Scoring Summary through Week 7

© Copyright 2008, Paul Kislanko

Scoring statistics are the most stable things one can measure in division one sports. Average points scored and allowed tend to change only with rules changes that affect equipment (bats, in D1 baseball) or scoring opportunities (three point line in hoops, clock management and kickoff location in football.)

For D1 football, prior to 2006 the average number of points per game was a little over 52, with the average score being about 35-17. The clock rules in effect in 2006 reduced the total by nearly a touchdown, and increased the average margin of victory. In 2007, the statistics returned to their historical levels.

The rules were changed again for 2008, and games are measurably shorter in terms of average number of plays, Scoring, though, is only a point per game or so below the historical levels, and the average margin to total score ratio is nearly exactly at its historical value.

It is also historically true that the scoring statistics are not the same for different categories of games. It is worth noting what they look like when the division is divided into categories made up of teams "like" each other:

Scoring Summary through Week 7
(Through games of 11 October)

Category Games Vis Home      Vwin Hwin      VWP HWP      Wscore Lscore      MOV Total
D1 v D1 675 22.09 29.57   251 424   0.372 0.628   34.95 16.71   18.24 51.67
                             
FCSvFCS 351 20.97 31.17   114 237   0.325 0.675   35.53 16.61   18.91 52.14
FBSvFBS 324 23.31 27.85   137 187   0.423 0.577   34.33 16.82   17.51 51.15
                               
nBCSvnBCS 200 22.50 29.44   80 120   0.400 0.600   35.02 16.92   18.10 51.94
BCSvBCS 124 24.61 25.27   57 67   0.460 0.540   33.22 16.66   16.56 49.88
(See Interdivisional Results for other category averages.)

Home field advantage may not mean as much as most think. While it is true that for some teams with respect to some opponents, the advantage is real and possibly large, the "big picture" view is that the home team wins more often just because the weaker team is more likely to accept a payday game at the stronger team's location (because 70-100 thousand-seat stadiums provide more revenue than 5-30 thousand-seat stadiums, if for no other reason.)

Worth noting with respect to the apparent conclusion:

  1. The FCS v FCS category should probably be split into FCS-scholarship and FCS-non-scholarship the same way FBS v FBS is broken out by BCS AQ conference vs BCS non-AQ conference, but I don't have that programmed.
  2. The BCS v BCS (meaning team from BCS-AQ conference vs team from BCS-AQ conference) bucket will become larger as more teams play conference games. There aren't that many enough BCS v BCS interconference games.

Averages don't tell the whole story, so we look at the distributions of MOV and points scored by each team.

ΔScore:   0-8 9-16 17-24 25-32 33-40 41-48 49-56 57-64 65-72 80+
#Games:   119 50 56 51 25 16 3 3 1  
%   36.73 15.43 17.28 15.74 7.72 4.94 0.93 0.93 0.31
Cum%   36.73 52.16 69.44 85.19 92.9 97.84 98.77 99.69 100  
                     
Score: 0 2-8 9-16 17-24 25-32 33-40 41-48 49-56 57-64 65-72 80+
Wins 0 2 17 57 76 67 64 28 7 5 1
Losses 15 54 88 96 56 12 2 1 0 0 0
#Times 15 56 105 153 132 79 66 29 7 5 1
WP 0.0 3.6 16.2 37.3 57.6 84.8 97.0 96.6 100.0 100.0 100.0

(FBS vs FBS only)

Lowest winning score: 13-Sep Auburn 3 at Mississippi St 2 (Also fewest total points)
Highest losing score: 20-Sep Fresno St 55 at Toledo 54 (Also most total points)
Highest margin of victory: 30-Aug Idaho 0 at Arizona 70
2nd fewest total points: 27-Sep Western Michigan 7 at Temple 3
2nd largest MOV: 6-Sep California 66 at Washington State 3

More than one in three of all games are decided by less than one score, and more than half by two or fewer scores. Teams scoring less than 25 points win only 23.1 percent of the time, but teams scoring more than 17 but less than 25 have won more than a third of the times that was their score.