Time again to review who have been the best offenses over the last three years – we have found that many schools or even coordinators have an amazing track record of producing numbers every year and that should help narrow your focus on Draft Day.

This study uses team stats, not individual stats so this is not a tool to use by itself, you still need to do your depth chart research to layer upon this – for instance Navy led the nation the last three years in yards rushing but they usually split carries among four players. Expect that I will do that for our Preseason Owner Manual, but for now I wanted to put the stats on the site. As a quick back story, I have gone back to 2000 and ranked each college football offense on three variables:

• Yards per play (YPP) to gauge big-play ability
• Yards per game (YPG) since yards equal fantasy points
• Touchdowns per game (TDG) since we shouldn’t care so much about kicker points and defensive TDs.

The final step involves adding up those ranks to achieve a raw score (lower the better), then ranking the resulting raw score. For teams that get a lot of yards but do not score enough, the resulting ranks will balance out and penalize inefficient offenses.

While that gives solid insight to an individual year, I wanted to look at a longer trend to smooth for outlier years (whether UCLA 2005 to the upside or Notre Dame’s Gabriel-like fall from grace last year). Remember the goal here is to increase your probability of predicting excellent stats, and if you have any children or work with youths you know it is hard enough to predict their behavior in life let alone on a football field in front of 25,000 or 100,000 fans.

So why not look at what schools have the best track record, not just one big year? I specifically used three years since that is the usual cycle of an impact player’s career (and lately a coach also). Either a freshman sits then has three years of starting, or comes in as a freshman and heads off to the NFL early. Or Bobby Petrino gets a wild hair and leaves in three years or less.

I added a momentum indicator this year – rather than my usual preference for equal weighting each year’s performance (DYN score), recent years received extra weight in a new calculation (DYNW). 2007 rank was given triple weight, 2006 double weight, and 2005 remained as is.

Stay tuned for some additional observations on this and many other items in the 2008 Owner’s Manual.

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Related posts:

1. Fantasy Dynasties
2. The 2005 Fantasy All-Americans
3. 2008 College Football Offensive Dynasty Report
4. Best College Football Offenses – Get with the programs
5. Top 13 fantasy college football games for 2008

Tags: Quantitative Analysis, Stats