SBNation: The surprising numbers behind last night’s Cowboys victory

[jobberone]

The surprising numbers behind last night’s Cowboys victory
by Michael Strawn@LifeInCharts Sep 26, 2017, 7:15pm CDT

Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
Whew. It’s never easy, is it? The Cowboys’ entered the University of Phoenix Stadium yesterday hoping to get back to the team’s physical, ball-control ground attack and grind out a road victory. The game did not go according to plan, however. Here’s five stats that show how Dallas overcame the team’s difficult start to wrestle a well-earned 28 - 17 victory.

46 Offensive plays

The Cowboys won despite running only 46 offensive plays. The team has played only 25 such games in the team’s 58-year history and won only 8 of those 25 (32%). In fact, the Cowboys have lost their last six straight, 8 of last 9 and 15 of last 17 games when running 46 of fewer plays. A rundown of those games:

Including last night’s result, the Cowboys have:

• Lost 15 of their last 18 such games
• Scored an average of 13 points
• Been outscored by more than 2-1

In short, it’s exceptionally hard to win when you run only 46 plays but the 2017 version managed to find a way to do so and deserve credit for making it happen.

How, though, did they make it happen? First, the Cowboys’ enjoyed a number of short fields which they successfully converted into touchdowns:

51 yards - average Cowboys’ touchdown length

***SNIP***

https://www.bloggingtheboys.com/201...tell-the-story-demarcus-lawrence-dak-prescott

 

[jobberone]

Lot's of meat on the bone here people. Good read and very surprising although not in hindsight.

 

[JD_KaPow]

Oy. Really bad analysis, at least in the quoted part. The author argues that it's hard to win when running only 46 plays by looking at what happened in games where they had 46 or fewer plays. So it lumps together a whole bunch of games that were worse than last night's. The right way to do it would be to figure winning % as a function of plays run, using all the data, or at least look at how we do when we run, say, between 40 and 50 plays, or between 44 and 48 plays. Then you'd be looking at games that are like this one, not skewing toward games that were much worse.

Not only would that be better analysis, it turns out it would be way more interesting (and make his point more strongly). Cowboys winning percentage when they run...
<44 plays: .428 (3-4) (!)
44-48 plays: .250 (7-21) (!!)
49-53 plays: .378 (37-61)

And then of course the real right way to do it is just look at all teams and how they do when they run 46 plays, and only in the more modern era of the game. Over the last 20 years, teams are 19-43 when they run 46 plays, for a .306 winning percentage.

Oh shoot, Football Ref says the Cowboys only ran 45 plays yesterday, not 46. Whatever.