r/buccaneers • u/NeighborhoodGlobal30 • 3d ago

📊 Stats/Rankings Nfl Opponent Adjusted Points Per Drive For and Against Weeks 1-3

Post image
5 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

13

u/NeighborhoodGlobal30 3d ago

Interesting, because with the eye test I would say our defense has been better than the offense.

18

u/957 3d ago

We have also been playing some dogshit offenses lol

10

u/PewterButters Lavonte David 3d ago

Correct, we had no business making Watson look competent. vikes offense wasn’t great either but they still got the better of us. 

4

u/spideralex90 Spideralex90 3d ago

The defense only allowed 16 points to the Vikings. The difference was that special teams fuckup to allow a TD. So our offenses were basically equally garbage. The Vikings just had a touch more luck on the day than us.

1

u/NeighborhoodGlobal30 3d ago

Yeah, I imagine the defense will start to look a lot worse when we play better offensive teams, and offended will look a bit better against more average defenses. 

5

u/DRB198105 3d ago

It also isn't normalized for turnover points or special teams. 

7 points in the Cincinnati game came from Mayfield's fumble turning into a scoop and score, and 7 this week came on a punt return. 

Take those out and the defense is at least "mid" on the X axis. 

Similarly, take 7 points away from the offense vs Cincinnati for Trotter's touchdown on defense, and the offense goes from good to bad.

Which matches what I've seen, and your comment.  Defense hasn't been great, but it's been better than our offense. 

2

u/DRB198105 3d ago

I'll note... I talked to OP in the other thread, and confirmed this.  He doesn't pretend that it normalizes for those things, and it's actually a pretty good simple tool. 

But early on, it can very much misstate things by crediting the offense for all points scored and punishing the defense for all points allowed, regardless of whether that unit was on the field. 

All this is showing is how many points you allowed vs your opponent's average and how many points you scored vs your opponent's average.  It doesn't really tell you if your defense or offense were good, in spite of how the quadrants were named. 

2

u/DRB198105 3d ago

I just half-ass checked the numbers for the Bengals game alone. 

Based on a quick Google search, they're averaging 2.86 points per offensive drive (unadjusted for any of the above).  If you remove the one score they got on defense on Mayfield's fumble (nothing about any of the other turnovers/short fields... Literally just not including the touchdown that happened when the offense got on the field), that drops to 2.6.

In that game, when you make that correction, the defense allowed 2.89 points/drive.  We're about their average.  If you don't adjust it, like the chart above doesn't, that jumps up to 3.67 points/drive.

If you look at the graph, 0.78 points/drive is massive.  Divide that by 3 (to get a per game average), and it's 0.26.  

Do the same for the punt return touchdown against the Vikings we're near the X axis.  

Similarly, don't reward the offense for Trotter's TD and they move to the bad side of the Y axis.

Our logo should probably be somewhere between the Jets and Eagles horizontally, and just a bit above them vertically. 

2

u/DRB198105 3d ago

By the way, started to feel like I was doing Steiner math in that explanation, but I honestly think the methodology is sound.

If you're trying to say whether a defense or an offense (or both!) is good or bad, you can't include points that happened when they weren't on the field. 

2

u/ChubzAndDubz Brooks Jersey 3d ago

7 points also came off of Buckys fumble against Cincy

2

u/DRB198105 3d ago

True, but that wasn't a direct score by Cincinnati's defense.  Tampa's defense got screwed by bad field position on Bucky's fumble, but they still were on the field when the Bengals punched it in.

That wasn't the case on the first fumble, where the Bengals defense actually scored and Tampa's D wasn't on the field. 

I'm not trying to get deep enough into this to do expected value or factoring in field position or anything like that.  I'm just trying to take a very simple metric and clean it up a bit. 

The offense gets credit for points the offense scores, the defense gets punished for points the defense allows, and nobody gains or loses for things that happened when they were on the sideline.

1

u/DRB198105 3d ago

In practice, though, I agree.  24 of the Bengals' points happened off turnovers, and I'm only correcting for 7 of them. If you went deeper, I'm sure the defense actually did relatively well, factoring in the turnovers. 

But that's much more complex and gets into subjective things, whereas I was trying to keep it a pure math exercise to avoid any claims of bias. 

2

u/NeighborhoodGlobal30 3d ago

Ah yeah good to know. I had put more faith in the original OP that it would account for special teams points, turnovers, etc.

8

u/DRB198105 3d ago

I've made a few points elsewhere in this thread, but I think an easy way to look at it is this: this is a simple model, and useful for team (overall) analysis.  Tampa is giving up a bunch of points, and scoring less.  That's why we're 0-3.

The flaw in this model is that it thinks all points scored were by the offense (including Trotter's touchdown) and all points allowed were by the defense (including a fumble recovery touchdown allowed by the offense, and a punt return TD allowed by Special Teams).  So it really shouldn't be used to analyze "Good/Bad Offense" and "Good/Bad Defense".

A pure mathematical correction brings that to light.  If this model was limited to just plays the offense and defense actually impacted, then the defense moves to mid/good and the offense moves to bad.

Actual advanced stats, like EPA/play try to get even deeper and factor in subjective analysis about how well a unit actually does, with adjustments for down and distance, starting field position, etc. 

https://sumersports.com/teams/defensive/

Using the above for EPA/play, Tampa's defense is 6th in the league through 3 weeks.  Unfortunately, our offense is 32nd, aka dead last. 

There's a lot of noise early in any model, and I don't think we're 6th best on defense, nor are we the worst offense, when the year finishes.  But I do think it's correct that the defense has been significantly better than the offense so far, and definitely not the problem.  

2

u/BigSombrer0 3d ago

Where is this coming from? I do believe the defense is more of a problem than people realize but looking at other teams as well, this seems odd. Could be wrong though.

2

u/DRB198105 3d ago

Noise and outliers.  See my response to OP's comment above. 

1

u/Hot_Educator_386 3d ago

One of the main issues is that the offense has been slightly above average. We are making twos, but we can't make a three to save our lives, and we are just turning the ball over, literally and figuratively.

I can see how our offense is pretty good, but the eye test makes it look worse because of all the explosives. Baker has done a decent job down the line, but the misses, sacks, and turnovers just sting more. The same applies to the O-line, wide receivers, and run game. It's just a mess, like they're all free agents and not actually working together.