The Northern California Symposium on Statistics and Operations Research in Sports (NCSSORS) was held at Menlo College last Saturday. I had the honor of presenting a saframetrics poster– The Best Scoring Placekickers in the NFL– which received much attention and discussion. After this success, I am preparing a manuscript which I hope will be published by the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.

One highlight of the symposium was a panel discussion that featured Football Outsiders’ Aaron Schatz, Gilbert Fellingham, Sam Hinkie of the Houston Rockets and moderated by Mike Pesca. All the panelists are successfully bringing quantitative methods to sport.

Apart from my contribution, other saframetric presentations were made:

• Optimizing Football Game Play Calling by Jeremy Jordan
• Quantifying NFL Coaching: A Proof of New Growth Theory by Kevin Braig
• Indecision in the pocket: an analysis of the relative success of fast and slow quarterbacking passing decisions by Elizabeth Veinott and Shane Mueller
• Assessing Methods for College Football Rankings by Jerome Keating
• A Statistical Analysis of NFL Quarterback Rating Variables by Derek Stimel

I plan to contact these individuals to see if they would consider discussing their work on this blog.

Field goals (FGs) and point-after-touchdowns (PATs) account for approximately one-third of all scoring in the NFL. Many times the scoring opportunities represented by field goal attempts change the course of a game. Given their often critical effect on game outcomes, many people want to estimate the likelihood that any particular field goal attempt is successful.

On this subject, in 1998, Christopher Bilder and Thomas Loughlin published in Chance magazine the article, ‘”It’s Good!” An Analysis of the Probability of Success for Placekicks’.

In the NFL, goalposts are placed at the back of a 10-yard end zone, and the ball is usually hiked about 7 yards behind the line of scrimmage to be held for a placekick. Thus, to the yard line number, 17 yards are usually added to approximate the horizontal distance a kicked ball must travel. For example, when the ball is placed at the line of scrimmage at the 10-yard line, the distance of a FG attempt would be reported as 27 yards.

For PAT attempts, the ball is placed at the 2-yard line. Apart from the number of points rewarded (3 for FGs, 1 for PATs), a PAT try is equivalent to a 19-yard FG try.

Bilder and Loughlin examined data from the 1995-1996 NFL regular season. Within those data were more than 1,700 FG and PAT attempts.

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