Red zone

What it measures

Performance when the offense has already done the hard part. Inside the opponent's 20 the field compresses: defenses have less deep space to defend, windows tighten, and the difference between a field goal and a touchdown is worth roughly four points of scoreboard. Red zone efficiency measures who finishes drives with sevens instead of threes.

In our situation views, red_zone is one bucket in a closed vocabulary, and buckets overlap by design: a shotgun snap on 3rd and goal counts toward red_zone, shotgun, and its down-and-distance bucket all at once. Bucket play counts do not sum to team totals.

How it is computed here

Every offensive snap with the ball inside the opponent's 20 (yardline_100 of 20 or less) lands in the red_zone bucket. The situation_team view aggregates EPA per play, success rate, and pass rate over those snaps for each team, on both sides of the ball; situation_qb does the same for qualifying passers. The EPA model already knows the field is short, so red zone EPA is measured against red zone expectations, not open-field ones.

How fast it stabilizes

Slowly, and this is the most important thing to know about it. A team sees roughly 150 red zone snaps in a season, a quarterback maybe half that, and touchdown-or-not outcomes are chunky. Red zone touchdown percentage is one of the least stable team stats year over year; teams that badly underperform their overall offense in the red zone tend to bounce back. Extreme red zone results are usually noise wearing a narrative.

How it gets misused

• Predicting with it. "They can't finish drives" is a description of the past, and it regresses hard toward the team's overall offensive quality.
• Ranking on the bucket without the volume. Thirty red zone dropbacks can decide a quarterback's bucket rate; the plays and dropbacks columns are there to be checked.
• Treating red zone skill as separate from offense skill. The best red zone offenses are, overwhelmingly, the best offenses.