FOA 2012 Preview: Strategic Tendencies Tables

by Aaron Schatz

I've spent the last few days working on the "Strategic Tendencies" comments for the team chapters in Football Outsiders Almanac 2012, and I wanted to share with everyone some of the cool new information we have for you. This year for the first time, we had game charters tracking defensive as well as offensive formations. In addition, after the season was over we went through and marked each play not just for offensive "formation" (where players are lined up) but also for offensive "personnel" (who is actually in the game, which is a better guide to how teams judge things).

We'll have this table in the book for all 32 teams, but we present the Super Bowl champion New York Giants here as a sample. Personnel is listed using the two-digit standard, where the first digit is running backs and the second digit is tight ends. Subtract both from five, and you get the number of wide receivers. We've got the five most common personnel groups for each team, and the five most common defensive formations, on both sides of the ball. Some of the less common defensive formations have been grouped together, so everything with six or more defensive backs is "Dime+" and everything with fewer than four defensive backs except for 4-4-3 is "Goal Line." There will be tables in the book with leaguewide averages from every formation and personnel group.

Also, note these DVOA ratings are the new DVOA v7.0 which will be introduced in the book, now normalized so every year averages 0.0%.

The Giants, as most people know, were pretty unique in their high usage of a 4-2-5 formation with three safeties. You may notice that the same five personnel groups are listed for both offense and "against Giants defense," but these will actually be different for most teams. The Patriots' top five personnel groups, for example, include two with six offensive linemen.

Next we have the Strategic Tendencies table that we've run in the book every year since 2006. We've made a few changes this year, so I thought I would share this one with you too. Again, this one is for the New York Giants.

I'm not going to go super into detail on explanation the way we do in the book's "Statistical Toolbox" section, but a few definitions:

• In the second column of stats, the first two lines represent "formation" and the next three represent "personnel." This is different from previous years where similar data was given only based on formations.
• "Max protect" means that blockers outnumber pass rushers by at least two, with a minimum of seven blockers.
• "CB by sides" is new for this year. It measures how often a team's top two cornerbacks play on one side of the field compared to the other side. It should give you a sense of which teams move cornerbacks around (like both New York teams) and which teams (Seattle, Atlanta, Philadelphia) like to leave cornerbacks always on the same side.
• "Go for it on 4th" is our Aggressiveness Index stat. Higher means more aggressive on fourth downs, and 1.0 is the league average over the last few years, although the actual average in 2011 was .92.
• "Pace" is based on situation-neutral pace, the number of seconds of game time that pass between plays when the score is within certain guidelines in the first three quarters.

I hope everyone enjoys discussing these and they get you excited to see information for all 32 teams in FOA 2012, which will be out in early July. It's just a taste to get you hooked, especially if you want to see some team that isn't the Giants. In the meantime, we also may run some articles with all 32 teams ranked in some of these stats, or in some of our other stats which are not listed here.