In April of 2008 former football coach turned analyst Terry Bowden wrote a piece for Yahoo Sports entitled "Coaching by the Numbers" that centered upon what metrics mattered the most for college football programs and how best to win.
The gist of the article centers around his chart that depicts how the Top 10 college football teams in 2007 finished in a variety of statistical categories. The matrix highlights to the right how many top programs finished in the Top 10, Top 25, etc. for each category (e.g. Rushing Offense, Passing Offense, etc.)
Bowden provides a more detailed chart as well for those interested (click here).
Per Bowden's analysis he concludes that Rushing Defense is the single most important statistic in explaining the success of a college football program. His rationale is that five of the overall Top 10 teams in 2007 finished in the Top 10 for Rushing Defense and all ten of the Top 10 finished in the Top 25.
Second most in terms of importance (based off of the Top 25 Teams) is Scoring Defense according to Bowden.
The chart is an impressive compilation of data organized in an effective visual manner. I applaud Terry Bowden for compiling the list and sharing it with public.
I even tend to agree with the general conclusion that metrics such as rush defense, scoring defense, and turnover performance "tend" to be a good predictor of success in college football. However those areas are no guarantee of success and of course Bowden does not make that claim.
An aspect of Bowden's analysis that concerned me however was the problem that it only included data for the Top 10 teams and not the entire set of Division I college football teams. Thus the sample size seems too small to draw any conclusions and at the very least opens up some further questions.
In order to be more robust, I thought the analysis should look at the middle and bottom teams as well as see if the opposite is true for the extreme case, etc. Out of curiosity I decided to see what would happen to the hypothesis of Mr. Bowden in two different dimensions.
Number one I wanted to see what would occur if the data set were expanded to include all 119 Division I teams in 2007. Number two I wanted to statistically correlate each of the categories above versus "wins" to see what type of quantitative relationship was exhibited.
In other words, instead of just noting that five of the Top 10 Teams were in the Top 10 for Rushing Defense I wanted to see how strongly that metric correlated with wins using simple regression analysis.
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