On Thursday, I looked at yards per attempt and outlier teams. Today, we use the same methodology but look at yards per attempt allowed (or, more specifically, Relative Yards per Attempt, which subtracts the league average from each team’s Y/A allowed).

In 2014, the best-fit linear formula to correlate relative yards per attempt allowed and winning percentage was 0.5019 – 0.1646 * Relative Y/A allowed. In the picture below, each team’s Relative Yards/Attempt allowed is on the X-Axis, while their winning percentage is on the Y-Axis. Since a negative RY/A is better — it means a team has allowed fewer yards per attempt than league average — you would expect the best teams/pass defenses to be on the top left of the chart.

The biggest positive outliers were teams like Dallas and Pittsburgh, which makes sense: both teams had bad pass defenses but fantastic pass offenses, so they were still able to be very successful. The biggest negative outliers were the typical bad teams like Tennessee, Tampa Bay, Oakland, and Jacksonville.

The Titans stand out as a fascinating case. Tennessee averaged 7.29 Y/A, while allowing 7.33 Y/A. That screams “average”, but the Titans went just 2-14. I looked at all team seasons since 1990, and the best-fit formula to predict winning percentage from Y/A differential was 0.502 + 0.151 * Y/A differential. Using that formula, of course, the Titans would be expected to be just a hair shy of 0.500. Instead, Tennessee went 2-14. Since 1990, the Titans fell the farthest short of expectation (0.370) of any team based on yards/attempt differential.

Take a look at this graph: I’ve colored in the Tennessee dot in red:

Tennesee would have been expected to post a 0.495 winning percentage, but actually had just a 0.125 winning percentage, falling 0.370 shy of expectation. The runner up was the 2013 Texans (0.467 expected, 0.125 actual, 0.342 shortfall), the 2000 Chargers (0.391, 0.063, 0.328), the ’94 Rams (0.572, 0.250, 0.322), and the ’97 Colts (0.507, 0.188, 0.320).

On the positive side? was the ’97 Chiefs, who had an expected winning percentage of 0.383 and an actual winning percentage of 0.813, for a differential of +.430. Following Kansas City was the ’01 Bears (0.387, 0.813, 0.4250, the ’10 Falcons (0.439, 0.813, 0.373), the ’99 Titans (0.455, 0.813, 0.357) and the ’95 Chiefs (0.501, 0.813, 0.311).

So what do you make of the 2014 Titans? By adding Marcus Mariota and Dorial Green-Beckham, Tennessee has done a nice job adding to the passing attack which probably wasn’t very good regardless of the above-average yards per attempt average. It’s easy to suggest that any 2-14 team is better than its record, but do you think Tennessee might be underrated heading into 2015?

