Quote:I disagree that 3 points is so automatic. If a team makes it to the 20, it's going to be a 37 or 38 yard FG. Anything beyond that is by no means a given. With that in mind, I can agree to assigning 3 points for turnovers or ST plays that result in the opponent getting the ball inside the red zone, but beyond that the defense most definitely has a chance to fend off the points.


 

With this in mind, the team had four such plays... A fumble, a muffed punt and two INTs. However, no points were scored off the fumble, so there are no points to subtract from the defense for that play. This leaves three plays where I can agree to assign the FG to the offense instead of the defense. Subtracting 9 more points puts the overall points scored against the defense at 276, which in turn works out to 23.0 points per game and would have them ranked 18th.


 

The points allowed breaks down as follows...


 

276 - defense


37 - offense


313 - total

 

We'll have to disagree then.  Even FG's attempted from the 30 yard line or farther away (47+ yd FGs) are made 60% of the time this year.  Maybe the fairer thing to do would be to apply the percentage made for a specific FG range to the 3 points and assign that amount of points to the responsible party (Offense or ST) and the other to the D.  That would be too tedious to actually do, but hanging all those points on a defense isn't a clean way of examining a defense's effectiveness at preventing scoring.  And I don't want to sound too much like I'm touting the defense here.  They need to get a lot more turnovers themselves.

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