FO Mailbag: Three-and-Outs Forced

July 07, 3:29 pm ET

Jeremy Norris: Yahoo has introduced some new scoring categories for this year's fantasy football season. Among the new options for Team Defenses are Three-and-Outs and Tackles For Loss. I, at least, would be very interested in using these categories, but doing so would risk unbalancing the value of DEFs relative to the other positions unless you can look at the history of those numbers to see what the averages are, how much separates the good DEFs from the average ones, etc. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find either of those stats online (having checked espn, pfr, yahoo, and nfl.com). Are you guys able to grab those numbers from your DVOA database from last year? Not just for my sake: there are a lot of FF commissioners who read the site.

By the way, other new Yahoo categories this year include Pick Sixes Thrown, Fourth Down Stops on defense, and Defensive Yards Allowed per Game.

Aaron Schatz: Well, those are some interesting categories. I know KUBIAK already projects how many games a team will allow 100-199 yards, 200-299 yards, 300-399 yards, and so forth. We do track three-and-outs, as part of our drive stats, although the numbers don't fit on the drive stats page on the site. We usually run the top 10 and the bottom 10 in the statistical appendix of Football Outsiders Almanac. The rankings somewhat follow the rankings for the best defensive DVOA ratings, except that teams which get a lot of turnovers and sacks will rank lower on the frequency of three-and-outs. Pittsburgh, for example, was just average in three-and-outs per drive.

Here are the rates of three-and-outs per drive for 2010, along with defensive DVOA ratings for comparison purposes.

Team	3Outs	3Outs/Drive	Rank	DVOA	Rank
NYJ	63	32.3%	1	-7.8%	5
SD	54	30.9%	2	-6.4%	7
CHI	57	29.8%	3	-7.7%	6
GB	51	28.0%	4	-10.8%	2
OAK	55	27.2%	5	1.5%	15
NYG	52	26.3%	6	-8.0%	3
SF	49	26.1%	7	1.4%	13
WAS	50	25.3%	8	9.2%	26
MIA	44	25.1%	9	-1.9%	10
SEA	47	25.1%	10	15.0%	29
STL	47	25.1%	11	6.0%	20
CIN	44	24.9%	12	4.8%	19
KC	46	24.7%	13	6.1%	21
PHI	46	24.5%	14	1.4%	14
MIN	44	24.4%	15	0.9%	11
JAC	41	24.4%	16	21.2%	32
Team	3Outs	3Outs/Drive	Rank	DVOA	Rank
PIT	41	23.4%	17	-18.5%	1
IND	40	23.1%	18	8.2%	24
NO	38	22.9%	19	-2.6%	9
BAL	41	22.7%	20	-7.9%	4
CAR	42	22.3%	21	1.8%	16
DET	41	22.2%	22	6.6%	22
ATL	38	21.7%	23	1.2%	12
BUF	40	21.5%	24	10.1%	28
DEN	39	20.6%	25	19.6%	30
DAL	34	18.9%	26	9.9%	27
ARI	37	18.7%	27	8.2%	25
NE	32	18.3%	28	4.7%	18
TEN	32	17.7%	29	-4.0%	8
CLE	29	16.9%	30	4.1%	17
TB	29	16.8%	31	6.9%	23
HOU	28	16.7%	32	21.0%	31

Right now, the one new item we're trying to put into KUBIAK for 2011 is the ability to give different point values to receptions at different positions. Are people interested in projections of three-and-outs? Will you use those in your leagues? What other new stats would people like to see us try to project?