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The Effect of Total Offensive Yards on College Football Game Win Probabilities

        Even someone who knows absolutely nothing about sports could tell you that “the best offense is a good defense.” This adage expands outside the realm of sports into the world of strategy and combat. However, if you compare the draft ranks and salaries of defensive players to offensive players in the National Football League (NFL), it could lead you to question this assertion. What about college football, though?

        Show your brothers and your dad this data, and urge them to consider defensive players more heavily when making picks from the Fantasy Football draft next year. Our data proves and discovers that relatively, the defense preventing yards is more valuable for the game outcome than the offense gaining yards. Who would've thought? The tables below go into more detail on how much of an effect each single variable has on the game.

        Formally, we examine the effect of one particular key statistic, total offensive yards, on the outcome of a football game. Our measure of total yards includes every single yard gained by a team’s offense: the sum of net passing yards and net rushing yards. Using the data from college football games, from a sample period of the 2004 - 2020 seasons, we estimate the effect of total offensive yards on the probability of winning a game, with a number of control variables included in the model as well. Additionally, we compare the effect of a team’s total offensive yards on its win probability to the effect of the opposing team’s total yards gained on the team of interest. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: the defense preventing the opposing team from gaining ten yards increases the win probability by slightly more than the offense gaining ten yards does.



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