What’s The Difference Between Traditional Stats and Advanced Stats in Football?

Traditional stats are stats that have been around for a long time and are easily recognizable. Some major ones for players are touchdown passes, interceptions, passing yards, receiving yards, receiving touchdowns, rushing yards, rushing touchdowns, sacks, tackles, and so forth. For teams, a couple of traditional ways is by ranking them by their total offense and total defense. These stats have been good at showing a good portion of the picture but leave out a lot of context that advanced stats add to the game. Traditional stats aren’t as good for the fact that not all passes are created equal. Not all touchdowns are created equal. Not all sacks or interceptions have equal difficulty, and so on.

Advanced stats have seen their popularity increase over the last few years because they account for factors and add context to the game that traditional stats do not have the ability to. For example, if a QB throws a perfect pass to a receiver or tight end and they drop it, there are advanced stats that account for that situation. The two that are probably the most popular are Pro Football Focus and NFL Next Gen Stats.

Pro Football Focus (PFF) has its own grading system for every player at each position and unique stats that further break down the players, and they watch every play of every game to develop their system. Some exclusive stats are Big Time Throw Percentage, which means throws that were of a high difficulty level and far down the field, and yards per route run.

NFL Next Gen Stats has their own unique stats but not a grading system. They still offer some interesting stats like 8+D % which the percentage of a running backs carries with eight or more defenders in the box. RYOE is rushing yards over expectation which looks at how many yards the back should get in total and per attempt. For receivers they have the players’ average cushion and separation. One of their passing stats includes xComp%, or expected completion percentage, and looks at what a QB’s completion percentage should’ve been.

Both traditional stats and advanced stats are good to look at and use. However, the advanced stats offer a deeper insight that is very necessary for evaluating players and teams for the present and future. Both are worth learning more about for any football fan that wants to know more about the game they love.