*Field Goals Above Average

[Beaver]

So in the course of my work as member of the very prestigious NSFL Historian Committee I've had the opportunity to caress very intimately some league data and after a quick search it doesn't look like this has been written about so I'll post something I found interesting here for a quick buck.

As we all know, all field goals are not created equal so raw Field Goal Percentage is shit. Two players could have 23/27 seasons but depending on the distances of those kicks, their performances should be viewed differently. To that end, I found the all-time league field goal rates for the different distance brackets (0-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, and 50+). Ideally we'd break it down by yard but I'm lazy so hard pass.

The expected field goal percentage for each bracket is:
0-19: 100% (53/53)
20-29: 95.22% (239/251)
30-39: 84.91% (270/318)
40-49: 78.79% (260/330)
50+: 63.38% (45/71)

I applied those numbers to each kicker-season's attempts to get an expected field goal spread - that is, what a historically league average kicker would do - and subtracting that from the number of field goals the kicker actually made. I feel like that was a terribly worded sentence so here's an example:
S4 Bojo Kicksit:
0-19: (2/2)
20-29: (4/4)
30-39: (11/12)
40-49: (9/10)
50+: (3/3)
Total: (29/31)

That ends up being a very respectable 93.5%, good for 8th best season in NSFL history (S1-5). But because he was so good/lucky at long range it's the 2nd best season by what I'm provisionally calling Field Goals Above Average (since it's FGM-xFGM just going with a simple dFG might be better, I use dFG and FGAA interchangeably throughout this post in order to sow maximum confusion).

He was expected to make:
both of his <20 yard kicks and did for 0 FGAA,
3.81 of his 4 20-29 yard kicks and made 4 for 0.19 FGAA,
10.19 of his 12 30-39 yard kicks and made 11 for 0.81 FGAA,
7.88 of his 10 40-49 yard kicks and made 9 for 1.12 FGAA, and
1.90 of his 3 50+ yard kicks and made all 3 for 1.10 FGAA.

Summed up that's 3.22 FGAA, 2nd highest in league history.

Now there are clear sample size issues here since most kickers only attempt 25 or so field goals in any given season so I'm not presenting this as the new gold standard, be-all-end-all kicker statistic but I do think it's an improvement over raw FG%.

Here are the career numbers:


Stephen Harris of Philadelphia leads the way in career FGAA with Turk Turkleton of Baltimore not far behind.

We can also break down players by FGAA in a given bracket (though noted here as dFG):


Nobody has missed a field goal from the 1 or 2 yard line yet so there's no FGAA to be added there but after that we can see that Turkleton's value comes on 30-39 yard field goals while he's below average from 40-49 while Harris is exactly the opposite. Since they're both well above average from 50+ I'd guess that most of this is statistical noise but hey that's the way things go. Remember that even the career numbers are extremely fluid with this few events. The major difference in their numbers come from 20-29 yards where Harris is 29/29 while Turkleton is 34/35 and if Harris were to miss his next 29 yard field goal he would drop below Turkleton in career FGAA.

Here are the numbers to this point in S6 which is an even smaller sample size than normal (ex: Turkleton missing a 65 (!!) yard field goal Week 5 against San Jose cost him about 0.63 FGAA compared to if he didn't attempt that kick at all - which isn't exactly fair but it is what it is) so take these with mild hypertension:


[div align=\\\"center\\\"]Stop here if you're looking for the tl;dr[/div]

Long story short, this is a somewhat interesting and probably not very useful or reliable statistic but I'm super excited to see who will be the first kicker to miss a <20 yard field goal in NSFL history. If you have any ideas on how to improve this I'm all ears.




PS: if there are any statistics easily found through simple manipulation of stats available in the index like FGAA/dFG that you would like to see, let me know and I'll add them to our file and once we noble Historians finish our project you'll be able to browse them as you would any other statistic (hopefully). So far I have:

1. Field Goals Above Average: FGM - xFGM

2. Adjusted Yards per Attempt: (Pass Yds + (20*TD) - (45*INT))/Att
(*note: no NY/A or ANY/A because it's effort to find sack yardage, I recall some talk of a similar statistic that's something along the lines of (Pass Yds + Rush Yds + (20*TD) - (45*INT) - (c*Fumbles))/(Att+Rush)) which would be easy to add, I can't find the formula after a quick google though so hit me up)

3. Total Blocks: Punt Blocks + XP Blocks + FG Blocks
(*note: shoutout to Z. SBot of the Las Vegas Legion for having the only Extra Point block in NSFL history in Week 9 of Season 2 against Yellowknife and 0s in every single other statistic in his career. Talk about a specialist.)

[White Cornerback]

A+, great work!

[Rabidsponge21]

So does that make me the worst Kicker in NSFL history then? @Beaver

[ckroyal92]

So does that make me the worst Kicker in NSFL history then? @Beaver

Not this season

[Beaver]

So does that make me the worst Kicker in NSFL history then? @Beaver

Worst from S1-5, best in Season 6. I haven't added the Season 6 stats to the career numbers so you're now 15th of 19!

Consider this the official beginning of the Blewitt for Breakout Player of the Year campaign.

(though, like I said, there are many flaws with this measure)

[HENDRIX]

One interesting thing with Kicker builds in the sim: having a higher power (example a 100 pwr vs 90 pwr) doesn't mean they'll have more attempts. Over a large sample they will average the same amount of attempts per season.

[timeconsumer]

IDK what I just read but I'm going to assume you're insulting my boy Madlad and I'll have you know he is the damn goat.

[nunccoepi]

Nice work! What is dFG though? is that just regular FG%, maybe I missed it in there.

I wonder how home field advantage affects the kickers. Are you able to determine if a player has better FG% or FGAA at home vs away?

Also, I nominate we retroactively award Z. SBot as an honorary Defensive Player of the week for that week for his efforts and historical accomplishment.

[Beaver]

IDK what I just read but I'm going to assume you're insulting my boy Madlad and I'll have you know he is the damn goat.

This was my precise intent but I was hoping I masked it with enough subtley, subterfuge, and other words that start with subt- to get away with it. Subterranean.

Nice work! What is dFG though? is that just regular FG%, maybe I missed it in there.

I wonder how home field advantage affects the kickers. Are you able to determine if a player has better FG% or FGAA at home vs away?

Also, I nominate we retroactively award  Z. SBot  as an honorary Defensive Player of the week for that week for his efforts and historical accomplishment.

dFG is FGAA. Partway through I decided "dFG" was a better term for the stat than "FGAA" and started using them interchangeably in order to cause confusion like this.

Eventually we hope to load game-by-game stat lines and when/if we do then we can see interesting stuff like that but as it stands now our dataset doesn't include home/away splits.