Indianapolis Colts By the Numbers: Week 1 Offensive Stats

For 2018, I am going to create a weekly dashboard of Team and Player stats, which will be an evolving process. As the season progresses, I hope to have more meaningful analysis to present, but for now I’ll just slap some tables up and give you the bullet points of what I see.

So here’s the week 1 offense.

TEAM TOTALS

I have ordered the table by points per drive as that is a much better indicator of how well a team played than just point totals, although they will obviously be highly correlated.

• IND ends up 17th in points but 11th by Pts/drv.
• Drive Success Rate (DSR) is the percentage of down series that results in a first down or touchdown: basically, how well does a team move the ball down the field. 72.7% is a good number and ranks 10th in week 1. If the Colts can maintain that for the season, we will all be very happy.
• The high DSR is explained by the ridiculously high 64.7% third down conversion rate, which was the best in the league.
• ADC is all down conversion rate, which is non-penalty first downs divided by scrimmage plays. The fact that 3DC was so high and ADC is just meh, means the Colts didn’t do a very good job on 1st and 2nd downs. 3DC better not fall.

PASSING

• This table is sorted by Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt (ANY/A) as that is one of the better passing stats and the IND offense is in the middle of the pack. 5.5 is pretty low for Luck.
• No one had more passing attempts than the Colts. That’s probably not a good thing.
• Luck’s completion rate was a 5th best 73.6% but that came at the cost of throwing a lot of short passes. His 6.0 YPA is 21st in the league and drives his low ANY/A.
• PDC is the passing down conversion, which is the number of non-penalty first downs on passing plays divided by attempts + sacks. It is an excellent stat and the Colts put up a mediocre 30.9%
• I included passing yards and passer rating which you are free to ignore.

RUSHING

This is sorted by EPA per carry because yards per carry sucks. A better metric would be weighted rush success rate but I don’t have that code working for the weekly data yet.

In the meantime there’s not much to say. Colt’s didn’t rush much and they didn’t rush well.

(edit: there was an error in the data for EPA/c, which has been fixed)

I’ll flesh this out more as the season goes on and provide better data based narratives instead of just throwing tables at you.

Do you have any suggestions of what you want to see? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see if I can incorporate it.