Analytics, Basic Stats, and Recent Historic Context: The ABC’s of Penn State Football – A New Metric for Measuring Explosivity: Touchdowns Out of the Red Zone (TORZ)

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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.

Data Source and Methods

As usual, the data herein comes from cfbstats.com and includes the 2009 through 2021 seasons. Only FBS versus FBS games were counted and we decided to exclude seasons of fewer than 7 games, which happened for several teams in 2020 because of COVID.

Overall Scoring and RZ Performance

We start with the relationship of TORZ (x-axis) versus Points/Game scored (y-axis) for offenses. Here, we find a reasonable trend between these two factors with an R-squared of 0.61 and a p-value of <0.001 indicating these values are correlated. Makes sense — the more TORZ a team compiles, the more overall points they tend to score.

Next, we look at Points Scored Inside the Red Zone per Game (PIRZ) versus overall PPG and we see an even stronger relationship (R-squared of 0.81). Again, higher-scoring teams score more RZ points than teams that struggle lighting up the scoreboard. This correlation is fairly obvious – if teams are turning RZ attempts into points, those points will add up over the course of the game.

The correlation between these two metrics likely would’ve been intuited had I asked you whether teams that register more PIRZ or TORZ rank higher in overall scoring. But here comes the notable part of this exercise…when we plot PIRZ/Game versus TORZ/Game we see a much weaker trend. Yes, these two factors are correlated (p-value of <0.0001) but with an R-squared of 0.19, meaning the predictability of one for the other is very poor. This implies that offenses tend to either post a high PIRZ number or a higher TORZ number but not both.

TORZ: What’s Good?

Below is a histogram of TORZ per game (x-axis) with the amount of teams as the y-axis. You see that the most FBS teams average between 6 and 12 TORZ per game. The more explosive offenses generate 17 or more points per game outside of the Red Zone – so roughly 2.5 TDs from beyond the Red Zone RZ per game. To be considered a Top Tier explosive offense, teams need to average 12 or more TORZ.

In the 13 years of FBS play we analyzed, the average TORZ rating has mostly increased, going from 8.3 in 2009 to a high of 10.2 in 2016. Those smattering of dots at the top of the graph represent the best-of-the-best squads in TORZ.

TD-PORZ > 20 is “ELITE”; >16 is “GREAT”; >12 is “GOOD”; 6-12 is “AVERAGE”; below 6 is “POOR.”

In the next graph (below) we charted all of the teams since 2009 that have either had multiple GREAT/ELITE ratings or a single ELITE rating in TD-PORZ. Only 14 programs meet these criteria with Baylor, Ohio State, Alabama, and Oregon leading the way with the most appearances. The orange represents an ELITE season and green is GREAT. The label is the overall PPG for the season.

The highlight here is that every team that has reached GREAT or ELITE status in TD-PORZ.TORZ has scored at least 40 PPG. Since 2009, only 92 of 1,640 total teams have averaged at least 40 PPG. Of those 92 teams, not quite half (43) have had a GREAT or ELITE TORZ ratings. Out of the remaining 1,548 teams that averaged below 40 PPG, none have achieved ELITE status and only 15 were GREAT in TORZ. The GREAT TORZ teams averaged 36.8 PPG, which is still 10 PPG above average. To me, the fact that so few teams have achieved GREAT or ELITE status in TORZ, irrespective of PPG, means this metric does a good job of demonstrating whether or not an offensive should be considered explosive – and at what level.

TORZ: Penn State

So, how have our Nittany Lions performed in TORZ? By year, you can see from the chart below that, for the most part, PSU been AVERAGE (6-12 TORZ) including the last four seasons. Only during Joe Moorhead years did Penn State achieved GOOD status (14.5 in 2016 and 14.0 in 2017).

The color of the dots above (the shade of blue) represents how well that particular team did in PPG. As you can see, generally, Penn State’s TORZ aligns with the overall scoring.

When we expand our analysis to include the entire Big Ten conference, it should come as no surprise that Ohio State has been the most explosive offense in the league when it comes to TORZ. They’ve had 1 ELITE season, 3 GREAT seasons, 6 GOOD, and 3 AVERAGE. They’ve had more “GREAT” than any other team has had a GOOD. Penn State falls at 3^rd on the list just behind Maryland – a program that has been slightly more consistent with only 1 FAIR/POOR, although keep in mind that not all of Maryland’s seasons since 2009 were as a member of the Big Ten.

As we go through the off-season we will be further incorporating this new TORZ metric and related concepts into our evaluation of Penn State and their opponents.