So in short, true yards measures how many yards a QB would have passed for against a replacement level defense that day?

But how do I pronounce it?

2: You pronounce it "jar." Sorta like how "D'Yer" isn't pronounced duh-yer.

2: I prefer a pirate-y approach to pronunciation, with Dee-Yarrr.

no, its dee-yar and say the 'yar' like the sea captain from the simpsons.

"deyaaaaaaaaaar"

D'Yarrrr is great!
Because that's Pirate and Pirates are the chosen people.
There is a strong correlation between the decline of Pirates since the 1800's and global warming since then.
RAmen

I second those who prefer the pirate pronunciation.

+1 for the pirate pronunciation.

Still no WinEx or leverage-adjusted stats.

As they say on the north side, "there's always next year."

I like the new stat and adjustments.

It seems to fit more closely with my perception of how individual players performed on the Vikings.

Because a good 'yar!' should come from the back of the throat, shouldn't there be an umlaut? And if there's an umlaut, shouldn't it be printed in a gothic font?

If we're going with the pirate pronunciation for DYAR, can we rename KUBIAK to SYMONS? KUBIAK has always bothered me, because my mother, who'd be hard-pressed to name more than 10 NFL players, recognized immediately it referred to Gary Kubiak, who was John Elway's backup. With Kubiak now being an NFL head coach and thus not at all obscure, renaming it seems appropriate.

And who better to rename it for than B.J. Symons?
(1) He's obscure, and will likely remain so.
(2) He was a draft pick of the Houston Texans, the team Kubiak now coaches.
(3) He played his college football at Texas Tech for noted pirate aficionado Mike Leach.
(4) TTU QBs put up ridiculous fantasy stat seasons, without necessarily being particularly good players.
C'mon, who's with me on this?

#13: Clever, but SYMONS fails for one important reason: unlike KUBIAK (and PECOTA, for that matter), SYMONS doesn't sound like a name of a computer from the '40s.

KUBIAK projections:

Tom Brady is listed as Red (High) risk.

I think you probably rushed the spreadsheet out the door, which is fine, but I hope a fix is in the making.

15: Why is that bad? Red means he is likely to fall short of the projection for whatever reason (not just injury).

16: His projection is for a reasonable 37 touchdowns, and his overall point total is only a couple higher than that of Manning, who is Green. Brady is obviously not meant to be Red, which is used for players likely to miss playing time due to injury or benching. Neither one has happened to Brady in his career. Also, Brady was ranked above Manning in the KUBIAK preview posted a while ago. It's an oversight.

I have more KUBIAK questions and complaints and stuff, but I'm not sure if this is the right venue.

Rex Grossman played below replacement level? C'mon, you didn't need all that newfangled mathematics to figure that one out, did ya?

I'll admit to being diappointed with the shift to DYAR - I always thought that DPAR was pretty intuitive, and hasn't one of the site's frequently made points been that yardage is a very flawed statistic for making comparative judgments about players? Sure, this is "DYAR" or whatever, but that's pretty nonsensical to me. What are these yards that are better or worse than actual yards? "True" yards seems silly - a true yard is 36 inches. When Tom Brady completes a pass, do his superhuman powers over space and time shorten that yard to 30 inches, making it easier for his team to march down the field?

I mean its just a collision of the abstract and the concrete that strikes me as being incredibly silly, and a needless attempt to dumb something down that wasn't particularly esoteric in the first place. It actually makes a hell of a lot more sense to me to think of Carson Palmer as, over the course of a season, being about ten touchdowns better than a replacement quarterback, rather than 1,215 imaginary yards better. Maybe this is because this site has done such a good job of training me not to look at yardage, but if you wanted to see how many [b]yards[/b] better one player is than another, wouldn't you just look at, y'know, their actual yardage and yards per attempt numbers?

The more I think about it, the dumber it seems. There's really no arguing about what constitutes a yard, whereas there's plenty to be parsed out when it comes to trying to figure out how much some players contribute (or fail to) to the success of their offenses. Which is measured in points.

Anyway, that's just the 2 cents of a longtime reader and rare commenter. It's nice to see the DVOA tweak, which with the given examples corresponds more closely to my own intuitive judgment of qbs last year than the previous numbers (and I guess corrolates more nicely).

How does anyone know if any of the stats make sense? Do they double count things? What aspects of performance are used, and how are they weighted? Etc?

