Offense sells tickets, and defense wins championships A hypothesis test of American football

Specialeforsvar ved Christian Ludvigsen

 

 

Offense sells tickets, and defense wins championships

A hypothesis test of American football

 

 

In American football one of the most known sayings is that ’offense sells tickets, and defense wins championships’. In this master thesis we have tried to examine if this is true, and further investigated how the offense and defense is performing when you split each into running and passing plays. We have done this based on the teams winning percentage and yards in each season. In the end we have also looked at how turnovers affect your winning percentage and then splitting these into fumbles and turnovers. Our results are similar to previous studies in the

fact that offense and defense are of equal importance for your winning percentage. When the offense and defense is split into running and passing plays, there is no evidence that running or passing is of greater importance than the other. For turnovers there is a greater negative effect of making turnovers on offense than the positive effect for making them on defense. In splitting turnovers into interceptions and fumbles, interceptions shows a greater impact on your winning percentage. We found that with regards to attendance the offensive production is more correlated

than defensive production. But we also found that winning games is significantly more linked with selling tickets. Especially the winning percentage from the previous year showed the greatest correlation to the attendance.

 

 Vejleder:   Christian Hjorth-Andersen, Ø.I.

Censor:     Bodil Olai Hansen, CBS