NCAAF Team Stats

NCAA Football is a completely different beast than the National Football League simply due to the emphasis on imbalanced schedules and college football being built on the coaching while top talent runs the NFL. Today, we are going to be diving into some critical stats to determine a solid program and one of the lesser teams in all of college football. Most of the stats are similar to what the NFL focuses on so let’s get into it!

Offensively, one of the biggest numbers to focus on is the third-down percentage. It is a tell-tale sign of if a drive will continue or if they will be forced to give the ball away from their opponent. Third-down conversions typically are a killer for an opposing defense as they feel like it can be a momentum swing and get the opposing offense on the field. To calculate this is extremely simple as you take the number of times you get a first down on a third-down play and divide that by the total number of third downs the offense takes on. 

On the defensive side of things, an opponent’s scoring percentage is the most important number to tell if a defense is dominating. To calculate this number, you take the number of drives that defense gives up points and divide that by the total amount of drives. The higher the percentage, the worse a defense is going to be. You can even dissect this further and do it with touchdown percentage where instead of accounting for field goals, this only tells when the defense gives up six points. 

Special teams is simply put either field goal percentage as kicking is a difficult thing and is simply the number of field goals made divided by the number of field goals attempted. However, with special teams, I love to look at touchback percentage. This is on kickoffs as things can break down relatively quickly and if you have a kicker that can kick it out of the end zone at a high rate, the opponents cannot return a kick for extra yards or even a touchdown and it forces them to march down the field to score.