Taking Ownership: A Statistical Look at 10 Years of Daniel Snyder's Redskins

You can't win a championship unless you go to the playoffs, so I figured the first number to look at would be number of playoff appearances.

In his ten years as owner, Dan Snyder has led the Redskins to the playoffs three times: 2007, 2005, 1999.

In the ten years before Snyder bought the Redskins, the team went to the playoffs three times: 1990, 1991, 1992. In the 1991 season, the Redskins won the Super Bowl (which was technically held in '92).

I think this number actually puts Snyder in a slightly favorable light. His arrival marked an immediate improvement.

The Skins went to the playoffs for the first time in seven years. He then had a five-year drought, but has gone to the playoffs twice in the past four years.

This is especially impressive considering how tough the NFC Beast has become recently.

So, Snyder has brought the Redskins to the playoffs as many times in his first 10 years as the Cookes did in their final ten years, but Snyder didn't win a ring like the Cookes did.

In the final ten years of the Cooke era ('89-'98) the Redskins won 79 out of 160 regular season games, giving them a winning percentage of .494 and an average season of 7.9 wins, 8.1 losses.

In Snyder's first ten seasons as owner ('99-'08) the Redskins have won 76 out of 160 regular season games, giving them a winning percentage of .475 and an average season of 7.6 wins, 8.4 losses.

So, the team has been a little bit worse under Snyder's direction than the Cookes', but it hasn't been a monumental downfall.

Nonetheless, any record under .500 is unacceptable. Snyder has earned his reputation for mediocrity in overall record. Not only that, but Snyder's mediocrity is spread out over his tenure.

The Skins won 38 games in his first five years ('99-'03) and 38 games in his next five years ('04-'08).

One thing that deserves to be mentioned, though, is how Snyder's first five years were actually better than the Cookes' last five years as owner.

The Redskins averaged 1.2 more wins per season from '99-'03 than they did from '94-'98.

Another regular complaint against Snyder is that his teams are erratic. They go up and down in performance and rarely ever find an identity. The two notable examples being the incredible playoff runs in 2005 and 2007.

On a season-to-season basis, that statement is a mix of true and false. After his first season as owner in 1999, the team had a steady downward trend in wins for the next four years, with one stable year.

In '99 the Redskins won 10 games. In '00, they won 8. In '01, they won 8. In '02, they won 7, and in '03, they won 5. While that it's a terrible season-to-season trend, it's not exactly erratic, with deltas of -2, 0, -1, -2.

The next five years are a different story. In '04, the Redskins won 6 games, one more than the previous year. In '05, they won 10 games. In '06, they won 5. In '07, they won 9. In '08, they won 8.

That's a much more erratic span. The deltas are 1, 4, -5, 4, -1. So, the Redskins have been less predictable the past half decade than they were the half decade before that.

Another way to look at it, though, is that the Redskins have been better than they were the previous year in three out of the past five seasons.
If it wasn't for the disaster that was 2006, Snyder's recent history would actually be looking pretty good and pretty stable.

The Skins have improved an average .6 games per season over the past five years even including '06, and that average leaps to 2 wins per season if '06 didn't exist.

Also, while the number of wins bounce around a lot more in the past half decade, the standard deviation in wins over that span isn't horrifically worse than Snyder's first half-decade as owner: 2.1 to 1.8.

From all of this, my conclusion is that Snyder's teams have been somewhat erratic in recent years, but besides the terrible season of 2006 (a wart that can't be overlooked), his teams have been much improved in the past few years than his earlier years as owner.

HOWEVER, there's one pretty big reason I think Snyder's reputation as erratic is unjustified, which I share on the next slide.

(That's Heath Shuler, ladies and gentlemen.)

Though Dan Snyder's 10 years here have been wild and unpredictable, they've been significantly less wild and unpredictable than the 10 years before that.

Twice in a row, the Cooke-owned Redskins lost five games more than they did the previous year; from 1991 to 1993, the Redskins plummeted from 14 wins to 4 wins. Even Snyder's biggest flop years haven't come close to matching that.

How much more erratic, season-to-season, was the '89-'98 decade than the '99-'08 decade? Nearly twice as much. The standard deviation in wins during Snyder's reign has been 1.8 wins. The standard deviation from '89-'98 was 3.2 wins.

It's crazy to think that Snyder's antics have somehow resulted in a more stable team than the one he initially bought in 1999, but the numbers say maybe they have.

The most important part of the Redskins season, in this fan's opinion, is "The Rivalry." Redskins vs. Cowboys. And this is probably the harshest stat of all against Snyder.

From '89-98, the Redskins went 9-11 against Dallas.

