Total vs. Average, Part II

Last Friday, I suggested that teams with great running games don't typically have good passing games and that teams with great passing games don't typically have good running games, despite the commonly held belief that good passing opens up the ground game and good running opens up the passing game. To some extent, this is true, but if, say, Adrian Peterson has a great season in 2008, very little of that will likely be attributable to the improved Vikings' pass offense. After all, with a horrible passing offense in 2007, the team still ran for 2,634 yards and averaged 5.3 yards per carry. Bernard Berrian can't make that any better, can he?

My thoughts than went to the notion that a good rushing team might have good passing rate stats while a good passing team might have good rushing rate stats. In other words, high rushing totals begets high average yards per passing attempt, while high passing totals begets high average yards per rush. This is because a team that's good in one aspect of offense won't rack up big numbers in the other aspect but when they do use it, they might catch the opponents off-guard and have fair success.

I tried out my theory against team stats for 2007 and here's what I came up with:

Team	PassYds	RushAvg	RushYds	PassAvg
Arizona Cardinals	5	30	29	10
Atlanta Falcons	18	20	26	21
Baltimore Ravens	23	17	16	29
Buffalo Bills	30	18	15	22
Carolina Panthers	29	15	14	31
Chicago Bears	15	32	30	23
Cincinnati Bengals	7	28	24	7
Cleveland Browns	12	6	10	12
Dallas Cowboys	4	10	17	2
Denver Broncos	13	5	9	8
Detroit Lions	9	19	31	15
Green Bay Packers	2	12	21	3
Houston Texans	11	24	22	6
Indianapolis Colts	6	22	18	4
Jacksonville Jaguars	17	3	2	5
Kansas City Chiefs	20	31	32	27
Miami Dolphins	24	16	23	30
Minnesota Vikings	28	1	1	19
New England Patriots	1	14	13	1
New Orleans Saints	3	29	28	14
New York Giants	21	4	4	26
New York Jets	25	23	19	24
Oakland Raiders	31	13	6	25
Philadelphia Eagles	10	2	8	17
Pittsburgh Steelers	22	7	3	9
San Diego Chargers	26	8	7	18
San Francisco 49ers	32	11	27	32
Seattle Seahawks	8	26	20	13
St. Louis Rams	19	25	25	28
Tampa Bay Buccaneers	16	9	11	11
Tennessee Titans	27	21	5	20
Washington Redskins	14	27	12	16

This chart probably needs a little explanation. (Gee, ya think?) The categories, across the top, are team passing yards (discounting sacks), team yards per rush, team rushing yards, and team average yards per pass attempt. The numbers are each team's rank in that particular category.

The colors are meant to show the correlation between the two (potentially) like categories. For the total pass/rush avg. combo, red indicates the team was in the top half (1-16) in league rank for 2007. Orange signifies bottom half (17-32). For the total rush/pass avg. combo, green is top half, blue is bottom half. In theory, like colors should be next to each other in the chart: red-red and orange-orange in the left half and green-green/blue-blue in the right half.

At a glance, the matches seem iffy at best. Here's the breakdown:

Red-red: 7
Orange-orange: 7
Mix: 18

Green-Green: 7
Blue-Blue: 7
Mix: 18

Well, that's rather disappointing. All the trouble of a color-coded chart, and that's what I end up with? Maybe it's just that, for the teams that were best in rushing or passing, that success came because of the ineptness of the other side of the ball -- that certainly was the case with the Vikings -- and nothing was going to bring that part of the team "up to speed."

Still, it's worth noting that the concept that one part of the offense being very good will have a profound effect on the other is probably still overexaggerated. Of the top 12 rushing teams last year, only Philadelphia -- at #10 -- had a top-10 passing attack. Similarly, of the top 10 passing teams, it was Philly again that was the only team with a top-10 rushing game (#8), and they were only barely in the top 10. The New England Patriots, for all their offensive fireworks and big leads, only ranked #13 overall in rushing (and #14 in yards per carry).

So if you're thinking Tarvaris Jackson makes a great sleeper pick in fantasy football this year, don't hold your breath. If he does improvem it will be because of his continued maturity and experience and the addition of Bernard Berrian. It won't be because Adrian Peterson and Chester Taylor are making it significantly easier to pass. And I'm sure as heck not drafting Laurence Maroney in the first round again this year...