My NFL Quest

I've got a new quest in mind. The NFL has been on my mind a lot recently, for obvious reasons. Looking around, advanced NFL stats are rather hard to come by. At first I wanted to gain an understanding of an individual's contribution to the overall performance of his team. But this has many complications, mainly things like how do you separate a quarterbacks throws from the receivers' catches? After finding myself unable to answer this question, I started down a different path. One, that when complete, should help me get to the overall goal, individual contribution.

My quest, as it stands now is to estimate the true talent level on a team basis. I'll try to stick to as much sabremetric methods as possible, deviating only when I have to. By dealing on a team basis, we don't have to think about individuals, and that makes it easier. As answers arise and a team talent picture is formed, we can formulate ways to estimate individual contributions to a team.

So here's my quick outline of the direction I'm going in:
Goal 1: Give estimates of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd order win percentage.
Each successive order takes out another part of luck.

• First order is based on points margin, trying to take out the randomness of when the team scores.
• Second order is based on a statistic called expected points. Once point margin is estimated, we can use our first order expectation to find a second order win percentage. This takes out the randomness of whether the team scores when they should or scores when they shouldn't.
• Third order aims at taking out other forms of randomness, such as strength of schedule and park factors. Park factors are interesting, because as I was watching the Week 2 MNF game Saints @ 49ers, I wondered how much Candlestick park had to do with the Saints not throwing the ball well as they might have in the domes. Also, as it gets colder, does Lambeau Field get less pass-friendly? This is all park factors that will be included.

Some notes:

• The first round of "stabs" at these expectations will be rough, and will definitely need to be come back to. I'll keep a list of things I need to revisit and fiddle with. This way, we can get a rough clue and tweak it to make it right.
• I won't stick with theory the whole way. As Bill James said, sabremetrics isn't supposed to teach us anything new, so empirically fudging with equations might happen.
• Notation: Xp will refer to X represented in terms of points, usually points, and Xw will be X in terms of wins.
• Notation: For each winning percentage order, OW% will be my notation (O = order) thus 0W% = (W+L)/G, 1W% is first order, etc.

I hope you enjoy my findings as much as I enjoyed thinking about them!