Brady would be listed as a high risk for missing his projected TD total. There's no doubt that he's an excellent QB, but he's never been a stat machine. For a guy coming off a 50 TD season and a devastating loss, I wouldn't be surprised if he breaks 30 TDs.

The reason Manning is listed in green is because he routinely generates big numbers, and is realistically capable of breaking the single season TD record every season.

I would second the confusion a FO thinking "yards" was somehow easier to understand than points. Sounds like a statistic fox would cook up. PAR is pretty damn straightforward if you ask me.

Alas it doesn't really matter to me I guess as I will understand what you are getting at either way.

I second #19. I picked up PFP08 yesterday and haven't put it down since, but I'm not sure I like DYAR -- isn't the whole point to move beyond yards and think about what actually helps teams win games? You don't win by getting more yards than the opponent, you win by scoring more points, and that was one of the big appeals of DPAR. I like the adjustment to DVOA and the replacement level, but I think you've unintentionally muddied the water by switching from DPAR to DYAR.

It'll be fun to see what the mainstream audience thinks of this.

19: I agree to some extent. One question is what sort of yards these are. A yard that counts towards a new first down is far more valuable than a yard that doesn't. The difference between three and four yards on first and ten is huge, whereas the difference between a 23 yard pass or a 24 yard pass on first and ten is negligible. Points are points, but yards have very situational value.

21: Again, it's true that Brady's projection is pretty unstable; he could go anywhere from 28 to 48 TDs and not surprise anyone. But that's not what the Red risk level has meant in the past few KUBIAK spreadsheets.

It's disappointing that I order my copy of PFP months ago and here I sit waiting while all I had to do was wait for it to come out and go to the bookstore.

I pre-ordered and pre-paid.

That's exactly the thing, thanks for putting it that neatly - yards are situational in value, whereas points are static. Which is what makes DPAR a far more comprehensible way of presenting the statistic to me.

Here is another dirty little secret MSC. Casual customers are a lot more important and treated better than loyal ones (Obviously this isn't 100% true, but it generally is).

Companies are out to get the most money, not give out the most satisfaction or fairness. As long as you are just satisfied enough to be a customer, thats good enough.

Wow, does 26 sound crappy. It was intended to be somewhat backhanded but not as strong as that. Sorry.

BTW. I wait for my copy of the book so I can deep dive these new stats a little more before rendering my opinion.

Count me among those not happy with the change.

You ask: "Do you know anyone who refers to a player’s value by how many points he scored?"

One of the things I love about this site and DPAR is that it gave a way to compare how many points a player contributed compared to another player. So that one could say "Tom Brady's performance last year contributed about 120 more points than Carson Palmer's." That makes sense to me, it tells me in terms I can easily understand how much a player helped his team compared to another.

This DYAR stat confuses me. Of course it could be because it's new. But one of the basic lessons I heard early on from FO is that yards is not a good basis of measuring players; instead, by considering performance in the context of the game situation and opponent, we can measure how much a player helps his team score points. If this were baseball, it would be like telling me how many more adjusted hits a player got rather than his VORP.

I assume the FO staff deliberated on this decision and isn't about to reconsider, but I wish that they would.

Stats are stupid

Loyal is right Becephalus. I'm such a flunkie that, when my wife threw out PFP2005 during our last move, I made her buy me another copy.

It will be interesting to watch the debate of DYAR, and I hope and expect Aaron will answer some of those questions being asked.

However, there is no need to debate which was the best way to buy the book, or imply that FO is somehow responsible for the fact that someone preordered and is still waiting their book (or imply that FO is somehow mistreating loyal customers versus casual customers). You either waited to get the book at the bookstore at $21.95 plus tax and gas, or you preordered it online from Amazon, etc. for about 14 bucks (and likely didn't pay much if anything for shipping). However you decided to get PFP 2008, you didn't pre- or otherwise order it from FO.

Whatever truisms there may be about casual versus loyal customers, and while the casual customer may help the number of books sold by online and B&M booksellers and thus help indirectly help FO, FO is still at the mercy of the publisher and the retailers as to when the book gets in your hands. It seems this might be the rare case where the loyal customer is the key to the success of the business, as ultimately FO probably makes more money from the non-casual visitors here who buy Kubiak, Premium, etc., which are likely beyond the interests of the "casual" FO visitor from Fox message boards or elsewhere.

