Its the high school lame answer. Winning takes heart. I dont think you can find stats that can justify winning. Like they say “any given Sunday” because every part of the team has to work to produce a win.

get yerself a BIG yardstick to measure this stat.

I have a methodology question: Assuming you are looking to predict wins and see what has the highest correlation to winning, will you use both teams’ stats for each game, or the differential? And if you use the differential, will it be Team A’s run success rate against team B’s DEFENSIVE run success rate? (because Addai rarely plays against Maroney—usually because Maroney’s hurt! Waah, I kill me) The idiot TV announcer path would be “Team A has the #3 offense and Team B has the #6 offense, so Team A will win.” Uhhhhh, yeah, sure thing….. but they don’t exactly play against each other like that.

Because so much of this is contextual—The Colts might have the best passing O and 10th best rushing O but be facing a team with the best pass D and 10th best pass D. Depending on how good those actual numbers are (rankings don’t give you actual measures of strength/weakness, just relative positions), it might all come down to the other side of the ball—when the other guys have it. Or special teams.

FO has done some good work on this, but it’s always fun to break out the tools, build something new, and find out if it’s any good. I actually think the old Aikman ratings (has he done this recently? I haven’t seen it in a few years) were pretty good and VERY easily understood—miles better than just yardage or points stats, and only slightly more complicated. It was something like 5 categories for O and D—3rd down conversions, red zone success, scoring, passing YPA, and passing % completions.

Colts kick Pythagoras in the crotch annually—they exceed FO’s win projections by around 2-2.5 wins each year. As our favorite retired coach used to say, “One time is a mistake. Two might be a coincidence, and more is a trend.”

Not that the loss to SD still chafes me, but turnovers is normally a pretty good indicator. Historically the Colts have always had a pretty mediocre return game and I always felt had to drive longer for scores. I’d like to see that metric fit in somehow.

No. of times in redzone, how many touchdowns to field goals to 0 points.

I suggest this, because I heard all season that we had one of the best red zone offenses, but it sure didn’t feel like it in January…course we didn’t get in the red zone very often, either.

Massive amounts.

But to a certain degree of seriousness, I don’t believe there’s any ONE significant factor. I believe they’re are contributing factors, with some being weighted higher than others. It’s the same as in war. There are certain situations where it benefits one side or the other, but no one move or stat can completely determine the outcome in and of itself.

After compiling my useless stats and walls of texts, there’s been a couple glaring factors that stand out. Of course some have been mentioned. 3 and outs are very important as they not only keep your offense off the field, but minimize downtime for the defense to recover. A defense is much more likely to get tired than an offense. Time of possession is helpful in seeing this, but doesn’t show the entire story. For example, if the time of possession is 36 minutes to 24 minutes in a game, however, the team with 24 minutes had 5 three and outs, especially if they’re back to back, that means that the defense is on the field for potentially almost an entire quarter. Even if the numbers are much closer, say 31 to 29, but the team with 29 minutes had a significant amount of 3 and outs and one 10-11 minute drive, and the other team had multiple 5-7 minute drives, the defense would still suffer from the constant activity.

The other factor that hasn’t been addressed I wrote a wall of text about. And that is QB fumbles. Since it’s never equated, and people mainly look at QB rating (which is an arbitrary number someone made up but the league adopted as THE number), some people are scratching their heads why some QBs with extremely high QB ratings have such low winning %. The best case was when Warner had an 85 QB rating after throwing 3 INTs, but they still got blown out 56 to 35. How could that be the case since the turnover margin between INTs was only -2? Well, Warner had 4 fumbles and he lost 3 of them. So a QB that throws 2 TDs and has 6 turnovers allows you to go “Ah, that makes sense.”, especially when it’s a habit. I already did a wall of text on that so I won’t go into it anymore.

