Noise Or Signal On Third Down?

Last week, Paul Domowich wrote an article that highlighted the Eagles’ deficiency on third down this year:

Despite a Mr. Softee-produced early season schedule, despite a receiving corps that many, including myself, consider the deepest and most talented of the Big Red era, despite two matchup headaches at running back, despite a five-time Pro Bowl quarterback with the second-best touchdowns-to-interceptions ratio in NFL history, the Eagles head into their first division showdown Monday night against the Washington Redskins ranked an unacceptable 21st in the NFL in third-down percentage.

It is very hard to compare third down success rates across teams. For example, if Team A has a lot of 3rd and 1 chance, and Team B has a lot of 3rd and 10+ chances, you would expect Team A to have a much higher success rate. However, that wouldn’t tell you whether Team A was doing a better job than Team B on third down, or was merely taking advantage of having done a better job on first and second down.

To look at this, I looked at two benchmarks.* First, last year Pat Kirwin put up a historical success rate by distance; multiplying these by the Eagles’ situations from 2009 gives us an expected success rate. Second, we can take the 2008 actual success rates by distance for the Eagles and come up with a comparison against the current squad. (Note that for this, I somewhat arbitrarily aggregated into buckets to get a bigger n: 1-2 yards, 3-5 yards, 6-9 yards, 10+ yards.) Again, I applied those 2008 rates to the number of 2009 situations that we have actually seen to get an expected conversion rate. 

Clearly, in the aggregate, the Eagles are doing worse than expectations on third down, having a success rate of only 35.3% when a rate of 38.2% would be expected, and 39.6% achieved last year. However, if you split the data into distance segments, the Eagles are doing better than expectations, as well as better than 2008, when faced with 3rd and less than 10. The struggle is coming on 3rd and 10 and greater where the team is 0-15 so far this year.

So if the problem is limited to 3rd and long, then this comment probably doesn’t have a lot of meaning:

In the 2 1/2 games McNabb has been at quarterback, the third-down playcalling has been even more incredibly lopsided. Thirty of the 31 third-down plays with McNabb at quarterback have been pass plays. You heard me. Thirty of 31. The one and only third-down run was a third-and-3 against the Bucs. LeSean McCoy lost 2 yards on the play. That apparently was enough to dissuade Reid from ever doing it again.

Assuming Domo isn’t suggesting that we run the ball on 3rd and 10 or longer to increase our success rate, then the reality seems to be that whatever we are doing on 3rd down is working, be it by land or by air.

Also, it is worth noting that if the problem is limited to 3rd and 10 or longer, the key is to actually gain yards on first and second down. But that isn’t always possible, so let’s take a look at what the problem is on 3rd and 10+.

The table below shows each of the 15 failed plays:

 

Plays 2 and 3 aren’t going to tell us anything about the team’s abilities. The Eagles were up 38-10 at the time, McNabb was out with a rib injury, and the team was focused on a) killing clock and b) not turning the ball over. No need to throw the ball there and risk the win.

However, I re-watched the rest of the 13 plays to see if there was any consistent theme in the failed attempts. First note that 8 of the 13 plays reviewed were in the Raider game. So we are starting with a sample where, as Derek showed last week, Donovan McNabb was playing poorly, and where the line was struggling more than any prior game.

Here is the summary of my review:

 

What’s interesting to me is how rarely, given the situation, there is pressure applied to the QB, with teams usually dropping seven (or six plus a spy on McNabb) or sometimes even eight. Obviously, this creates a low percentage play, which you’d expect on third and long. Of course, that brings one back to the suggestion of a draw, but I'm still not sure that is a higher percentage play than even a well-covered pass. But this doesn’t seem to me to be a systematic problem. Yes, you’d like to see a little bit better execution, but to me, the struggles in this area look a lot more like noise than like a truly troublesome area of the offense.

Hopefully we will have better fortunes on third and 10 or more tonight -- by making sure we aren't in those situations at all by gaining yards on first and second down.

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* I could not find league-wide success rates by distance for 2009, or really for any time period. If anyone knows of a source that provides that, let me know and I can update the numbers.