How important is ST play relative to the other two phases?

[patsfaninpittsburgh]

If you leave FG accuracy out of it, which is mainly on the K/holder/LS, what would your 20% drop to?

How about if you took the punter and returners out as well?

What I'm driving at is trying to figure out whether the kick cover guys, or the guys who skillfully block the kick cover guys, are really all that important.

Special teams are more decisive than important. If one considers the number of games decided by a FG; one has to accept that minutes of offense/defense were required to get to that point.

Special Teams TD's are "big plays". It's amazing thew winning percentage when teams get SP big plays. Also, last year during their losing streak, the Steelers gave an non offense TD (mostly returns).

 

[SanAngeloState]

which would you rather have, great offense, great defense and average st...or great special teams and average offense or defense?

the difference between returning a punt 8 yards and 5 yards? about zero.

kickoffs the same.

if you have a FG kicker who simply can't kick, then it's a different story...but I'd say about 45/45/10.

 

[Crazy Patriot Guy]

I think you can make the argument that a great special teams or a horrible special teams can both have a very large effect on the outcome of a season.

Ask any Texans fan how important special teams are. Kris Brown missed two game-tying FGs that would have sent games into OT. When your team goes 9-7 and you miss the playoffs on tie-breakers, those two kicks become much more critical.

If you asked us this question after the Pats-Raiders playoff game, I think you'd clearly be getting some different responses than you are now.

Again, I think both extremes obviously show up more in the eyes of fans.

 

[BradyFTW!]

I think it's almost tautological that offense and defense are of equal or almost equal importance. After all, the purpose of one is to make the other unsuccessful, and vice-versa.

Anything good that one can do, the other can in principle negate and prevent.

Pre-2005, I'd agree with you. But defenses have been neutered for the last 5 years, to the point that the best offenses, if they're having even a pretty good game, can't really be stopped. If you match up a good offense on a good day against a good defense on a good day, the offense will win that matchup, since covering receivers is now illegal.

 

[Bostonian1962]

The ST plays that matter are:

Kickoffs (receiving or covering)
Punts (ditto)
FGs (attempting or defending)

PATs almost always succeed, so I'm not counting those.

There's probably an average of a little under once such play per drive. Most drives start with one. (Exceptions = TO, TO on downs.) Few drives have two. (Exceptions = successful FG attempts -- the unsuccessful FG attempt was the start of the next drive )

FGs and punts are pretty rarely blocked -- indeed, I'm not sure if trying hard to block punts is even a good idea the way the penalties are these days. That said, the Pats have basically won a couple of games in the BB era due to blocked FGs, including one AFC Championship game.

The difference between being really good or really bad on kickoffs or punts (either side of the ball) is an average of a few yards per play.

So the "1/3" of the game that is STs -- if you take out the performance of the kicker/holder/longsnapper, just what fraction of the game is it? I'm thinking in the 15% range ...

I think it's more important than 15%, but am not sure what % to put on it. There has got to be an advantage to Ghost being so automatic on FGs. It's got to be huge that he has such a big leg, and teams are starting off drives in lesser positions than they would otherwise.

Ditto with a great cover team that cause teams to start in poor field positions.

This kid Mesko the team drafted not only has a huge leg, but is great laying the ball down inside the 20. You know how irked we've been the last several years with our punting. Well, this improvement has got to be fairly important I would think.

 

[Patjew]

I'd say it's 50-45-28.

 

[PatsFanSince74]

...
The difference between being really good or really bad on kickoffs or punts (either side of the ball) is an average of a few yards per play.

So the "1/3" of the game that is STs -- if you take out the performance of the kicker/holder/longsnapper, just what fraction of the game is it? I'm thinking in the 15% range ...

This is a really interesting question and one that no doubt can be answered as the statistics gathered on NFL football begin to rival those collected in MLB.

I'm sure other analysis has been done, but the only analysis that I have reviewed related to Special Teams play is done by Bob Carroll, Pete Palmer and John Thorn in "The Hidden Game of Football: The Next Edition," published in 1998. I have gone on about the strengths and weaknesses of this book in other posts out here, so I'll keep this short and say that, IMHO, it's a great start, but incomplete for both practical and statistical reasons.

But, that said, it is the only analysis I've read that gets to part of the question asked by Fencer.

They devote an entire Chapter to analyzing Special Teams' play, which they narrowly define as trying to determine the Advantage or Disadvantage gained/lost by a team because of their play on both sides of the ball on Punts and Kickoffs.

After a lengthy analysis, which I encourage you to read, they conclude that field position on Punts and Kickoffs by Special Teams (as narrowly defined immediately above) was worth a total of 33.4 points over the course of the season to the team that played best in this phase of the game (+2.1 points per game) and cost 48.9 points to the team that played it worst (-3.1 points per game), so a gap between the best and worst teams of 82.3 points in a single season, or, with rounding, 5.2 points per game.

That suggests two things:

One, it supports Fencer's intuition that "The difference between being really good or really bad on kickoffs or punts (either side of the ball) is an average of a few yards per play."

Two, it points out that teams with dominant offenses and/or defenses are less dependent on Special Teams, on average (!), than other teams (I emphasize "on average" because obviously a big special teams play can still impact a close game). For example, in the NFL last season, the median differential between "Points For" and "Points Against" was around +10 points, in total (ranging from +169 for the Saints to -261 for the Rams). However, the Standard Deviation around the median is very high (119.3) suggesting what every fan intuitively understands, that many factors are at work here. But, it does clearly suggest that Special Team play (as defined above) can have a larger bearing on the performance of teams without a dominant offense or defense.

I'm not endorsing this as Gospel, but it makes some intuitive sense to me. As a range, a two or three point a game advantage or disadvantage because of performance on Kickoffs and Punts by Special Teams play feels right to me. The Average number of Points scored by an NFL team last year was 343.5. Carroll's "best" team with a 33.4 point advantage would have benefited roughly 10% (9.7%) from Special Teams play, without taking into account FG's kicked.

But, assigning percentages for Offense, Defense and Special Teams would have to vary by team. Teams that put up relatively few points with their Offense could still have a better record than that would suggest because of the play of their Special Teams.

Carroll leaves the impact of Field Goals out of his analysis because he analyzes the FG decision differently, spending many pages to develop the logic that coaches far too often opt to kick when they should "go for it" according to the statistics. In other words, it is his view that putting up three points is frequently the wrong decision and, therefore, that simply adding up points off of FG's would misrepresent the role that this aspect of Special Teams plays.