Relax Yetanotherpatsfanonapatsfanladenintrrnet, it's not nearly as serious as you make it out to be. I've been floating around this site since 2003 and I preorder every year. Ain't no thing.

Funny that Baseball Prospectus is mentioned in this article. While they provide stats like EQA and QERA (which are on the same scale as batting average and ERA, respectively), the stats they use for overall player comparisons are from the VORP/WARP category -- expressed in runs ("points") and wins ("tens of points").

This may be because, as noted above, scoring/winning is more intuitive/important than "stats that look like stats everyone already knows, except not."

...long live DPAR!

Count me as a longtime follower who prefers points to yards.

i feel the need to echo the sentiments of Crabbie and others. To me DPAR was simple to understand, where the value of a yard changes in context, the value of a point rarely does.

as others have pointed out BP has VORP and WARP. So why scrap DPAR? why not just print it next to the new stats?

Shouldn't it be Yards Adjusted for Replacement and Defense, a.k.a. YARD?

Book says Raiders have 0% chance to contend for Super Bowl and they have 4% chance to be playoff contender.
This going to be very embarasing when Raiders do make playoffs.
Book also says Russell going to throw 20 ints. No way does that happen. Jamarcus ussell is very accurate passer. More like 12 ints.

I'll second (third) the disappointment with the death of DPAR.

Frankly, I wish more of the advanced stats had migrated toward a "points" framework, instead of moving in the opposite direction. As someone pointed out, it's parallel to the BP use of "runs" in many of their metrics.

I like DYAR, it does a much better job of showing the differences between players. DPAR was too compressed.

Here's a quickie for the mailbag, although it's not YAR-related. You mention that Eli Manning had the second-worst completion percentage over a 5-game stretch since 1995 (among QBs with at least 15 attempts). So who's #1?

44: I'd bet it's Ryan Leaf, starting with that legendary awful game.

40.3% over five games.

Bill, any chance at the rest of that list?

Eli Manning. Worst 'good' quarterback ever, or best 'bad' quarterback ever? Discuss.

Is it April Fools Day again? Or did FOX get their sinister, dirty noses into FO business? I wouldn't blame anyone for selling out though, if the price is right.

It may be just a fear of anything new and unfamiliar, but I don't trust this DYAR. I liked and understood DPAR; it made intuitive sense to me even when I first encountered it. It took some time to get a feel for what the scale of what numbers meant, bit I knew immediately that it was measuring something important. This DYAR doesn't have the same appeal; like others have said, this stat doesn't really add anything new that traditional stats--interpreted through DVOA--didn't already.

Like it was said above, "scoring/winning is more intuitive/important than “stats that look like stats everyone already knows, except not.” Now I will spend all season wondering what Clinton Portis' DPAR would have been, and I feel like I've lost an important tool in assessing how much Jason Campbell is improving. Yards don't do it for me anymore!

I also second that YARD (Yards Adjusted for Replacement and Defense)is a better acronym.

"Unfortunately, DPAR isn’t exactly the easiest thing to understand either. The reason is obvious: Do you know anyone who refers to a player’s value by how many points he scored? I mean, we know touchdowns are six points, and we talk about kickers in terms of points when we talk about fantasy football, but people don’t think of football players in terms of points. They think in terms of yards."

The whole point is about the points and not the yards. Why do we need FO if we have to still go by people thinking ? Maybe, DPAR wasn't accurate enough. Couldn't you guys could do salvage point-based measurement while improving its accuracy ?

obviously points are more important to outcomes, but how many people intuitively know how many points an offense usually scores over a season. I don't and I consider myself a pretty hardcore football stat guy. Football fans know that 4,000 yards (or DYAR) is a solid QB season, what does 75 DPAR tell you without the context of the a DPAR ranked list? It's above replacement level. Is it mediocre or very good? I honestly don't know because I pulled 75 out of thin air. I'm going to check as soon as I post this because I really don't know.

I dont know what DPAR and DVOA and DYAR is, I just read the comments in the book.

Yeah, but nobody has 4000 DYAR either -- Brady's record-breaking year was apparently worth 2788, and only a handful of guys were over 1000... So DYAR isn't really on a familiar scale, either. Now, for a familiar scale you supposedly look at true yards, but like Aaron says, those are too dependent on attempts to be used to measure value.

