Football geeks: your 10,705 field goals are ready

EVERY NFL FIELD GOAL SINCE 2002

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ADDENDUM: This Decision Science News post was covered by Bloomberg TV!

We looked at NFL punts before on Decision Science News. That’s old news. Field goals are the new hotness and Super Bowl Sunday is coming up, so let’s look at a kicker’s chances.

We’ve taken the same database and looked at the probability of getting the ball through the uprights depending on the yard line from which the kick starts. The result is above.

O data, you are so beautiful sometimes.

Those in need of a handy formula for the sidelines might want to use the following approximation. Let D be the yard line you are on:

• If D>50, you will miss
• Otherwise, your probability of making a field goal is about 1-.0004*D^2

We tried to fit a logit model, but it wasn’t pretty.

Speaking of beauty, one big data lesson is that data are more beautiful when binned. Here’s the more raw version:

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It seems coaches are aware of the maximum distance at which they have a prayer of making a field goal, and don’t even try otherwise:

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Graphs were made in R using Hadley Wickham’s ggplot2 package. Pointer to the data can be found at our previous post.

ADDENDUM:

Reader Anders made a chart that looks at the count of good and bad field goals by distance (yard line + 17):

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ADDENDUM
We changed the model we had originally posted for one with just 1 free parameter. Here’s the fit:

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ADDENDUM

Some folks have asked if some of the longer attempts are noise. It appears so. Here are the descriptions of the attempts from behind the 50 yard line. On a regular attempt, the distance of the field goal is the yard line plus 17, so the case where the yard line is 86 and the field goal distance is suppose to be 68 yards, for example, seems to be a typo.

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