ESPN NFL

In this week's version of the best of/worst of 2007 series, I'll again cover the controversial bad decision metric. However, instead of looking at it from the quarterback's perspective, I'll be looking at this metric from the perspective of the defense. Bad decisions don't happen in a vacuum and, as this study will illustrate, some teams create a much larger number of mistakes than others.

As I detailed last week, it is useful to remember that the bad decision metric is gauged on a percentage basis. The key to remember when using percentage formats is that even though a single percentage point difference might not seem like much, its relative impact is quite large. A defense that forces bad decisions 2 percent of the time is creating mistakes on one out of every 50 passes, or about once every 1½ to 2 games. Contrast that to a team with a 4 percent forced bad decision rate that is collecting errors on one out of every 25 passes, or about one per game, and it should be clear that even small increments in this metric can be very meaningful.

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