You know, at least with DPAR I could subtract it from a team's point total or swap players and use the old pythagorean formula to run "what ifs" with different players; how do you do that with DYAR? The more I think about it, the more I see this as a move backwards, taking FO's signature individual stat and needlessly making it worse.

Re: 50

So the average fan knows how many yards is "good" for a QB, RB, or WR, and therefore "True Yards" is more intuitive than DVOA. Hmm, I'll have to think about that. It's hard for me to think about rating players based on yards because I've been conditioned not to. Seems like this is a concession to people who insist on counting yards in their assessments- "You want to count yards? OK, here are some more accurate yards."

I definitely liked that DPAR represented points. That enabled us to see concretely how much a given player added to the offense. I realize you can do that with yards, but yards don't win games, points do. With DPAR, we used to be able to say, "That RB was critical to his team's win. A replacement back wouldn't have generated enough points for them to win." Or, "That team could be winning every game if only they had a replacement-level QB, but their crappy starter is sucking the points away." Now, of course this wasn't perfectly accurate since the teams don't generate points precisely according to DVOA on a game-to-game basis, but it was useful.

How can we do that with yards? A RB generates a certain number of DYAR. Great, he got more yards than a replacement would have. But what does that mean for the outcome? Points impact the outcome, yards do not.

Bottom line, don't scrap DPAR yet. How about a trial run for Quick Reads using both stats, to see which one people like more?

I love how we have an ultra-researched post about mathematical equations and accuracy, and the first chunk of comments are all about pirates. Love it.

On a more serious note, does this mean that "dpar" has been moved from the list of security words to leave comments?

Re 53:

I actually think yards is much better way to represent how much a player helps his team. It goes back to the 99 yard drive capped with a 1 yard TD. People intuitively realize the TD wasn't as important as the yards in this situation.

Assigning how many points a play is worth was always kind of arbitrary because a great player can be a on a bad team, and generate a lot of yards, but not reach the end zone.

I'll reserve final judgment until I get the book, but based on this article I have to put myself in the pro-DPAR faction. Points simply makes more intuitive sense to me in determining a players value than yards. #19's comment about Carson Palmer being worth 10 TDs more than a replacement QB being easier to envision than 1200 yards better. It probably doesn't help that I'm used looking at teams point differential to determine its real value.

Re 57:

The lack of Rex Grossman on that list surprises me.

Put me on the anti-DYAR list.

A bit of background first... I discovered FO in 2006 after I heard it mentioned while some friends were talking about BP. I checked it out, and absolutely loved it immediately. I was quickly hooked, and I check this place almost every single day, not to mention reading all of the PFPs, and the Year of the Scab.

I was born and raised in the heart of Alabama, and after being named after Paul "Bear" Bryant, it's fair to say that football is something of a religion with me. I've always loathed the talking head "experts" that fill the football landscape, and FO is one of those few places that you can truly get great insight and research from.

However, as many have mentioned earlier, I think the move to DYAR is a backwards step for FO. This place has gotten bigger by the day, and it has done so with DPAR and DVOA at the core. Changing DYAR just isn't a positive step, in my opinion. One of the cornerstones of this site has been that yards constitute a relatively meaningless number that was a poor indicator of value and efficiency. And now we're going to do a 180 by emphasizing yards... I just don't get it.

Beyond that, who was complaining about DPAR in the first place? I know I certainly wasn't, and I don't know of many people that were. I can say firsthand that it was / is much more intuitive to me than this whole DYAR stuff. And I know no one discusses player value in terms of points, they all talk about yards. That's exactly why I read FO! As mentioned earlier, it's a respite from the talking head "experts" and ignorant fans with no knowledge whatsoever of the game.

I'm still going to keep reading FO regardless, and I'll be glad to get my hands on the new book, but in my humble opinion this is a step backwards. Ditch DYAR and bring back DPAR.

quinn gray is now top 10 in DVOA?
I may have a foggy memory of jacksonville football last year but quinn gray was bad. He had two great games where he threw for 300 yards and had 6 td's to just 3 int's. However, every other game, against good secondaries, he struggled. Someone needs to help me understand how Gray's value per play was so good.

I have to vote in favor of True Yards. We all know from experience that 450 yards passing is a monster game, and that 250 is only decent. So if a QB passes for 450 yards in a game but only earns 250 True Yards, we know what's being said. In contrast, if a QB throws three TDs but has only a DPAR of 12.7, we understand that the actual performance was worse than the points scored, but for me there's a much less intuitive feel about the statistic. For me, 12.7 points only has meaning on the average, on a per-game basis averaged over several games, whereas saying "yards" appeals to my intuition directly; I don't have to go through an "average" filter.

