Finding the Winning Factors - Yards per Drive

This week in the Finding the Winning Factors series, let's take a look at another semi-conventional stat:  Yards per Drive.  This was suggested by Nideak, so a special thanks goes out to him.  This is a very simple calculation, once you get the number of drives in a game:

To make it a little more accurate, I've removed all drives that only consist of kneel downs.  I hope nobody objects.

Since this involves searching through the play-by-play data (to find the number of drives), 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.

Here are some interesting (and exciting) findings:

• The Overall Average for the past 8 years is 28.4 Yards / Drive.  I really didn't have any idea about how this number would turn out, but this seems like a reasonable amount.  This also means, on average, that any drive starting from the Opponent's 40 should result in at least a FG attempt.
• Like every other category we've looked at, the Colts' Offense was #1 in the league, at 35.8 Yds/Drive.  What is most surprising is how dominant the Colts have been in the category when compared to every other team.  They are 4.1 Yds/Drive higher than the next best team (Patriots).  That is a bigger difference between the Patriots and the 19th best team (Cowboys).  Unbelievable.
• The Defensive numbers prove what we've all seen as well:  The Colts give up lots of Yards/Drive at 30.8, which is 29th in the league.  The Ravens, again, are the best defensively at 23.9 Yds/Drive.
• How often do teams win when they are Above Average on Offense?  1302-757-1, which is 63.2%.  Much better than we have been seeing lately.  Having an Above Average defense produces a record of 1282-735-3, which is 63.5%, pretty much the same as the offense.  It looks like this stat may be a keeper.
  
• When both the Offense and Defense are Above Average, their record is 706-160-1, or 81.5%.  The only thing higher was Adjusted Net Passing Yards per Attempt.  It's a keeper.
  
• The best game since 2001?  Week 16 this past season, where the Saints had 66.5 Yds/Drive against the Lions.  The Colts best game was Week 11 last year against the Texans, with 59.3 Yds/Drive.  They did own the game on Offense.
• The worst game since 2001?  Week 14 in 2004, where the Browns only had 1.9 Yds/Drive against the Bills.  Yes, you read that right.  26 yards in 14 drives.
• The Colts have the 2nd Fewest Drives in the NFL on both offense and defense since 2001, only behind the Texans.  Makes a lot of sense after seeing the average yardage for each unit.
• Only 1 team has not lost a game when both the Offense and Defense have been Above Average, the Lions!.  They are 8-0 in such games, which averages out to only 1 per year.  The Colts have 40 such games, ranking 2nd only behind the Steelers 45.
• The Bears are the worst Offensive team over the past 8 seasons, almost 2 full yards lower than #31, the Browns.  That's really bad.  Maybe that Cutler guy will help this stat out, especially after the season the Broncos had on offense last year.

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 and 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