Passing efficiently, not necessarily a lot, is conducive to winning.

 

I think we're starting to learn that bulk yardage is not important anymore or at least less important than it ever was.

Look at the Vikes with AP and the Lions with CJ this year....they had lots of yards and both teams missed the playoffs. Hell, we put up a good amount of yards too.

I think that like Stringer said, its how efficient you are that tells the story.

 

Rafeal can give you a pretty good run down of how passing efficiently transcends into wins and SB's. Although I do not 100 percent agree with it, he has a good bit of info on the subject.

 

Yep my bad. One and done.

 

You can save money by switching to Geico?

 

There's more than one way to skin a cat, but in whatever way you're skinning it, you'd better be passing the ball efficiently.

 

Well, current passer rating has around a 75% chance of predicting the winning team (highest rating wins). I'd say passing does help.

 

The average net YPA in the league this year was 6.2. Only one team below that average made the playoffs (Minnesota, at 5.3), and it was arguably the worst team to do so. It compensated by having the #2 overall running game (Adrian Peterson's near-record year).

The Dolphins were below average, at 5.9.

 

This. Conversely when a team gets down first thing they usually do is air it out.Does the author take styles and Gameplan into consideration?

 

balance for me..
He was right , and the NFL did evolve to what he projected, but no disrespect to Rafs, he's one of the best talent evaluators on the board, it's also evolved into something else as well, I do think a serious power running game with an athletic Qb making plays, a good defense can get you there as well..see Jim Harbaugh philosophy on football...9 10 blockers, sweep right, crush opponent..

I'm ready to invest into a back that can get that job done.cough cough Eddie Lacy.

 

And you can sure do that, but when you do pass, and you will, in order to win, it better be efficiently.

 

IMO the goal should still be about a 50/50 split between passing/running. But statistically if you're not getting at least 7.0 YPA on your passes then your odds of winning go way down. You can have also win with a lower YPA if your pass defense is so good that your opponent's YPA is lower than yours. The general conclusions I've drawn from watching over the years is that you win about 70% - 75% of the time if you're better than your opponent in YPA and in the turnover battle. On average over the balance of a season, you probably need to be above 7.0 YPA and have a positive TO ratio. Going back to winning the YPA battle and the TO battle, I think that's why having a great QB is so successful. If you have the better QB then you're going to win the YPA battle and the TO battle a large percentage of the time. That doesn't mean that the run doesn't matter. As I said, I prefer balance, but I want that balance b/c it makes the QB's job and the defense's job easier. But the running game is clearly a smaller factor when if comes to winning. If your QB is good enough then you can win consistently even if the rest of your team is substandard. It's pretty rare that you can get it to work any other way. Your running game and/or defense would have to be exceptional to overcome a substandard pass offense. It's happened, but it's rare. You pretty much have to have an all-time great defense or run game to pull it off. I can't recall the specifics of the stat, but I think it was something like since 1958 there has never been an NFL champion that wasn't better than their opponent in YPA over the course of the season. Even the oft cited 2000 Ravens had a better YPA than their opponents. IMO that is a minimum requirement to giving your team a chance to win it all.

And as has been mentioned above, total pass yards is meaningless. It's all about efficiency. It doesn't matter if you're like the '72 Dolphins or the '99 Rams. One passed a little and one passed a ton. But they were both very efficient passing teams. So the stats posted by Gosselin are not surprising. They're focused on total yards and over the years that has never been shown to be correlated to winning. Like the two examples above, some teams pass a lot and win while some teams a pass a little and win. And conversely some teams pass a lot and lose. The volume is pretty irrelevant and more about what style you prefer.

 

Yep, I've pointed this out many times, GENERALLY passing the regular season leads to winning, passing in the playoffs wins 75% of the time..there is USUALLY 1 in 4 teams in the championship games who run the ball.

Air Coryell won lots of games, the WCO won lots of games, what then happens is early adopters break that trend, do so successfully, and have lots of success in winning games.

People tend to forget when the WCO was big, the One Back offense was winning SB's as well.

There are no sure things in the NFL, I think we are at a point though were the Dolphins just have to win games..period.

 

And then you have qbs like Luck, RG, Kap, Wilson who can do it all..

I'd like to stay with a balanced attack with power spread running principles..strong defense.

 

But even those teams almost always pass the ball efficiently when they do pass. They don't run the ball well, pass inefficiently, and reach that level.

BTW, this thread is a great example IMO of how a simple curiosity can be addressed definitively and with certainty and objectivity by simple research and statistics. Given the fact that there is little emotional investment in the topic at this point, that sort of statistical analysis is more easily "digested." When there is more emotion involved, we tend to get "heartburn" if not outright nausea when the statistics don't confirm what we believe we already know.

 

I don't have the stats in front of me, however, would bet the 49ers scored Td's running the ball.