But one intangible is motivation. Teams can gain massive amounts of confidence and play much higher than their talent level suggests (Titans) or much lower (Detroit, not saying they’re good, but they should’ve been good enough to win 1 game, I mean Miami beat the Patriots in one of their bad years. Look at Green Bay, they start off hot then have a bad streak and went on a huge skid. I understand there were injury factors etc.. but it doesn’t complete equate to going 5-11. I actually believe this is one of the most significant factors, and one that can’t be evaluated based on stats. I mean, I do have some ways I think you could analyze it (3 game win streaks and how the equate to the end of the season, players staying healthy etc.), but stats don’t take into effect human emotion. Did losing Plax definitely take away from the Giants? Yes. Did the negative coverage and stress to perform without him and having questions about other players on the team cause them to question their ability to win and lessen their motivation? I believe so, but there’s not a stat for that. T.O. while consistently great, caused rifts and altered emotions in the locker room causing strife and breakdown.

How many players are under contract years, thus forcing them to motivate themselves so they get paid (Haynesworth, possibly Boldin especially since he came back to a team he didn’t much care for after having his jaw removed) is a self motivating factor that is an individual factor contributing to a team sport.

And how bad are the teams opponents? I believe the NFC South and AFC East definitely benefited from scheduling. The NFC South pulled the AFC West, NFC west, each other and 2 tie breaker teams. The AFC East pulled, yep that’s right, the AFC West and NFC West and 2 tie breaker teams. Both the western divisions were by FAR the worst divisions this year. Say what you will about the Cards, but if they had played the Eagles coming of the momentum and motivation from beating the Cowboys, I believe it would have been a much different playoff picture. The Cards pulled both NFC South teams, who as I said I don’t believe were what their record showed, and gained the momentum against a team that had injury problems. So both the AFC East and NFC South pretty much completely split their games (except Carolina) and had the opportunity to beat up on poor teams. If you took the Jaguars (easily the worst team in the AFC South) and swap them with either a team in those divisions, they’d probably be 10-6 with the media saying “Good season, just missed the playoffs.” Playoff teams get schedule against other playoff teams the next year for good storylines and pull low draft picks. So you have teams that don’t replenish their talent pool to the degree poor teams can and force them to play the best teams. If they’re constantly making the playoffs, they do this year after year (Colts, Pats Steelers etc.) and the other teams continue to get stronger while the other teams try to find diamonds in the rough. You do this over the course of multiple years and there’s definitely degree of “centering” (trying to lessen the power of strong teams and bring up the level of poor teams). It makes for much more interesting football and allows the “underdog” story to carry some weight. Granted, if the teams don’t know how to manage their teams, great players rot away on poor teams. Barry Sanders, Boldin until this year, probably Calvin Johnson, and QBs that could have potentially been awesome are put in situations that are setup for failure. Some mid-low-undrafted QBs benefit from getting on great teams that just need a filler and have well designed systems and supporting casts (Brady, Roethlisberger etc..) and are overrated. Peyton did his thing on a team that was 1-15 and craptastic for a few years until the past 5 or so. And even though he put up the numbers that makes people go “WTF, why didn’t you win more?! You must not be clutch!”, it doesn’t mean that these other QBs are any better or that the Colts would win simply because of Manning’s insane stats.

So in summation; there are definite stats and things that can bring to light aspects and contribute to a teams success, but there’s no quantitative formula or definitive stat that you can specifically look at and go “There, that’s it, that’s the one.” There’s just too many factors with 22 players on the field at any given time, subjective officiating, 53 man rosters, people getting injured, motivational factors (be it individual or team) and handling your players with respect. You don’t respect your players, you’re not winning games (Jets and T. Jones, Mangini thinking that the answer was Favre and telling T. Jones to shut up; Del Rio and verbally bitch slapping the captain of his defense because he wanted to look like the MAN). And the opposite is true too. Don’t respect your coach, you’re not winning either (Wade Phillips, Dan Snyder to any coach but Gibbs).

So there you have it. My wall of text that leads to the ultimate conclusion of “Nobody knows for sure so just get some hookers and blow.”