From '99-08, the Redskins went 6-14 against Dallas, including a heartbreaking 1-11 streak (extended back through the Cooke era, it was actually 1-14).

However, the recent history and future are bright. The Redskins are 5-3 against the Cowboys since that incredible Monday night game when Joe Gibbs and the Redskins ended the losing streak. (By the way, that's the most satisfying sports event I've ever watched on television live.)

'89-98 never had a 5-3 run against the Cowboys, so the past four years, '04-'08, is the best four year span the Redskins have been in the rivalry for two decades.

Before I move on, I want to talk about some of the numbers I'm discussing in the upcoming slides.

This is where the stats get a little bit more confusing, because I talk about team rank in the NFL.

The reason it gets tricky is because the NFL had 31 teams in the first three years of Snyder's reign as owner, '99-'01, as opposed to the current 32.

A ranking of 1 means the best results in the league in that stat, a ranking of 32 (or 31, pre-2002) means the worst in the league in that stat.

I also discuss something I call "corresponding expected win percentage"-- or CEWP, so it's easier to type and read -- of different team rankings.

Essentially, this number tries to answer the question of what the Redskins winning percentage would be if wins and losses were determined solely by the final result of this ranking.

This number equals 1.000 if the Redskins have a team rank of 1 and .000 if they have a rank of 32. It scales linearly in between these two numbers, with a really simple formula of 1.0323-0.0323*rank.

I realize this is an incredibly flawed way of thinking about it on so many levels. First, the best team in the NFL doesn't usually finish 16-0 and the worst team doesn't usually finish 0-16, and the records are certainly not distributed linearly over the win counts.

Next, for my own mental sanity (remember my warning that I'm an amateur at stats), I didn't adjust the years of 1999-2001 when there were 31 teams. That means a CEWP from those years should be slightly better than it actually is.

Finally, it doesn't consider match-ups. It just takes the final rank, nothing else considered, and churns out an expected win percentage.

I know all of these flaws in this arbitrary stat that I made up on the spot (which may or may not have a real-life counterpart used by real statisticians), but it's still interesting to me, so I'm going to use it for the sake of discussion.

Also, these next few slides shift the focus from comparing to the pre-Snyder Redskins to comparing to the rest of the NFL, since that's the point of these stats.

(Please note that, due to my incompetency in making graphs from spreadsheets, the following graphs go back in time from left to right, and are misleading in that lower value is better. Sorry.)

The first team ranking I want to look at is point differential, because it seems like the stat that would best correlate to winning.

During Snyder's tenure, the Redskins have averaged a rank of 19.3 in turnover differential. If you turn that into CEWP, you get .409, which is notably worse than their actual winning percentage of .475.

So, the Redskins haven't scored and prevented scoring very well. This means blowout losses and close wins.

The Redskins' best point differential year under Snyder was the first, 1999, a playoff year, when the team ranked eighth. That would give them a CEWP of .774, meaning their 10-6 record is a bit worse than it probably should have been.

This suggests '99 was Snyder's best year overall, which is a sad thought. Remember that I'm an optimistic fan, one who hopes his team has been improving. But they've never matched that early number in the Snyder era.

Of the nine other years in the Snyder era, the Redskins have been ranked in the 20s for six of them. The worst of these years was 2004 when the Redskins ranked 29th, with an abysmal CEWP of .096.

It seems the Skins' six wins (.375) that season were mostly thanks to good defense; they finished ranked in the fifth in scoring defense but 31st in scoring offense. Ouch.

The only years the Redskins didn't finish ranked in the 20s were 2000 (16th) and (unsurprisingly) the two recent playoff years, 2005 (11th) and 2007 (12th).

But, overall, the Redskins have had a pretty bad point differential since Snyder bought the team. It almost suggests they're lucky they haven't lost more games. It also confirms the Redskins have been pretty erratic these past five years.

I've also included in this graph the yardage differential, which matches point differential pretty well with a few years as exceptions. Some of the reasons for these occasional gaps I detail in the next slide.

There's no doubt that the Redskins have been, in general, pretty pitiful on offense since Snyder acquired the team in 1999.

The average ranking in offensive points has been 21.1 (CEWP .350) and in offensive yards has been 17.2 (CEWP .477). These numbers are pretty striking.

First, it shows that the Redskins' ability to win over the past decade has matched their ability to produce on offense, looking at the Redskins' winning percentage of .475.

Next, it shows that the Redskins haven't been able to capitalize points to match their yardage production. This shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who has watched the Skins closely the past decade. That's been, perennially, one of the Redskins biggest problems, if not their biggest problem.

It's in part a knock on the offense, that they can't produce where it counts (the scoreboard), but the blame should be shifted more broadly than that.

