What We Can Learn: NFL Team Scoring Output Per Drive

As we are pushing into July and further downhill towards the 2024 fantasy season, we are going to extend our top-down approach that started with a look at the state of leaguewide production and usage at each skill position for fantasy by looking at team performance and output.

The goal is that come late August, we have covered all corners of the fantasy Earth from a team, player, position, and game theory stance to accurately calibrate our draft strategy for this upcoming season.

Today, let’s dive into team performance and potential regression notes to apply to the 2024 campaign, looking at how the league and teams performed on a per-possession basis a year ago.

League-wide Scoring and Touchdown Rates per Drive Since 2010

*Drives excluding ones that ended in kneel-downs

As we highlighted when taking a top-down look at the league as a whole in 2023, last season was another down season for NFL offenses.

Offenses managed to score on just 37.1% of their possessions, the third consecutive season that scoring rate per drive dropped from the year prior after an all-time spike in 2020.

Last season, that scoring rate was the lowest since the 2017 campaign.

Offenses scored a touchdown on 21.3% of their drives, a rate that has also dropped from the previous season in three straight years and the lowest rate since 2017.

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Year-Over-Year R-Squared Correlation Per Drive Since 2010

As we start to move towards a more team-specific outlook, looking at the predictability of per-drive metrics offers a mixed bag.

Since 2010, 25% of a team’s scoring rate per drive can be explained by the output from the season prior.

Touchdown performance per drive is just below that mark while offensive scores per game take a step below the 20% mark.

When looking at just the teams at the top and bottom of the league in those seasons in the major categories, we can see that the more efficient offenses are more stable.

While our top-down correlations are not so strong that we are going to go all in on them from a blanket stance, top-10 teams in scoring efficiency fare better than bottom-rung teams in terms of rolling over their efficiency while teams at the bottom of the league are not as stable in being awful again.

That alone is inherently useful.

Not just for us having stronger convictions on offenses that were good.

It is easy to just look at a team and their lackluster output from a year prior and just write them off as terrible again.

There is surely a good amount of rebounding and recession towards the mean.

Despite there not being extremely reliable year-over-year correlations on the team level, there are still bulk trends to take away from things here that play into those splits.

Since the 2010 season, 68.9% of the teams that were below average in scoring rate per drive improved the following season.

Those teams averaged an average spike of 7.0% in scoring rate per drive the following season.

Those teams also averaged an increase in average touchdown rate per drive of +4.3% with an average increase of 9.5 offensive touchdowns per season.

Looking at the most recent NFL season, of the 16 teams that were in the back half of the league in scoring rate per drive in 2022, 10 improved that rate a year ago.

The Rams jumped to a top-10 scoring offense per drive after ranking 22nd in 2022.

The Bears, Saints, Buccaneers, and Texans all went from the bottom half of the league in 2022 all of the way into the top half of the league last season.

On the other side of things, 69.4% of teams in the top half of the league in scoring rate per drive suffered a decline in scoring rate the following season.

The silver lining, though, is that even though we should expect everyone’s favorite phrase of “regression to the mean” for high-scoring offenses from one season to the next, we do not have to panic.

Rarely do good offenses completely bottom out the following season, even with a recession.

49.5% of all top-10 scoring offenses have rolled over as top-10 again in the following season.

Only 32.3% fell to the back half of the league, and just 12.3% fell to the bottom 10.

With some of those bulk trends noted, let us dive into per-drive team production from the 2023 season with some takeaways we can apply heading into 2024.

2023 Team Per Drive Rates

*Drives excluding ones that ended in kneel-downs

Even though last season was a down year for scoring as a whole, we still managed a few standouts.

Dallas Cowboys

The Cowboys were the only offense to score on over half of their possessions last season, leading the league at 54.5% of drives ending in points.

Not only did that lead the league last season, but only six teams in the 2000s posted a higher rate in a season.

Every one of those six other teams had a decrease in scoring rate in the following season.

Not one of those six other teams came back and scored more touchdowns the following season.

Four of those six teams had a decrease of over double-digit touchdowns the next season.

There have been 20 other teams to score on 50% or more of their drives in the 2000s.

Just four of them scored 50% of the time or more again in the following campaign. Three of those were quarterbacked by Patrick Mahomes.

Of those 20 teams, only four scored more touchdowns the following year with the others having an average loss of 13 fewer touchdowns scored.

The Cowboys are an extremely top-heavy roster and walking a fragile edge of rolling over their elite efficiency from a year ago.

45% Scoring Club

The 49ers were right on the heels of the Cowboys, scoring on 49.7% of their possessions.

San Francisco has had some great offenses, and this was the highest scoring rate per drive that the organization has posted in the 2000s.

Two other teams (the Ravens and Dolphins) also scored on 45% or more of their drives last season.

Of the 72 other teams to score at an arbitrary rate of 45% or more in the 2000s, just nine of those teams scored at a higher rate the following season.

75% of those teams scored fewer touchdowns the following season.

30% TD Club

San Francisco also led the NFL in reaching the end zone on a league-high 36.8% of their drives.

Only 10 teams in the 2000s scored touchdowns at a higher rate.

Not one of those teams scored more touchdowns the following season.

