I have been using the term often lately. I think I cribbed it from teejers as the one thing he was saying about the offense that rang true to me.
Many of the issues listed above seem to me to be reasons why a team is fragile, but not really a definition of fragile.
I have been using the word fragility to define an offense that has notably poor individual game performances compared to its average level of performance. As far as dictionary definitions go, that is probably closer to a version of "consistency". I guess fragility would imply one small bad thing happens and the offense collapses - which may or may not be consistent with the definition I used above.
As an example of what I was thinking about would be a team in the top 20 in offensive efficiency (Stanford #16 OFEI) that still puts out individual game performance in the bottom 40 of all games played (Stanford vs OSU 3rd worst by my count in OFEI).
For a quantitative measure, a couple of thoughts would be:
- Look at how far below a team's own average is their worst performance.
- Count number of performances worse than N*sigma below the average.
In either case I might want to look at the parameter versus teams grouped by overall performance. My instinct is that top 20 teams will usually have fewer or less bad individual performances, but on the other hand teams with a higher average have further to fall.
And I guess I would use FEI as a measure because it is the only thing easily available on a game by game basis that I know.
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On a season to season basis the idea is a little harder to define. Nominally you could still take an average over X years and look at season outliers from that. But teams, coaching staffs, everything change to quickly to get a reliable average to compare to.
Probably the best you could do here is simply standard deviation in offensive performance measured in whatever way you like.
Many of the issues listed above seem to me to be reasons why a team is fragile, but not really a definition of fragile.
I have been using the word fragility to define an offense that has notably poor individual game performances compared to its average level of performance. As far as dictionary definitions go, that is probably closer to a version of "consistency". I guess fragility would imply one small bad thing happens and the offense collapses - which may or may not be consistent with the definition I used above.
As an example of what I was thinking about would be a team in the top 20 in offensive efficiency (Stanford #16 OFEI) that still puts out individual game performance in the bottom 40 of all games played (Stanford vs OSU 3rd worst by my count in OFEI).
For a quantitative measure, a couple of thoughts would be:
- Look at how far below a team's own average is their worst performance.
- Count number of performances worse than N*sigma below the average.
In either case I might want to look at the parameter versus teams grouped by overall performance. My instinct is that top 20 teams will usually have fewer or less bad individual performances, but on the other hand teams with a higher average have further to fall.
And I guess I would use FEI as a measure because it is the only thing easily available on a game by game basis that I know.
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On a season to season basis the idea is a little harder to define. Nominally you could still take an average over X years and look at season outliers from that. But teams, coaching staffs, everything change to quickly to get a reliable average to compare to.
Probably the best you could do here is simply standard deviation in offensive performance measured in whatever way you like.