Is 3rd Down Conversion Rate Indicative of Success?

Conversions in football are very important. After all, teams need to advance that extra 10 yards to keep attacking on offense, no matter what down it might be. 1st down conversions translate to a monstrous offense, while 4th down conversions symbolize clutch plays that a team needs in order to attempt and score later on. However, is 3rd down conversion rate indicative of success? It doesn’t easily lead to answers about how good a team is, and it’s a small stat that represents a bigger picture.

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Like any other conversion rates, 3rd down conversion rates is tied closely to 3 other statistics: Offensive Passing Efficiency, Sack Rate, and Interception Rate. This makes sense, because the more efficient your passing, the better chance of converting downs, and the lower the rate at which defense penetrates through, the greater the chance that the offense is able to complete the play. With these stats, it helps create a better prediction of a team’s future 3rd down conversion rate rather than simply using the last year’s statistics.

However, 3rd down conversion can just as easily inform us of the random luck and circumstance a team has experienced. It doesn’t really fit in as a primary tool for evaluating offenses despite how it is thrown around by analysts. 3rd down isn’t a standard value for every team either; depending on the plays, teams require different numbers of yards in order to convert to first down again. It’s hard to draw conclusions on such a thing if it keeps changing.

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Looking at the past season’s 3rd down conversion percentages, it doesn’t give the best picture of a team’s overall offense or even their performance in general. For example, in last year’s top 5, we do have some teams like the Kansas City Chiefs, Buffalo Bills, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, all of which do have great offenses. But then there’s the Pittsburgh Steelers and Los Angeles Chargers. Not exactly bad, they do have some star players, but they’re barely above 0.500. Meanwhile, the Cincinnati Bengals rank 15th, but they were the best in their conference and managed to make an appearance at the Super Bowl, beating some of the best teams in the NFL.


To conclude, the statistic itself is too small to have much meaning, but if used with other stats like other conversion rates, it can give a somewhat accurate depiction of a team’s performance.

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