One way to evaluate either an offense or defense is to grade how each unit does on each individual drive. I’ve seen a number of ways of breaking drives down into “winners” and “losers”. Peter Alexieff, of our fellow SBNation site Field Gulls, segments drives into “successful”, “unsuccessful” and “money”. I like his approach but have modified it a bit by introducing “disaster” drives as well. The basic rules:
- A “money” drive ends in a touchdown... or a kneeldown that ends the game after at least one first down.
- A “successful” drive ends in a high-percentage field goal attempt (inside 45 yards) or traveled 40 or more yards (it doesn’t matter if the field goal is good or not).