Filling in the blanks for TSN's Field position article

On September 18th, Paul LaPolice wrote this great article for TSN, which breaks down some of the scoring data across the CFL this year.  It's a good read, if you haven't checked it out yet, take a moment and do so, I'll wait here.

The one downside to this article was that Mr. LaPolice opted to trim his tables down to highlight only a subset of teams in each table.

Using the Drive Search feature on CFLStats.ca, I will fill in the rest for those who are interested. Please note that because I do not have direct access to the stats that TSN uses, my numbers are slightly different. I can't explain these discrepancies, as I'm confident in the accuracy of my data.  It's possible that in some cases, our criteria for certain cases is different, for example the total number of possessions (TSN cites 1497 possessions, while my data includes 1485.)  Whatever the reason for these discrepancies, they constitute a very small portion of the data and do not change the overall trends of the results.

For each of these datasets, if you click the link to the underlying search, you'll be able to view the stats from the defensive perspective (which team allows the highest TD percentage, etc), as well as each individual drive that matched the results.

Touchdown Percentage

Tm	G	Possessions	TD	Pct
CGY	11	163	34	21%
WPG	12	178	25	14%
EDM	11	171	23	13%
TOR	11	173	23	13%
SSK	11	161	19	12%
BC	11	169	19	11%
HAM	10	156	17	11%
MTL	11	169	13	8%
ORB	10	145	11	8%
Total	98	1485	184	12%

Drives starting inside your own 20 yard line

There is a slight semantic difference in the search here - "inside the 20" on the drive finder includes the 20 yard line, while the TSN data does not.  The actual search results presented here from CFLStats.ca is "Drives inside own 19".  That said, the TSN article may mixing the two data sets, as they claim a 21% TD rate for the Stamps, which is correct if I include the 20 yard line, but a 0% rate for the Riders, which is only correct if I omit the 20 yard line.  The issue here may be that TSN's source tracks the starting line of scrimmage independently from the CFL's scoring, which is what CFLStats.ca's stats are based off of.

Tm	G	Possessions	TDs	Pct
CGY	10	32	6	19%
MTL	10	21	3	14%
WPG	11	30	4	13%
BC	10	21	2	10%
ORB	9	20	2	10%
TOR	11	33	3	9%
EDM	10	24	2	8%
HAM	9	29	1	3%
SSK	10	25	0	0%
Total	90	235	23	10%

Drives starting from own 21-49

I don't have a good search for this one, I had to search for drives within own 49 and remove the data from drives within own 20.  Even still, my numbers are quite different from TSN's here.

Tm	G	#Dr	TDs	Pct
BC	11	118	11	9%
CGY	11	86	16	19%
EDM	11	112	11	10%
HAM	10	95	12	13%
MTL	11	124	6	5%
ORB	10	105	6	6%
SSK	11	104	6	6%
TOR	11	110	10	9%
WPG	12	110	16	15%
Total	98	964	94	10%

Starting from Opponent's End

I'd very much like to see TSN's source data on this one to compare, because they or I have a big error (or Mr. LaPolice made a mistake in this section).  There are minor discrepancies here such as the article crediting the Riders with 9 touchdowns on 21 possessions, vs my data showing 8 touchdowns on 21 possessions, but the big one here is Toronto, which isn't included in the article's data.  The article claims that the Riders lead the league with a 43% TD rate, but according to my data, Toronto is way ahead of the pack at 53%.

Tm	G	#Dr	TD	Pct
BC	11	21	5	24%
CGY	9	30	12	40%
EDM	9	26	9	35%
HAM	9	20	3	15%
MTL	8	15	2	13%
ORB	7	10	2	20%
SSK	8	21	8	38%
TOR	9	17	9	53%
WPG	11	25	5	20%
Total	81	185	55	30%