NFL stats is inherently flawed. That's good to know.

Flawed, or at least not as accurate as it could/should be.

 

[Skinsmaniac]

Really? So I'll turn on ESPN on Tuesday and it'll say that Romo had 341.28 yards for the day? If you're going to put down FO's stats for not having incremental yardage, then I suppose you don't ever use official NFL numbers either?

And the part about how success points are determined... read "The hidden game of football".

I'm not saying FO is perfect though... the best football statistical research site on the web (though not as data-heavy as FO or some others) is http://www.advancednflstats.com/

And this is coming from a guy who majored in statistics.

I think you are missing the point I was trying to make. Football Outsiders, using "the hidden game" as a starting point, evaluates a play as a success if it gains 4.5 yards on the typical first and ten. Regardless of whether they use official NFL stats (which would be less accurate than more precise measurements) or not, that 4.5 yard benchmark is arbitrary. (I should mention that I haven't read the book. Perhaps there is a more detailed explanation in the book of why an offense needs to gain 45% of yards needed on first downs.)

And, that's a neat site. The current article has a picture of Joe Gibbs and is about predictability lol.