The defense and special teams are also to blame, since field position plays a big role in a team's ability to score on any given drive.

It makes sense how a bad offensive point ranking would be at least somewhat the defense and special teams' "fault."

If the Redskins produce 40 yards on offense, the result is different if the drive began at the opponent's 40 following an interception or big punt return rather than their own 15 after a downed punt.

This matches everything I've observed about the Redskins since I started watching them closely around the turn of the millennium.

Like point differential, the best year for the Skins was Snyder's first, 1999, when they put up a killer 2nd overall ranking in points and yards (CEWP.968).

The ugly duckling year for the offense was again 2004, with cellar rankings of 31st in points (CEWP .031) and 30th in yards (CEWP .063).

(RIP Sean Taylor, one of the greatest Redskins safeties ever.)

While the Redskins' offenses have been a weak point recently, the defenses have been reliably solid... mostly. The Redskins have ranked 4th, 8th, 9th, and 3rd yards allowed in '08, '07, '05, and '04. But in 2006, they ranked 31st. I can't even explain why that would happen. Even a couple of injuries wouldn't result in that harsh a drop.

Snyder's first five years as owner saw much less consistency at defense. The Redskins bounced around from 30th to 4th to 10th to 5th to 25th in yards allowed from 1999 through 2003.

Overall, Snyder-era defense has been pretty good. The Redskins have averaged ranks of 14.7 (CEWP .557) in points allowed and 12.9 in yards allowed (CEWP .616)

The Redskins' turnover differential has been pretty poor recently, but has been only barely sub-average over the ten years that Snyder has owned the Redskins.

Overall, the Skins have averaged a 16.5 turnover differential ranking in the league (.499 CEWP).

Turnovers have been the most inconsistent ranking for the Redskins. They've seen season-end rankings as poor as 29th (2002) and as impressive as 4th (1999) with all sorts of variety.

I see very little pattern in this season-by-season ranking. As I get discuss in the next slide, it hasn't been a great predictor of how many games the team is winning.

I honestly expected it to be. I don't really see a pattern to this stat that really should be a crucial one.

After going through and looking at all of the stats and their CEWP's throughout Snyder's decade, I became curious which rankings most closely matched the Redskins' win totals. So, here are the best and worst indicators for how well the Skins have done the past decade.

The value provided is a basic R-squared correlation.

Point differential: 77%
Yardage differential: 51%
Offensive points: 32%
Offensive yards: 31%
Turnover differential: 14%
Defensive points: 12%
Devensive yards: 5%

What do these numbers mean?

Over the past decade, success on offense has correlated to wins more often than success on defense has correlated to wins. Turnover differential has pretty poorly correlated to the Redskins' success.

And, least surprising of all, scoring more than opponents and gaining more than opponents have happened during wins.

I want to include one final graph. This one includes not only number of wins by season by season, but CEWP*16 -- that is, expected wins if each ranking were the sole determiner of victory.

[here's a bigger, more clear version]

From this, and from what I've gone over the past 11 slides, I want to draw some conclusions and summaries about the Redskins over the first 10 years of Dan Snyder's tenure.

Dan Snyder has not been a terrible owner, according to wins and losses. He's been a slight step down from Jack Kent Cooke and the Cooke Foundation if you look at their final 10 years of ownership.

The best, and most unusual, year under Snyder's ownership was his first, 1999. It was far and away the best their offense has been, and about the worst their defense has been.

The statistically most well-rounded year under Snyder was 2005, which is kind of bizarre considering its chaotic, turnaround nature. And the worst, most poorly-rounded year was 2006. Very frustrating.

Snyder's 'Skins struggled against the Cowboys early in his tenure, but has really turned it around the past four years.

Unsurprisingly, the stat that has most tied to success for Snyder over the past decade has been point differential. Turnovers and defense have been less important than offense in correlating to the Redskins' success.

As volatile as the team has been over the past few years, it's still not as volatile as the Redskins were from 1989-1998.

On average, the Redskins have been improving over the past half decade whereas they got worse per year on average during Snyder's first five years as owner.

Snyder's antics seem to have had an immediately positive impact on the Redskins, as his first year was their best in a long time, and his first five years averaged 1.2 more wins per season than the previous five years had.

All in all, I think these conclusions shine a more positive light on him than sports media likes to portray. Though the teams under his ownership have been far from great, they've been pretty close to average, and seem to be improving.

Of course, this article simply evaluates his team's results under his ownership, not his ownership itself. That's a different story for a different day. If I ever write that story, though, I'll definitely keep his numeric results in mind.

(Please share your thoughts, responses, and suggestions in the comments.)