[CTcard]

Isn't what you're trying to do basically a poor man's FEI? Why not just use FEI?

Well, BC should answer for his own reasons, but here are why I like the write up he does.

While FEI is basically margin of victory divided by number of possessions in a game, the issues beyond "basically" are not described in mathematical detail as far as I know. Those details matter. I know exactly what the per drive stats are to the level that I can reproduce them on my own. Not so with FEI.

Next, if a team scores 3.5 points per drive, I have a very good intuitive feel for what that means (a TD every second drive). If a team has an offensive FEI of 0.877 I don't have much of a feel for what that means.

Third, there is a lot of information in the per drive stats. Points per drive, yards per drive, starting field position per drive, etc. All of these can tell us something about how a team has played in addition to how well a team has played. That's a lot more information than simply having an OFEI of 0.877.

For those interested who haven't seen it, here is the most detailed explanation I know of on the web for FEI:
http://www.footballoutsiders.com/fei-rat...ency-index
There's a few other useful pages kicking around the FootballOutsiders site.

[CTcard]

Isn't what you're trying to do basically a poor man's FEI? Why not just use FEI?

Well, BC should answer for his own reasons, but here are why I like the write up he does.

While FEI is basically margin of victory divided by number of possessions in a game, the issues beyond "basically" are not described in mathematical detail as far as I know. Those details matter. I know exactly what the per drive stats are to the level that I can reproduce them on my own. Not so with FEI.

Next, if a team scores 3.5 points per drive, I have a very good intuitive feel for what that means (a TD every second drive). If a team has an offensive FEI of 0.877 I don't have much of a feel for what that means.

Third, there is a lot of information in the per drive stats. Points per drive, yards per drive, starting field position per drive, etc. All of these can tell us something about how a team has played in addition to how well a team has played. That's a lot more information than simply having an OFEI of 0.877.

For those interested who haven't seen it, here is the most detailed explanation I know of on the web for FEI:
http://www.footballoutsiders.com/fei-rat...ency-index
There's a few other useful pages kicking around the FootballOutsiders site.