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You might have had mixed feelings watching Kaytron Allen run into the end zone on Saturday.

It’s always fun to watch the Fatman in the open field, if you’re a Penn State fan, especially on a well-blocked play, and more fun if that run results in six points. However, you also might have wondered exactly what the hell Allen—and the rest of the offensive starters—were still doing in the game with just under 11 minutes to play in the fourth quarter against an FCS opponent.

The Nittany Lions’ third straight squandered cover win was another head-scratcher. They went right down the field on the game’s opening drive, covering 78 yards in 12 plays with a precision and a confidence that suggested they had purged many of the, uh, inconsistencies that we saw the first two weeks.

And then we saw about three more quarters of those inconsistencies.

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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?

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