How does anyone know if any of the stats make sense? Do they double count things? What aspects of performance are used, and how are they weighted? Etc?

I don't know how long you've been here, but if you're new, maybe you missed this, where you can scroll down to "Does DVOA really work?" Or, maybe your questions would be better answered by going here, which goes into some detail about how the stats made.

as others have pointed out BP has VORP and WARP. So why scrap DPAR? why not just print it next to the new stats?

I agree, why can't we keep DPAR and bring in DYAR? What, is DPAR going to get jealous? Did DYAR make you put a clause in its contract so that it would be the only advanced statistic measuring value above a replacement player, or its entire contract would be guaranteed? D*mn poison pills clauses.

Seriously, though, having DPAR is nice, not just because it's intuitive/more directly tied to winning, but as mentioned before, you can use it in conjunction with Pythagorean wins to make rough estimates of the change in winning percentage of switching certain players. That's a lot of fun, and you can't do that with DYAR (or at least, it's not as easy). So why can't we at least see the DPAR alongside the DYAR? Why take away a good measurement?

Still, I'll say this for DYAR, it does give us the pretext for talking like pirates and making ridiculous jokes about this fact, so it can't be all bad.

It may be just a fear of anything new and unfamiliar, but I don’t trust this DYAR.

Oh, don't worry, that's just perfectly normal paranoia.

I also second that YARD (Yards Adjusted for Replacement and Defense)is a better acronym.

Does YARD give us a ready-made excuse to talk like pirates? Didn't think so.

Hm. I don't comment much here, but I've been reading FO for so many years now that I can't even remember when I first found this site.

My first reaction to reading the "DPAR Is Dead" title was one of excitement: FO has invented something even better! My second reaction to DYAR, after reading about it, is that I don't like it. I've become very comfortable with DPAR, so there may be some status quo bias in my reaction. The rationale for moving to DYAR (making it more intuitive) is getting it exactly wrong: DPAR works as an better stat because it is not tied to old notions of yards, and you can evaluate it without the mental baggage that yards bring. This is an advantage.

Not only that, I also ended up confused by the nomenclature of DYAR: "True Yards" is a horrible name because they're not true yards. The true yards are the traditional stats you see plastered on TV. At least, that is how my DPAR/DVOA-centric mind works now.

I am not opposed to introducing DYAR and DAFY (Defense-Adjusted Fake Yards?) in addition to DPAR, but getting rid of DPAR strikes me as very wrong.

Points are also relative. When you are down by 5 with one minute let, you'll be given 3 for free. Similarly, when you are down by 2 with almost no time left you'll take the 3 even if you were 51% as likely to 6 had you gone for that. So the "relative"-ness of yards is a problem that also applies to points.

If you wanted a real comparison you might have to have some notion of an individual contribution to wins and then you could say, "If you replaced Carson Palmer with an average replacement qb, the bengals would have won x fewer games". That also means a team with an average replacement qb, (the Bears if we are being charitable) know how many wins it would be worth to them to trade for Carson Palmer. They would also know if it was worth trading another player at another position for Carson, because wins are wins. Wins are also relative, though. The difference between 1 and 2 wins is a lot less important than the difference between 8 and 9 wins, for example.

The only real measure would be something like Defense adjusted Super Bowl Wins above replacement. Because so few teams win the super bowl each year, though, the confidence intervals would be huge (that means you can't trust the stat at all) and the percentages would be infinitesimal (how much more likely does Anthony Gonzalez make a team to win the SB? )

But DYAR has virtues that DWAR and DPAR don't. Yards happen all the time, and its a lot easier to assign them to individuals, because they happen on every play. If you were Willie Parker at a time when Jerome Bettis was the RB on all redzone plays, you could conceivably be a starter who was never on the field for points, and that would skew the stats. Yards provide a better measure. I don't think they are perfect, but if you want to compare Joe Jurivicious to Eric Parker, its a much better because the confidence on the stat is much higher.

Count me as willing to give it a season to see how it goes, and appreciating that you guys are still thinking about this stuff.

