How close to their offensive potential do national football league teams play?

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary results about how close to their offensive potential teams in the National Football League (NFL) play. Our study extends the work of previous researchers in several ways. First, we are the first to investigate the efficiency of professional football teams. Secondly, we utilize a panel data set covering the seasons 1989 to 1993 for all 28 NFL teams. Thirdly we estimate a frontir for the offensive teams. By estimating a stochastic production frontier model on a panel data set of NFL teams we find that many teams have played very close to their offensive potentials. For example, teams could have scored around one point more in each game than they actually did. This shows that these NFL teams are excellent, on average, at exploiting their talent - which seems reasonable.