As someone who relies heavily on stats and analytics in my analysis of the New York Jets and the NFL, I have found quite a few metrics to be less useful than others when evaluating teams and players.
I initially intended to rattle off a plethora of overrated stats in this article, with the goal of crowning a champion. But as I began listing them, I realized that most of them fell under the same umbrella: volume-based metrics. Together, they can be grouped as “the most overrated stat in the NFL.”
Whether it’s a player’s passing yards, a team’s total rushing yards, or anything in between, people are too accustomed to making judgments based on raw totals that do not account for volume. There is no valuable information to be gleaned without considering efficiency.
This applies to both players and teams. Let’s start with players.
Players (Total pass yards, total rush yards, etc.)
For instance, Aaron Rodgers ranked eighth in the NFL in passing yards this past season with 3,897. He had more yards than quarterbacks like Jalen Hurts, Justin Herbert, Brock Purdy, Matthew Stafford, Josh Allen, Jayden Daniels, Jordan Love, and Tua Tagovailoa.
That sounds fantastic – until you realize Rodgers threw the second-most pass attempts in the league (584). In terms of yards per attempt, Rodgers ranked 26th out of 32 qualified quarterbacks (6.7). All eight of the aforementioned quarterbacks ranked at least 10 spots higher than Rodgers on the Y/A leaderboard.
A player’s volume of attempts (be it pass attempts, rush attempts, targets, or any other similar category) is affected by numerous factors beyond the player’s control, including game situations, play calling, scheme, opponent, supporting cast, and so forth. Throwing more pass attempts does not indicate you are a more productive passer, but it inflates your passing yardage total.
Using efficiency-based metrics – such as yards per pass attempt, yards per rush attempt, and so on – allows us to evaluate all players on the same plane regardless of the uncontrollable variables that affect their volume. It is a far more accurate way to accomplish the simple goal that stats are supposed to accomplish: evaluate a player’s impact on winning.
Some quarterbacks throw more passes because their team is often trailing, while others throw fewer because their team is often leading. The opposite is true for running backs; they tend to get more carries on teams that are often leading, and fewer if their team is often trailing. This factor has nothing to do with their impact on winning, but it is a major factor in their total yardage.
The context can go even deeper than that. These are things that the eye test can notice while watching a game live, but get lost in the mud as we fall back on the surface-level nature of box-score stats.
One way to go deeper with context is to consider play-calling tendencies.
For example, regarding Rodgers’ 2024 season, the most commonly cited stat in his favor is the big “28” under his “TD” column. It is the third-best single-season total in Jets franchise history (although, what does that really mean when the guy on top is Ryan Fitzpatrick?) and ranked seventh-best in 2024, tying Josh Allen. Again, it sounds impressive until you take a second to dissect it.
Before diving in further, the context of Rodgers ranking second in pass attempts still applies. Comparatively, Allen ranked 14th in pass attempts, throwing 101 fewer passes than Rodgers. In terms of passing TD rate, Allen placed 7th (5.8%) out of 32 qualifiers, while Rodgers placed 12th (4.8%). It’s still a solid ranking for Rodgers, although not quite as impressive as his ranking in total passing TDs. After we apply further context, though, Rodgers suddenly won’t look nearly as proficient at producing passing TDs as his box score suggests.
Touchdown totals are largely a product of play calling. The majority of them occur deep in the red zone, which means each team’s play calling choices in that area will play a large role in determining how the TDs are distributed. We know that the Eagles, for instance, let Jalen Hurts hog a huge portion of them with his legs. In the Jets’ case, they were the pass-heaviest team in the NFL near the goal line, inflating Rodgers’ TD total solely on the basis of play calling rather than by his own performance.
The Jets passed on an NFL-high 71% of their plays inside of the 5-yard line, miles above the league average of 42%. Of the Jets’ 16 TDs inside of the 5-yard line, 12 were passes, an NFL-high 75%. The league average in that category was also 42%.
If the Jets had a normal pass-run split of TDs inside of the five (42% of their 16 TDs), Rodgers would have thrown 6.7 passing TDs instead of 12, a deduction of 5.3 total passing TDs. Suddenly, just by giving the Jets a normal play-calling balance inside of the 5-yard line, Rodgers’ passing TD total falls from 28 to 22.7, enough to drop him from 7th to 12th in total passing TDs and from 12th to 23rd (out of 32) in passing TD rate (3.9%).
Ultimately, Rodgers’ pass heaviness near the goal line inflated his own stats without actually making the Jets a better team. Despite his high volume of passing TDs, the Jets still ranked 21st in red zone offense and 24th in points per game. And when you dice up his stats based on true efficiency rather than raw, unadjusted volume, you get a result that looks very similar to the results of the team.
This is not intended to be a critical deconstruction of Rodgers; his 2024 season just so happens to be a perfect illustration of why raw volume totals from the box score can tell a misleading story about a player’s real impact. He is one of many examples. Bo Nix had more passing yards than Josh Allen, Geno Smith had more passing yards than Lamar Jackson – we can go on and on.
