Came across this fantastic article/resource over at footballoutsiders.com (it's a site that looks at the game of football through a scientific lens). E.g. They take conventional wisdom about the game, and perform various studies applying science/statistical analysis and publish journals sharing their results. Kind of like many popular baseball websites in recent years that have open dialogue about sabermetric topics.
Anyway, I think it's important that people see this list as it touches on a lot of topics brought up here. There are 25 total...I've taken 10 (edit: 9) of the most applicable, adding some of my own thoughts in parenthesis and listed them here. If you click over to the article they go into detail about each point and cite their sources/journals/books regarding their finddings.
1. You run when you win, not win when you run.
2. Standard team rankings based on total yardage are inherently flawed.
3. The total quality of a team is four parts offense, three parts defense, and one part special teams. (Meaning having a good offense is more conducive to winning than having a good defense ... and both of those are exponentially more important than having good special teams play)
4. Recovery of a fumble, despite being the product of hard work, is almost entirely random.
5. The red zone is the most important place on the field to play well, but performance in the red zone from year to year is much less consistent than overall performance. (Meaning that redzone performance isn't some special skill that some teams have and others don't)
6. Injuries regress to the mean on the seasonal level, and teams that avoid injuries in a given season tend to win more games.
7. By and large, a team built on depth is better than a team built on stars and scrubs. (Kelly has done a good job addressing this one ... earlier in his career he went all out for the 5 stars/top 100 players ... and then missed on a bunch of them and left the team shallow. He now takes way more 3 star players earlier in the recruiting cycle).
8. The strongest indicator of how a college football team will perform in the upcoming season is their performance in recent seasons. (Because a program's recruiting results are very consistent from year to year)
9. Championship teams are generally defined by their ability to dominate inferior opponents, not their ability to win close games. (this touches on a recent topic here about point differential and ND not being able to dominate inferior teams, etc.)
http://www.footballoutsiders.com/info/fo-basics
Anyway, I think it's important that people see this list as it touches on a lot of topics brought up here. There are 25 total...I've taken 10 (edit: 9) of the most applicable, adding some of my own thoughts in parenthesis and listed them here. If you click over to the article they go into detail about each point and cite their sources/journals/books regarding their finddings.
1. You run when you win, not win when you run.
2. Standard team rankings based on total yardage are inherently flawed.
3. The total quality of a team is four parts offense, three parts defense, and one part special teams. (Meaning having a good offense is more conducive to winning than having a good defense ... and both of those are exponentially more important than having good special teams play)
4. Recovery of a fumble, despite being the product of hard work, is almost entirely random.
5. The red zone is the most important place on the field to play well, but performance in the red zone from year to year is much less consistent than overall performance. (Meaning that redzone performance isn't some special skill that some teams have and others don't)
6. Injuries regress to the mean on the seasonal level, and teams that avoid injuries in a given season tend to win more games.
7. By and large, a team built on depth is better than a team built on stars and scrubs. (Kelly has done a good job addressing this one ... earlier in his career he went all out for the 5 stars/top 100 players ... and then missed on a bunch of them and left the team shallow. He now takes way more 3 star players earlier in the recruiting cycle).
8. The strongest indicator of how a college football team will perform in the upcoming season is their performance in recent seasons. (Because a program's recruiting results are very consistent from year to year)
9. Championship teams are generally defined by their ability to dominate inferior opponents, not their ability to win close games. (this touches on a recent topic here about point differential and ND not being able to dominate inferior teams, etc.)
http://www.footballoutsiders.com/info/fo-basics
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