Eight of those 10 teams had a touchdown decrease in the double digits.

Four other teams (the Cowboys, Lions, Dolphins, and Bills) scored a touchdown on over 30% of their drives last season.

There have been 57 other teams in the 2000s to score a touchdown on 30% or more of their drives.

Of those, just eight scored a touchdown at a higher rate in the following season.

44 of those teams scored fewer touchdowns in the next season with 31 of those teams seeing a decrease of touchdowns in the double-digits.

As noted in the open, we do not have to run completely away from any regression from these offenses as they are unlikely to bottom out, but we should anticipate a decrease in touchdown output from their 2023 totals for the crux of the group.

20% TD Club

We can also work in the opposite direction.

We had 16 different teams fail to score a touchdown on 20% of their drives.

That was the highest number of teams in that bucket since the 2011 season (17 teams).

Over the previous decade, 72.9% of those teams raised their touchdown rate per drive the following season with an average increase of +5.6% and an average spike of +9.0 touchdowns per season.

Of the 13 teams to score a touchdown on fewer than 20% of their drives in 2022, nine of them scored more touchdowns last season.

The Ravens (+20), Rams (+13), and Colts (+12) all had touchdown spikes in the double digits.

We will not run down all of the players here with depressed ADP based on their anemic offenses last season, but you should be looking for a dead-cat bounce for three-fourths of those teams in the table when value hunting as fantasy drafts move on.

The only team I will outright mention here is the Jets, who scored a touchdown on just 8.8% of their drives.

That was the lowest rate for any team in a season since 2011.

Just six teams in the 2000s posted a lower rate of touchdowns per possession.

Every single one of those teams came back not only with an improved rate in the following season, but all of those teams scored at least 11 or more touchdowns in the next season.

The 2011 Panthers being the mighty bounce back of all of those teams, scoring 31 more offensive touchdowns than the previous season.

30% Scoring Club

We also saw four teams (the Jets, Panthers, Giants, and Patriots) score points on fewer than 30% of their drives.

That lower-end threshold has been a strong area to target turnarounds.

Since 2010, there have been 69 other teams that have fallen below that threshold.

58 of them (84%) scored at a higher rate the following season.

Those teams saw an average increase in their scoring rate per drive of +8.3% while averaging +8.0 offensive touchdowns.

Looking back at the teams last season, the Broncos and Titans were the teams in that company.

The Titans did have an increase in scoring rate per drive but did score three fewer touchdowns in 2023 than they did in 2022.

Denver had more fortune, raising their scoring rate 7.0% in 2023 and scoring seven more offensive touchdowns than the year prior.

Scoring Distribution

Bringing this one home, the last section is not only going to look at the team scoring rate per drive but also how often those teams were converting those scores into touchdowns and who was solely kicking field goals when they did score points.

Percentage of Scoring Plays Being TDs Since 2010

After a run of at least 60% of the scoring plays being touchdowns over the 2018-2021 seasons, we have dipped in the rate of touchdowns per scoring play in each of the past two seasons.

In 2023, 57.3% of all scoring plays were touchdowns, the lowest rate since the 2017 season.

2023 Team Dispersal of Scoring Plays

Even in a depressed scoring season for the league as a whole, we did still have three teams (Lions, 49ers, and Dolphins) have over 70% of their scoring plays come via touchdowns.

The Lions were at 75%.

Just 12 other teams in the 2000s have had 75% or more of their scoring plays be the result of touchdowns.

Only one of those teams had a higher rate in the following season.

10 of those teams scored fewer touchdowns the next season with an average loss of 9.7 touchdowns per season among those teams.

There have been 60 other teams in the 2000s with 70% or more of their scoring plays being touchdowns.

45 of those teams scored fewer touchdowns the following season.

In 2022, the Eagles and Chiefs were the only teams in that arbitrary bucket.

The Eagles scored 11 fewer touchdowns last season than they did in 2022 while the Chiefs scored 22 fewer.

Not only did the Chiefs and Eagles score at a high rate per drive, but they scored touchdowns when they did.

The Jets and Sub-Par Seasons

The 2023 Jets were a disappointing offense on several levels, but they were an all-time lackluster unit in turning scoring plays into touchdowns.

Just 33.3% (18-of-54) of their scoring plays were the result of getting into the end zone.

That was the lowest rate for any team in the 2000s.

The previous low was Arizona at just 34.9% all the way back in 2005.

We have had just eight other teams in the 2000s have fewer than 40% of their scoring plays come via touchdowns.

All but one of those teams scored more touchdowns the following year while six of them had touchdowns climb in the double digits.

While the Jets were an all-time anemic touchdown-scoring unit in 2023, the Seahawks, Falcons, and Panthers, all joined them in having over 50% of their scoring plays come via field goals rather than touchdowns.

The Steelers and Bears were right at a 50/50 split.

Since 2010, there have been 60 other teams to have 50% or more of their scoring plays come via kicks.

Of those teams, 46 of them (76.7%) scored more touchdowns the following season with an average increase among those teams of +11.5 touchdowns per season.

In 2022, there were eight teams in this group.

The Jets and Panthers found themselves in that group again this past season, but the Ravens, Buccaneers, Colts, and Texans all had major spikes in regression and provided value for gamers.