*The Hidden Numbers

[Modern_Duke]

Yards and points are correlated. If you gain a lot of yards you're going to gain a lot of points. But what does looking at offensive and defensive yardage not tell you, and specifically not tell you that results in differences in scoring? Off the top of my head:

1. Special Teams - Team A has a 60-yard drive that ends in a made field goal. Team B has a 60-yard drive that ends in a missed field goal. Same yardage, different points. Simple enough. But also: Team C fair catches a punt and has to go 80 yards to score, while Team D has a 30 yard punt return and has a short field to work with to score. All of those teams could have the exact same offense/defense and end up with very different point totals.

2. Penalties - Pretty straight forward, penalties lengthen the field for offenses and shorten it for defenses.

3. Sim luck - Shit happens

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So I wanted to look into this, for reasons that may be clear at the end. Here are the yardage differentials and point differentials for NSFL and DSFL teams in S20 and so far through S21 (they're in a weird order, idk why I did that)




And let's graph out those YDiff and PDiff columns:



So yeah, there's some correlation there. You can see the formula for the trendline at the top: a normal team will have a point differential about 0.134 times their yardage differential. So we can calculate a team's expected point differential pretty easily, and comparing to their actual point differential. So who strays the farthest from their expected numbers?

Who benefits from the hidden numbers?


Who is hurt by the hidden numbers?


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TLDR: The Sim Hates The Royals

[Isidore94]

Idk how but this must be HO's fault