Professional football has returned to our collective lives. With the NFL kickoff game scheduled for Thursday night, it’s the first weekend of action for the 2023 season. The Dallas Cowboys find themselves in familiar territory, playing on Sunday Night Football, against a familiar foe in a familiar place. The Cowboys travel to NewYork to take on the Giants in what used to be an annual affair on opening night.
Who holds the advantage? Teams change from year to year, so in some aspects advanced statistics from 2022 won’t tell much. However they do provide a baseline for expectations which in Week 1 is all fans have to go off of. The Advanced Stats Notebook looks to gather stats and metrics that truly function as measures of team quality and then use an overview to determine which team should have the advantage.
For decades, teams have been ranked based on stats that don’t give a complete picture. One example, yardage. Yardage is so far away from being what’s important in the NFL, yet the conventional moniker “No. 1 offense in the league” has to do with yardage totals. If a team falls behind every game and throws it all over the place in the fourth quarter, they can be a top yardage squad without being a good squad.
What should fans be talking about instead? Glad you asked. Each week we analyze how each team ranks in EPA, DVOA, ANY/A and Toxic Differential. These four key metrics have a high correlation to win probability.