Also, here's a suggestion for looking at Replacement Level. By revealed preference, all teams prefer their staff at their salaries to the best unsigned free-agent at a position. It would be interesting to look at the DYARs of unsigned free agents against those of players with jobs and figure out how much a team is wiling to pay for DPAR, or conversely, how much a FA has to lower his expectations before he gets picked up to replace some cheap guy who is worse than he is (Kevin Jones is better than a lot of back ups in this league, even with his age, how much can he ask for and still get a job?)

I fall into the group liking the DYAR stat. I think a lot of confusion is coming from FO initially indicating that you can't necessarily judge a player by the yards they earn, because of team and opponent factors. For example, Tom Brady could pass for 400 yds and 6 TDs against the Raiders and Peyton Manning could pass for 200 yds and 1 TD against the Jaguars. Everybody would say that TB had a better game, but look at his competition. (Intentional barb for RaiderJoe.) I think what FO is trying to do is use a stat that appeals to the average joe (another barb), uses the basis of DPAR and tries to amalgamate the two into a usable statistic as a foundation for further research.

I like the stat and look forward to this year with D`YAR (best pirate impression) and it's accompanying analysis.

re 57 - the list of 8 worst QB 5-game stretches in terms of completion percentage (during a new moon while geese are migrating). Is it just random that 5 out of 8 on the list end on week 15 or 16 - is this a case of QBs (or teams generally) being shell-shocked by the end of a crappy season / giving up on a crappy season, or just one of those random things.

Re DYAR vs DPAR - DYAR I can live with. I was fine with DPAR. I tended to think in terms of DPAR as being essentially DVOA multiplied by no. of plays anyway, on a rather arbitrary scale rather than in real 'point' terms. So DYAR is basically just DPAR mutliplied by an arbitrary constant - simply changing the scale.

True Yards seems conceptually confused to me though. You measure how many extra yards a player has gained vs what a replacement level player would do in that position. Okay. Replacement level player would gain RLP yards. Real player gains RLP + DYAR yards (well, RLP + YAR strictly). Then you produce a stat of his actual yards plus DYAR, which is RLP + 2 DYAR. Which seems pretty meaningless. If a player is X above replacement level, then why do we want to know what X above his actual level is - 2X above replacement level?

True yards is the answer to the question "How many yards would player X throw for in a game in which a replacement level player threw would as many yards as player X did in a given game?" Or to put it more simply... Huh?

What would make more intuitive sense is "how many yards would player X have thrown for against an average (or replacement level) defence rather than the one he did play against?". Or "What would a replacement level players stats have been in this game? (Real world yards MINUS YAR or DYAR, not plus).

Please, please either explain what I have misunderstood or go back to the true yards concept and think about what it is meant to represent again.

Re: 64
If you were Willie Parker at a time when Jerome Bettis was the RB on all redzone plays, you could conceivably be a starter who was never on the field for points, and that would skew the stats. "

That misses the point of dpar completely. In a scenario like this Parker gets 95% of the dpar, because that is exacly what FO metrics are about. You are right, that traditional yards are better than traditional points, but that why Fo introduced a nmetric which spread the points of a team over all offensive skill players.

In generell I believe Aaron is trying to solve a problem that is not solvable.
Last year the fox reader wrote "What are your stupid dpar anyway, can't you see that Kitna passed for trillions of yards he is a hero"
So this year they will write, "What are you stupid true yards anyway, the true yards are the one on his box score. Alex Smith will always be our hero."

Also I must say, the more I think about it, the less I understand what these "yards" mean.
Bradys true yards come down at 6428. For this number to mean anything, there should be a sentence like "If Brady played sixteen times against an average defense then he would have thrown 6500 Yards."
Firstly I do not believe such a sentence to be "true" for any if, but I guess I just can't fathom how superhuman the pats where last year.
But secondly the way FO stats works, the real sentence is probably like: "If Brady plays 16 games against average defense and plays all snaps from either 1 and 10 from his own 47 yard line or 2nd and 7 from the oppenets 35 yard line (or whatever an average difficulty situations for a QB are), the he would have thrown for 6500 yards. If you consider that the real sentence is probably even more complicated, I do not see where this creates a stat that is more accessible than DPAR.

I do like the DYAR addition, but I'd much rather be able to work with DPAR if we can only have one.

Another vote for offering both DYAR and DPAR stats, at least on the FO stats pages. I've just about gotten used to DPAR!