Citing a player’s total production in any category is essentially meaningless outside of fantasy points and record books. If you want to get a better feel for a player’s true impact, look at their efficiency, not their totals.
Teams (Total offense, passing yards per game, etc.)
The same logic applies to team statistics. Volume-based metrics continue to be misused when evaluating teams.
My least favorite stat in all of football is “total yards per game” for teams, whether it’s offense, defense, or passing/rushing on either side. The networks love to throw this up on the screen as an indicator of how strong a team is in a particular area, yet it is actually terribly inaccurate at answering the question people look for it to answer.
Allow me to reveal some “total defense” rankings from the 2024 season. The Minnesota Vikings ranked 16th, yielding 335.4 yards per game. Aaron Glenn’s Detroit Lions ranked 20th, coughing up 341.3 yards. Meanwhile, the mighty New York Jets placed 3rd with just 313.8 yards allowed.
Clearly, the Jets were an elite defensive team, while the Vikings and Lions were mediocre. Firing Robert Saleh and Jeff Ulbrich in favor of Aaron Glenn was foolish.
In actuality, the Vikings and Lions fielded two of the best defenses in football, while the Jets were subpar. Here are the three teams’ defensive rankings in more accurate metrics:
- Vikings: 2nd in EPA/play, 2nd in DVOA, 4th in points allowed per drive
- Lions: 7th in EPA/play, 5th in DVOA, 8th in points allowed per drive
- Jets: 21st in EPA/play, 20th in DVOA, 22nd in points allowed per drive
There are countless variables that affect total offense/defense without having anything to do with the team’s actual performance. Perhaps the biggest factor is the game situations that the team typically finds itself in.
The Jets were a bad team. There were plenty of games where the opponent took their foot off the gas pedal and focused on milking clock instead of putting up more points, making the Jets look good in total defense even though the defense already blew the game.
The Vikings and Lions were elite teams who each had their share of blowout wins. Their opponents were given many opportunities to rack up garbage time yardage that made them look bad in “total defense,” even though it had little to no effect on the outcome of the game.
Total yardage also ignores the whole goal of the game: scoring points. Yards are important because they put you in a position to score points, but if they are not actually being converted to points, they hardly matter. Minnesota (4th) and Detroit (8th) were both in the top eight when it came to preventing points on a per-drive basis, while New York was 21st.
Takeaways, third down, fourth down, red zone – all of these vital aspects of the game are ignored by total offense/defense. These are the areas that can help a team’s offense or defense make a more significant impact on winning without performing better in the total yardage column.
Metrics like DVOA (via FTN Fantasy) and EPA (via RBSDM) account for all of these factors to provide a substantially more accurate evaluation than total offense/defense. They consider down-and-distance, field position, time, score, win probability, opponent quality (in DVOA’s case), and other factors to reveal a more accurate estimation of an offense or defense’s play-by-play efficiency in terms of impacting winning.
Total offense/defense is an arbitrary metric that tells you one thing: how many yards a team gains or allows. If you want to answer that simple question, it’s a great stat. If you want to know how effective a team is at offense or defense, choose a more all-encompassing metric that evaluates all of the factors involved in a team’s true performance. DVOA, EPA per play, and points per drive are some of the best options.
The same logic applies when isolating total passing yards or total rushing yards.
Here are some passing yards per game ranks from the 2024 season:
- Dallas Cowboys: 11th
- Las Vegas Raiders: 13th
- Washington Commanders: 17th
- Cleveland Browns: 22nd
- Philadelphia Eagles: 29th
Compare those ranks to more accurate passing-offense metrics:
- Dallas Cowboys: 29th in EPA/play, 23rd in DVOA
- Las Vegas Raiders: 28th in EPA/play, 30th in DVOA
- Washington Commanders: 4th in EPA/play, 9th in DVOA
- Cleveland Browns: 32nd in EPA/play, 32nd in DVOA
- Philadelphia Eagles: 8th in EPA/play, 14th in DVOA
Bad teams tend to rack up passing yards because they spend ample time trailing, leading to a massive spike in second-half pass attempts. The opposite is true for good teams.
This is what leads to those ridiculous stats that say something like, “This team is 10-0 when they run the ball 30+ times.” Well… that’s because they start racking up rush attempts to milk the clock after they already sealed the game.
Another crucial factor is the team’s intended pass-run split based on scheme/play-calling. Teams like Washington and Philadelphia throw fewer passes since they are more of a run-heavy team, but that does not make them less dangerous when they choose to throw the ball.
To summarize this winding, rambling article filled over the brim with needless nerdiness: use efficiency-based metrics to evaluate players and teams, not volume-based metrics. Following this simple rule will eliminate most of the common flaws that I see from people attempting to use stats in NFL conversations.
