Sponsor: FTB’s Donors Club – the most direct way to support our efforts – is back for another year! (sad Sarah McLachlan music plays) For $9.99 you can feed a starving blogger…and get a cool FTB bottle koozie in return! JOIN HERE.

For a long time, golfers looked at putts per round as a key statistic. Then, a few years back, a more advanced metric emerged that was a more accurate gauge of putting success or failure—strokes gained. See, no two putts are created equal, so a golfer who hit 16 greens but had 30 putts had a much worse day on the greens than a golfer who had 32 putts but only hit nine greens and didn’t miss anything outside of five feet. Strokes gained measures how a golfer did compared to the rest of the field, not simply the number of putts.

The football equivalent of putts per round is third-down conversion percentage, which measures an offense’s ability to stay on the field but does not, by itself, account for the overall success of the offense. Would you rather be a unit that converts 7 of 10 third downs but only winds up with 20 points or an offense that converts 4 of 8 third downs but has five plays of 30 yards or more that all go for touchdowns? And, like putts, not all third downs are created equal. Are you failing to convert a bunch of 3rd and 2s or 3rd and 9s? How often are you even getting to third down in the first place?

Continue reading