Not many commenters have mentioned it, but there are some excellent-sounding changes in your upgrade: red zone and replacement level, in particular, make a lot of sense.

Now that you are working from five years of data (2003-07), I wonder: has the value of Average in DVOA changed at all? If, to take an extreme scenario, passing success on first down increased by, say, 15 per cent in 2008, would DVOA adapt to that? Or does Average mean 'average for the era'?

re myself in 66 - obviously I am reading impaired this morning :(. What I wrote about True Yards was complete rubbish - it's not player's actual yards plus DYAR, it's 'replacement level yards' plus DYAR - something a bit like how many yards they would have passed for against that defence if each play was 1st and 20 from their own 20, or some such metric.

Well, one nice thing about the new stat is that you not only can make Pirate Sounds (always good) but Philadelphia Story reference too.

KH: "My, that 2005 Peyton was yar!"
CG: "ITruly he was, Red. Yar, indeed."

But that still doesn't solve a baseline problem I have with football analysis. Unlike baseball stats, hardly any football stats really resonate. Baseball Prospectus has a couple of revolutionary stats, but one of them, Eqa, looks like something you grew up with, batting average. It takes offensive performance in totality and renders into a batting average like number.

What's the football equivalent of batting average, or era? It's hard to say, since the roles of players, and their relative success in those roles, is so different.

It's possible to get to important and revealing stats, and I believe FO has made great progress with this. DYAR (yes, why not YARD, or YARDA?) I think is an attempt to get to a more familiar context than points. I just don't think either is so familiar that it really matters much which you pick for translation.

Personally, I'd rather see wins (warp), or fractions thereof (which, hey, probably would look like batting averages!). To say a QB is worth 5000 D'YARS! versus an average of 3000 D'YARS! isn't terribly meaningful to me on first glance. Whereas if you said "This QB is worth 3 wins above replacement, given a average team around him, and an average opponent." I'd think, hey, that's huge! That guy is great.

19....I agree. Points win games, not yards.

And personally, as a Steelers fan, I find any system that ranks Sage Rosenfels ahead of Ben Roethlisberger (new DVOA) sort of ridiculous. Maybe I just read it wrong.

Bug Report:
The new table for Quarterback Rushing is sorted by true yards instead of DYAR like every other table.

I'll put in another vote for DPAR. Yards, as most people here agree, are a poor measure of success. We've often ridiculed the NFL for designating the best offenses and defenses by yards instead of points and it seems like DYAR is a step in that direction.

I'm sure I'll get used to the new formula, but I'm not sure that I'm going to like it.

Hey, that 1995 NFC Central was positively stacked at the QB position! Mitchell, Kramer, Dilfer...

But isn't DYAR a measure of individual success, not team success? So wouldn't yards be a more accurate measure of an individual player's contributions than points scored? I'm just thinking of a running back or wide receiver who routinely moves the chains for a team, but once his team gets in the red zone the fullbacks and tight ends get a disproportionate number of TDs (ie Warrick Dunn & Mike Alstott).

So a red zone fullback would have his DPAR skewed in one direction, and his DYAR skewed in the other?

Re #54
I'm waiting for my copy of PFP to give a fuller analysis. In the meantime, I concur generally with qsi in #63 and with #19 in wondering what non-FO partisans will think of DYAR. I'll see what results experiments on my co-workers, who generally have not cottoned on well to DPAR, render.

And to answer your second question, judging by my current security word, no.

I kinda like the idea of DYAR on an individual game basis (i.e. Quick Reads). In evaluating/measuring individual game performance it does seem more intuitive than DPAR. As a cumulative measurement I think I still conceptually prefer DPAR though there's probably not a big difference (in the table above no QBs ranking changed more than two spots).

I think that quote cuts to the quick of the matter at hand better than anything that's been said. The inherent problem isn't really replacing points for yards in a qualitative metaphor; rather, it's the nature of a qualitative metaphor itself. The point of metaphors like this is to translate a long set of performance metrics into one number that states whether something (in this case, a football player) is good or bad in a way that a layperson could relate to his own experience. (e.g., "Well, 100 horses can pull more than 75, so this engine is stronger than that one.") The key word, here, is "layperson", which will come into play more and more as Football Outsiders gets more popular and becomes more revenue-driven. Now, that's not to say that the FO guys should boil their stats down to "on a scale of 'teh suck' to 'ZOMG!', Vince Young is 'meh' with a slight chance of becoming 'feh' in the future", but I appreciate that they have received some criticism of casual users of their stats (like the readers of Quick Reads), and have at least made an attempt to meet them halfway.

