The First Law of Football Behavior

Following yesterday’s newsletter, I got some great feedback about how this law of Football Behavior seemed “obvious” and “common sense”. That’s great. Because it is the foundation of everything we do here at Football Behavior. But, then you may be surprised to know that almost no advanced analytics or traditional statistics account for time of possession when analyzing team performance.

The First Law of Football Behavior

Straight forward. The Offense cannot score points while it is sitting on the sideline. Every single behavior, for every living thing, occurs at a certain point in time, and lasts for a certain period of time.

In the science of behaviorism, we refer to the former as Temporal Locus, and to the latter as Temporal Extent. This is basic physics. AND, it is the number one argument for not relying on statistics that are merely just averages. Think things like Points Per Game (PPG).

Lets take a rather simple example:

• Team A scored 30 points in 40 minutes of possession time

• Team B scored 30 points in 20 minutes of possession time

Both teams scored 30 points per game. That stat alone would you have believe these offenses are of equal caliber.

But which offense was more impressive?

Team B scored the exact same amount of points as Team A, but in half the amount of time. Team B is the more potent offense.

Using Points Per Game, and stats like it as a comparison tool for all 32 teams in the NFL can lead to Explanatory Fictions, or something we observe and give a name to, but that doesn’t actually contribute to our understanding of what happened.

Explanatory Fictions are troublesome because they can lead to a false sense of understanding.

Time of Possession Has Control on Behavior

Remember, our behavior is mostly governed by our environment and how we must respond according to that, in order to survive, or be successful. Remember, the NFL is not a singular universe, operating in a uniform environment.

It’s a multi-verse of madness made up of 32 unique environments, who they themselves have two different environments inside of them, independent of every other team. So 64 unique environments. The only things they have in common is the ball, the field dimensions, and the rule book.

Time is so important because on game day, it’s the one thing both teams have toto contend with no matter what, at the same time. No one gets to be Dr. Strange with the time stone. Once the clock reads zero, that’s it.

Points per game measures how many points were score over the entirety of the game. A game though, is 60 minutes long and the offense isn’t on the field for 60 minutes. So points per game is assigning value to time where the offense has zero opportunity to behave, and zero control over when that opportunity will come.

So points per game, and other non-contextual statistics that rely on averages, miss a large amount of what actually matters to analyzing the performance behavior of the teams by assigning value to elapsed time where a offense has absolutely no ability to put up points.

By understanding time of possession and its role in the control of football behavior, we can actually give a more precise look as to how an offense is performing, and, how they’re most likely to perform in the future.

There is a reason football teams designate their pace of play packages as the “2 minute” and “4 minute” offense. It’s because time is finite, and they will need to play with pace. It isn’t the “2 down” or “4 down” offense.

When teams are constructing their rosters and performance environments, the pace they want to be able to play with is something they keep in mind. Scoring one point per minute isn’t helpful if your defense can’t get off the field and give you opportunities to score.

Conversely, if you’re a high risk, high reward offense with lots of turnovers, again, you’re limiting your own opportunities and need to play with pace by default, and even when you do, it may to be enough based on…the amount of time you end up possessing the ball.

Example

Take the Buffalo Bills in a 2023 game vs the Denver Broncos, a game we accurately predicted the Broncos would win, despite the Bills being heavily favored. They scored 22 points in 22m39s. That’s just about 1 point scored for every minute of possession time. That’s is typically the bench mark for an “elite” scoring rate.

However, they lost that game, to a team who scored at a rate of 0.65 points per minute of possession. The Broncos scored 24 points in 37m21s. Much lower rate, but a 15 minute advantage in opportunity. The Bills simply did not possess the ball enough to score enough points before time ran out. They had four turnovers in that game.

Understanding the relationship between scoring points and time of possession is crucial to understanding and predicting football behavior. Hitting that relationship perfectly is the type of balance teams want to achieve, and finding what works for your team leads to all types of different play calling, and roster building strategies.

Introducing Scoring Behavior Rate (SBx)

At Football Behavior, we call this relationship, scoring and time of possession, “Scoring Behavior rate (SBx)”. If we have already agreed that an offenses primary job is to score points, and they can only do the when in possession of the ball, quantifying that relationship seems like the only logical step.

SBx is the foundational measurement at Football Behavior for understanding the football behavior of the offense. How well are they really performing their number one priority?

We measure SBx, as mentioned, as points scored per minute of possession time. While it isn’t necessarily prudent to directly compare the 32 teams, this is a more precise measure to do so, and helps coaches and team executives better understand how beneficial or problematic their offense is, and what, if anything needs changing.

The reason we prefer to measure “rate” vs raw point totals is because behavior change is exponential, not linear. It increases and decreases through multiplication and division, not addition and subtraction.

So not only does SBx help us understand the efficiency of an offense in a given game, it also helps us measure their growth or regression over the course of the season when we chart it on a semi-logarithmic chart, which is designed to measure exponential changes.

And unlike traditional statistics and statistical modeling, when we look over the course of the season at SBx, we aren’t looking at the mean or median when looking to the future.

Instead we are looking at celeration trends and geometric means. So when you see the charts that we post, that is a standard celeration chart (SCC), which is a type of semi-logarithmic chart.

And the solid black lines on that chart showcase the SPEED or Celeration, of the change in their performance behavior trends over time, making this one of the many key features in our predictive modeling.

Lets hear From You

Does this make you reconsider the value of “Points Per Game” and other average-focused analytics and stats?

If so, tell us what was most persuasive.

If not, tell us why not. What is not adding up?