Finding the Winning Factors - RB Success Rate

This week in the Finding the Winning Factors series, let's take a look at another non-conventional stat:  RB Success Rate.  This stat was created by Football Outsiders, and it attempts to judge how well a running play works.  Here's how they explain it:

In general, a play counts as a "hit" if it gains 40% of yards on first down, 60% of yards on second down, and 100% of yards on third down.

If the team is behind by more than a touchdown in the fourth quarter, the benchmarks switch to 50%/65%/100%.

If the team is ahead by any amount in the fourth quarter, the benchmarks switch to 30%/50%/100%.

Since this involves searching through the play-by-play data, I can only go back to 2001 to see how teams do.  That means I'll be looking at 4,080 games over the past 8 years.  I did this calculation for every game, then found the overall average for a game.  I then went back and compared every game to this average, and found wins/losses based on being above or below average.  A couple things I should explain on how I calculated this, since I'm looking at the team as a whole, not individually:

• I used the percentages above for each play.  No need to change that.
• When a QB rushes the ball, I included that in the stats.  When the QB scrambles (which NFL.com usually indicates), I did not include it.  I wanted to focus on running plays, not every play there is a run.  I have to trust the Play By Play data in this respect.
• I did not include any kneel down play.  This is self explanatory.
• I included how teams did on 4th down as well.  I used 100% for that, just like for 3rd down.  In the numbers, I combined 3rd and 4th down stats, as they both are trying for the same outcome.

There has been much discussion here about the relative importance of the run game vs. the Pass game, and I stated in this article how I was slowly turning to Pass > Run, thanks to Adjusted Net Passing Yards / Attempt having such a high Win Percentage.  Let's see if the running game can live up to those lofty standards:

• The Overall Average for the past 8 seasons is 45.4%.  I could have won many bets with this stat, as it is much lower than I was expecting.  Not even half of all running plays are "successful".
• While it was really easy to predict the Colts would lead the league in the passing categories, could anyone have predicted the Colts led this category as well?  At 50.9%, they are one of only two teams that were actually over 50% (Chiefs).
• Defensively, the Colts rank 30th at 48.9%.  This is completely expected, and painfully obvious for anyone who has watched the Colts over the past decade.  The best defense? The Ravens at 39.9%.
• How often do teams win when they are Above Average on Offense?  1072-884-3, which is 54.8%.  That's not much above .500.  I'm not liking it so far.  Having an Above Average defense produces a record of 1155-965-1, which is 54.5%, pretty much the same as the offense.
• When both the Offense and Defense are Above Average, their record is 614-426-1, or 59.0%.  I'm not buying this as a stat that conclusively leads to victories.  Everything else has been higher than this.
• The best game since 2001?  Week 7 in 2002, where the Chiefs had a success rate of 87.1% (27/31) against the Broncos.  The 2nd best game was one we all thought the Colts should have won, Week 3 of 2008 against the Jaguars.  The Colts were successful 83.3% of the time (15/18).  The Colts have had 4 of the top 15 games since 2001.
• The worst game since 2001?  Week 2 in 2005, where the Ravens went 0 for 13 against the Titans.  The worst Colts game over this stretch was the 31-3 blowout of the Ravens from 2008 (6/30).  Didn't really need the running game, huh?
• I took a look at the numbers for just 4th quarter runs, to see if that told us anything different.  What did I find?  Being Above Average on both sides of the ball loses more games than it wins (467-560-1).  Talk about being counter-intuitive.  This is not to suggest teams should purposely not run the ball well in the 4th quarter.  That's obviously dumb.

So let's see:  Running the Ball and Stopping the run leads to wins 59% of the time, and Passing the Ball and Stopping the Pass leads to wins 89% of the time.  Again I say, the numbers don't lie.  I'm now firmly implanted on the "Pass is more important than the Run" side.

After the jump you'll see the offensive and defensive numbers for each team, as well as Win/Loss records when going above/below the league average.  Click on the headers to sort.  Here's a link to the last 5 years worth of data.  There's not much of a difference, especially since it only took out 3 years worth of data.

Here are the Offensive Numbers...

Here are the Defensive Numbers...

Here are the Win/Loss records of teams when they go above/below average:

And finally, Win/Loss records when the offense is above average, and the defense holds the other team below average (you'll have to click the link to see it, as I've hit my limit of characters).