And that is the gold coin of the realm, not yds or QBR or YPA, Td's matter, Gosslein has a faulty assumption

 

I think the way you win with that approach, then, is by also having 1) a strong pass-catching tight end who can draw mismatches in the passing game, 2) a sure-handed possession receiver who is a good route runner and can get open in the sort to intermediate ranges and move the chains when they need to be, and 3) a downfield threat, whom you can hit occasionally and fairly reliably, who can keep defenses from stacking the box against your running game and make them pay with game-changing plays when they do.

This is the Pittsburgh Steelers formula that has been winning fairly consistently for eons.

 

League average was 12.5 rushing TDs on the season, and SF was 6th in the league with 17.

League leader believe it or not was the Pats with 25. Redskins second with 22. We were 11th with 15 and above average.

 

Like Torrey smith..Anquan Boldin..Dennis pitta and Ray Rice?

Or Greg Jennings, Robert Woods, Tyler Eifert and Eddie Lacy.?

 

Championship Games Shou, the regular season is a different beast that stat nerds look at as a whole, when in fact there are complete mismatches that add little stats wise to anything that happens in the playoffs.

Why stats are not given context is beyond me:

-Td's vs' the Top 1/3/Middle 1/3rd and bottom 1/3rd for example
-Passer rating vs the same

Etc etc, the way the NFL does things now is a Td is a Td, that is not predictive or really very informative.

 

I recall seeing a correlation study a while back on TDs and they did not correlate as highly as YPA. IIRC rushing TDs had a .41 correlation and passing TDs were about .55.

 

Or Julio Jones, Roddy White, Tony Gonzalez, and Michael Turner.

There is so much parity in physical talent when you reach this point in the season that I think the outcome of these games is driven primarily by emotion and random events.

That said, I don't think your back needs to be of the "bruiser" type, however. Personally I'd rather use your approach but have a Chris Johnson/Adrian Peterson type who can take it the distance on any play.

 

Was thinking of the championship game Rafi not the mass of meaninglessness the regular season stats produce.

"Jacksonville vs Titans"

For example, it would be more productive to see how winning teams accomplished this rather than just bundling stats as if all are equal imo.

 

Here's what Joe Philbin said during his introductory press conference, BTW:

http://gnb.scout.com/2/1150895.html

QB rating differential is correlated with win percentage above 0.80 IIRC.

 

In the past I've looked at how teams were successful through the playoffs (not just the championship game) and the results were the same. You have to pass more efficiently than your opponent and win the TO battle. It's just more difficult when you have better opponents, but the results are the same. I did find that you could get away with just being a run/D team with a lesser passing game during the regular season, but once you faced the better opponents it came down to winning the YPA battle and the TO battle. The number of TDs produced were another cumulative stat that had a lesser correlation.

 

Adrian Peterson for sure, but Really good consistent downhill running with power and a certain nature can have some lingering affects that can help the overall impact of the game, favorable down and distances for the Qb, defense rests, overwhelming physicality, creeping safeties..Lets see how Lacy runs and catches at the combine, along with Ball and Step Taylor, I just think we're missing a big part of this equation, and these three give me comfort.

 

Exactly, and the opposite for the losing team who's throwing it a ton to get back in the game.

 

even if passing efficiency is a very telling stat, no one stat is good enough to determine who will win the game or whether the passing trend will continue. I wish people would stop trying to narrow it down to one stat because they are always wrong.

1) there are always multiple formulas for winning.
2) like it was mentioned, balance is the best option if you are passing it very efficiently when you do pass. which means you need a good QB. a team like Houston is always touted as a great balance team, but Schaub is extremely mediocre and it showed this year.
3) you have to factor in defense. San Fran and Baltimore are in the superbowl because they played good offense and defense. furthermore, the New England stat of losing is a little misleading. once they lost Talib, their defense took a huge blow and allowed Baltimore to easily come back and win.

 

It is quite possible that there is one element of the game that must be present to win at a high level.

The research shows that there is no such element of the game more associated with winning than passing efficiency (turnover differential notwithstanding). What that means is that, yes, there may be more than one overall formula for winning, but passing efficiency had better be an ingredient in that formula.

Think about it like making pizza. You can get pizzas that have cheese or don't have cheese, that have marinara sauce or have white sauce, that have pepperoni or a whole host of other options for toppings. But if you don't have dough, you don't have pizza.

 

To add, doing anything efficiently is conducive to winning.

 

True, but it may not be as conducive to winning.

Running the ball efficiently, for example (i.e., having a higher number of yards per carry), is associated with winning but not anywhere near as strongly as passing the ball efficiently.

In fact, two of the strongest predictors at halftime of the winning team in NFL games are YPA differential and a greater number of rushes, not necessarily greater rushing efficiency (YPC).

 

I'm going to question your thoughts on that one. You are basically advocating putting gas in the engine without anything being done with it.

 

More than that. Teams with a lead tend to run to burn out the clock, it doesn't mean more rushes is conducive to winning where as its a result of winning.