Pro Football's Most Important Stat

September, 2000

What's the quickest way to measure the effectiveness of a team's offense? We ran every National Football League game from 1960 to last year's Super Bowl through our computer, Mad Max, looking for the statistic that best correlates with winning in the NFL. Max's answer was clear and emphatic: yards per pass.Not total yards passing, or even yards per pass attempt, which includes sacks, but just plain yards per pass. Take the gross number of yards gained in the air and divide by the number of throw...

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