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Introduction

For years now, broadcasters and other football pundits have stressed the importance of converting Red Zone opportunities into points, especially touchdowns. But rarely is a word uttered about how well teams score on explosive, home run chunk plays from OUTSIDE the Red Zone…which doesn’t make a ton of sense considering evolution of modern quick-strike offensive football.

In analytic circles, measuring an offense’s explosivity has become an often used metric when evaluating college offenses. Until now, measuring a team’s explosivity has consisted of a combination of points per play and yards per play and while I believe that is a good indicator of explosivity, it is also somewhat incomplete.

So today we’re introducing a new metric to assess explosivity – Touchdowns Out of the Red Zone (TORZ or as it’s sometimes labeled in the graphs, TD-PORZ). TORZ is as simple as it sounds — take a team’s total TDs, subtract the number of red zone touchdowns scored, and multiply by 7. This gives us the total TORZ for the season. From there, we divide that number by the number of games played to give us our final metric.

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