Whoops, #79 was supposed to open with:

Translating player performance into yardage rather than points allows us to introduce one more statistic, which we hope will make Quick Reads much more accessible to the general population of football fans.

Sorry 'bout that.

I hope DPAR is dead like Favre is retired.

Re: 76

If I understand correctly, DPAR and DYAR are based on the same performance factors. A red zone fullback would not have a good DPAR and a bad DYAR, they would both be either good or bad because they are saying the same thing, just expressing it in different terms. DPAR was never based on distributing the actual points scored, it was always based on drive success points (on a per-play basis), and DYAR is based on that, too.

DYAR is not qualitatively different from DPAR. The debate is whether we want value above replacement to be scored on a points scale (DPAR) or a yards scale (DYAR). I personally like points, and I don't see how yards are more meaningful to anyone. In fact, It seems confusing to me that a player could earn more "True Yards" than he actually got. What does that mean, really, in terms of value to his team? We all know Brady got a lot of yards. But is his value determined purely by getting yards? Only in the sense that yards lead to points. So why not skip that step and go straight to points?

(However, I do like that "True Yards" and DYAR will be able to put to rest the myth that throwing 4,000 yards is a good thing. We'll be able to look at a 4,000 yard guy and say his true yardage was far less than that, while a guy who had 3,800 normal yards actually has a higher number of "True Yards." So the new stats are useful for comparison of players at the same position to each other, but not as useful as DPAR for measuring a player's contribution to his team's wins.)

Again, I end with a plea to keep DPAR around for comparison, to see if people like it more.

P.S. I realize that the charts make it seem like DPAR and DYAR are different, but that's because the DPAR numbers are from before the baseline changes and the DYAR numbers are from after those changes. If you recalculated DPAR with the new baseline numbers, it would rank the players in the same order and with the same proportions as DYAR.

Are kickers going to be ranked using DYAR instead of DPAR? That seems... stupid.

I think the improvements to the formula, especially the new replacement levels, reflect excellent work. Good job, guys!

However, when I saw the headline "DPAR is Dead", I hoped FO was moving to a wins-based metric. After all, the point of yards is to score, and the point of scoring is to win. It seems like this stat is moving backwards. It's not a bad thing on its own-more stats are better, as long as they are clearly labeled, explained, and understood. However, if forced to choose between DYAR and DWAR, I'd prefer to have an individual metric that corresponds more directly with the whole point of the freakin' game (corresponds in my mind, I realize the actual difference would be negligible).

I love DYAR!!!

Kickers + yards: those are yards that you don't have to get to get into good % field goal range, since your kicker 'already' got them.

Re: 82 (myself)

I made a mistake in saying that "True Yards" are good for comparing players at the same position. They are not. "True Yards" are only useful in determining whether a player was better, even with, or worse than his actual yardage number (which is of dubious utility, IMHO).

Re #88
I generally share your skepticism w/r/t the probable value of True Yards, but one thing I noticed and sent Aaron an email about is, looking at RB True Yards, RBs like Fred Taylor and Purple Jesus have significantly lower True Yards, while Joseph Addai has more True Yards. Coincidentally or not, MIN and JAX rank 1st and 2nd in 10+ yards and IND ranks toward the bottom. The OL rankings discount 10+ yards, which makes strong intuitive sense. But, from those examples, it seems like True Yards do, too, and I'm not sure THAT makes sense. It's particularly confusing w/r/t somebody like Purple Jesus-both DYAR and DVOA say he's very good, and then there's True Yards saying "whoa, wait a minute, he's not nearly as good as he looks."

re 57 - the list of 8 worst QB 5-game stretches in terms of completion percentage (during a new moon while geese are migrating). Is it just random that 5 out of 8 on the list end on week 15 or 16 - is this a case of QBs (or teams generally) being shell-shocked by the end of a crappy season / giving up on a crappy season, or just one of those random things.

I suspect it has something to do with lousy weather.

#87: I'm not sure that would be correct; I don't think 1998 Gary Anderson (regular season version) could have kicked a 60 yard FG even though he undoubtedly would have had a really high DYARrrrr.

This was my first thought: "with DPAR I could subtract it from a team’s point