If you’re a heavy follower of football sports analytics twitter, you have perhaps seen terms like Offensive Rush EPA or Defensive Pass EPA. These terms are referring to an Expected Points Added metric (EPA) that attempts to quantitatively evaluate a play and return a magnitude and direction for the result of each play’s effect on the game in relation to the mean expectation for the game state.
The EPA metric used in this article relies on a model that breaks plays into down, distance and yard line groupings (or bins), and then estimating the actual points expected from each of the game states and subtracting that from the expected points added as a result of the play.