{"id":5528,"date":"2026-09-23T09:40:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T05:40:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=5528"},"modified":"2026-09-23T09:40:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T05:40:13","slug":"god-bless-the-epa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=5528","title":{"rendered":"God Bless the EPA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">An article at <em>The Athletic<\/em> yesterday (I&#8217;d link it but it&#8217;s on the pay side) notes that in the modern era of sports analytics we are now all football nerds. They offer a few new stats and acronyms, one of which is the amusingly titled EPA, Expected Points Added. Not exactly <em>new<\/em> to the nerds, but new enough among casual fans and rather accessible as these things go, EPA places a value on factors other than simply <em>yards<\/em> gained (or lost) when determining a resultant play&#8217;s overall value. The simple example is that one yard gained on fourth and one and better than five yards gained on third and ten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The nerds say this stat goes back to 1971, putting it almost exactly in line with that other thing we know EPA stands for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This one is way more fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An article at The Athletic yesterday (I&#8217;d link it but it&#8217;s on the pay side) notes that in the modern era of sports analytics we are now all football nerds. They offer a few new stats and acronyms, one of &hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=5528\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5528"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5530,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528\/revisions\/5530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}