Week 1 Analysis: Yards Per Attempt Correlates With Victory

Just a quick update.  I did a quick analysis of the winning percentage for teams with favorable yards per attempt.   The results for annual win % since 1995 are in the graph below (table 1-a).

Table 1-a

Clearly, there is a trend here.  Teams with favorable yards per attempt win at a 70%-80% clip.  (I think there's something wrong with my 2001 data - I had a smaller sample). 

So....in week 1 of the 2009 season what was the winning percentage for teams with favorable yards per attempt?  71.4%.  

This statistic is proving to be a stronger "predictor" of victory than I ever imagined.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Table 1-b shows the winning % by week for teams with a favorable yards per attempt differential.  Again, I'm not sure what's up with my 2001 data, but I'll see if I can fix that.

The stats are pretty consistent.  Teams who win the yards per attempt battle win more than 2 out of every three games.