As Nick Saban recently stated, offense is what is predominantly winning games in college football. Furthermore, passing and points are at a premium. Converting on a down and distance (D&D) situation is intuitively a good thing for the offense, which is then good thing for the team’s chances of winning. I was curious about how converting D&D relates to winning. Since I already had the play by play data from the SEC 2020 season courtesy of https://www.collegefootballdata.com/ (with the exception of the Ole Miss Vanderbilt game), I decided to check it out.
Among the 67 regular season games analyzed, the winner of the game converted a D&D situation (either a first down or a touchdown) at a higher rate than their opponent 77.6% of the time. The winner, on average, converted D&D 9.7% more than their opponent. In the few games in which the team with the lower D&D won, this difference shrunk to 4.2%. So in instances when the team with the higher D&D lost, it was typically much closer, which makes sense.
A regression model for the data indicates a pretty strong relationship between winning and D&D conversion success. A statistically significant model (p < .001, r2 = 0.6281). Yea, it’s a small sample size, but still informative. A quick look at a scatterplot shows the linearity:
8 of 14 observations land within 2 standard errors of the regression line. Adding the team labels shows us who underperformed/overperformed as well:
The team that overperformed best was Texas A&M, while Ole Miss underperformed. There were only two games in which the loser of the game had a D&D conversion rate of more than 10% better than their opponent. Mississippi State vs Vanderbilt (MSU won 24-17, but Vanderbilt had a 34.1% D&D while MSU had only a 22.8%) and LSU vs Florida (LSU won, but UF had a D&D of 40.5% compared to 29.1% for LSU). So, going by this, LSU beating Florida was the SEC’s biggest upset in 2020.
| Team | avg D&D | win percentage | D&D Rank |
| Alabama | 0.424 | 1.00 | 1 |
| Florida | 0.390 | 0.80 | 2 |
| Ole Miss | 0.370 | 0.44 | 3 |
| Texas A&M | 0.350 | 0.89 | 4 |
| Georgia | 0.324 | 0.78 | 5 |
| Auburn | 0.317 | 0.60 | 6 |
| LSU | 0.315 | 0.50 | 7 |
| Missouri | 0.308 | 0.50 | 8 |
| Arkansas | 0.308 | 0.30 | 9 |
| Tennessee | 0.305 | 0.30 | 10 |
| South Carolina | 0.301 | 0.20 | 11 |
| Kentucky | 0.289 | 0.40 | 12 |
| Vanderbilt | 0.278 | 0.00 | 13 |
| Mississippi State | 0.275 | 0.30 | 14 |
I’ll probably play with this some more with additional years and conferences. I’d like to see how it plays out with larger sample sizes.
