NFL stats are the numbers that record what happened in a game: how far a team moved the ball, how accurately a quarterback threw it, how often a defense stopped anybody. There are a few hundred of them in total. You need about six to follow a game properly, and I’ll show you which six.
I came to this game as an adult, and the first thing that put me off was the broadcast graphics. A box would flash up mid-play with eight abbreviations in it, everyone watching seemed to know what they meant, and nobody was going to stop and explain. So this page is the explanation. It’s the front door to every stat guide on the site, plus a table you can come back to whenever a number appears on screen and you want to know what it is.
What are NFL stats?
NFL stats are the record of every measurable thing that happens on the field. The league logs them play by play, and by the end of a game they add up to a box score: the summary page you’ll find on NFL.com, ESPN or Pro Football Reference, with every player’s numbers set out in rows.
They fall into three groups, and knowing which group you’re looking at matters more than memorising any single number.
Counting stats total something up: passing yards, touchdowns, sacks, tackles. Easy to read, but they reward whoever played the most.
Rate stats divide a total by the number of chances: yards per attempt, completion percentage, yards per carry. These tell you how efficient someone was, not just how busy.
Advanced stats are built by analysts rather than by the league, and they add the context the raw numbers miss. EPA and DVOA are the two you’ll hear most, and I explain both further down.
One naming note before we go on. The two units on the field are the offense and the defense. In British English we’d spell that second one defence, but the sport’s own spelling is American and every stat sheet uses it, so I’ll stick with the American spelling throughout. Offense means the eleven players trying to score. Defense means the eleven trying to stop them.
Start here: the three guides most people need
Everything on this page routes into three guides, in the order most people need them:
- NFL QB Stats Decoded covers the quarterback, whose numbers are on screen more than everyone else’s combined: passer rating, completion percentage, yards per attempt, touchdown-to-interception ratio and what counts as good.
- NFL Defense Stats Decoded covers sacks, tackles, interceptions and the rest, including which of them are far less reliable than they look.
- NFL Team Stats Decoded covers the whole-team numbers that actually predict who wins: points, yards, third downs, red zone efficiency, turnover differential.
If you want those team numbers for one specific side, the NFL teams decoded go through all thirty-two.
The master NFL stat table
Every stat you’re likely to meet, grouped by where you’ll see it, with a plain reading of what it measures and the guide that goes deeper:
Quarterback and passing stats
| Stats | What it actually means | Full Guide |
|---|---|---|
| CMP/ATT | Completions and attempts: passes his own team caught, out of passes he threw. | QB stats |
| PCT | Completion percentage. Completions divided by attempts. | QB stats |
| YDS | Passing yards gained. | QB stats |
| Y/A | Yards per attempt. The efficiency version of passing yards. | QB stats |
| TD | Touchdown passes thrown. | QB stats |
| INT | Interceptions: passes caught by the opposition instead. | QB stats |
| SACK | Times he was tackled behind the line before he could throw. | QB stats |
| RTG | Passer rating. One number summing up the passing line, on a scale that tops out at 158.3. | QB stats |
| QBR | ESPN’s Total QBR. A rival rating on a 0 to 100 scale, where 50 is average. | QB stats |
Rushing and Receiving stats
| Stats | What it actually means | Full Guide |
|---|---|---|
| CAR | Carries. Times a player ran with the ball. | Guide coming soon |
| AVG | Yards per carry. Total rushing yards divided by carries. | Guide coming soon |
| TGT | Targets. Passes thrown in a receiver’s direction, caught or not. | Guide coming soon |
| REC | Receptions. Passes he actually caught. | Guide coming soon |
| YAC | Yards after catch. Ground gained once the ball was in his hands. | Guide coming soon |
Defense stats
| Stats | What it actually means | Full Guide |
|---|---|---|
| SOLO | Solo tackles. Ball carriers he brought down on his own. | Defense stats |
| AST | Assisted tackles. Ones he brought down with a teammate. | Defense stats |
| COMB | Combined tackles. Solo plus assisted, added together. | Defense stats |
| SACK | Sacks. Tackling the quarterback behind the line before he throws. | Defense stats |
| TFL | Tackles for loss. Stopping a runner behind the line of scrimmage. | Defense stats |
| PD | Passes defensed. Passes he knocked away without catching. | Defense stats |
| FF | Forced fumbles. Times he knocked the ball loose. | Defense stats |
| INT | Interceptions caught. | Defense stats |
Team and situational stats
| Stats | What it actually means | Full Guide |
|---|---|---|
| PPG | Points per game, scored and allowed. The bluntest measure of how good a team is. | Team stats |
| YPG | Yards per game, gained and given up. | Team stats |
| 3RD% | Third-down conversion rate. How often they turned third down into a fresh set of downs. | Team stats |
| RZ% | Red zone efficiency. How often they scored a touchdown from inside the opponent’s twenty. | Team stats |
| TO DIFF | Turnover differential. Balls taken from the opposition minus balls handed to them. | Team stats |
| TOP | Time of possession. Minutes each team held the ball. | Team stats |
Advanced Stats
| Stats | What it actually means | Full Guide |
|---|---|---|
| EPA | Expected points added. How much a single play changed the points a team could expect to score. | Explained below |
| Success rate | The share of plays that gained enough to count as a win for the offense. | Explained below |
| DVOA | Defense-adjusted value over average. Every play compared with the league average for that exact situation. | Explained below |
| CPOE | Completion percentage over expected. Whether a quarterback completed more passes than the difficulty of his throws suggested he should. | Explained below |
Which NFL stats should a beginner learn first?
Six of them. Points per game, turnover differential, third-down conversion rate, passer rating, yards per carry and sacks. Learn those and you can follow any game, any broadcast and most arguments about football.
- Points per game, scored and allowed. The starting point for everything. A team’s real quality shows up here before it shows up in its win-loss record.
- Turnover differential. Giving the ball away and taking it back are the two biggest swings in a game.
- Third-down conversion rate. Third down is the down that decides whether a drive continues, so this is the closest thing to a measure of a team keeping the ball.
- Passer rating. One number that tells you roughly how the quarterback threw it. Not perfect, but you’ll see it constantly.
- Yards per carry. The quickest read on whether a team can run the ball.
- Sacks, both taken and made. Pressure on the quarterback decides more games than almost anything else, and this is the visible version of it.
One layer deeper, if you want it. Of those six, turnover differential is the one to be careful with. It correlates strongly with winning in the season you’re looking at, but a lot of it is luck, and it swings hard from one year to the next. That’s a big part of why a team that wins a pile of close games one season so often falls back the next.
NFL stats explained: EPA and DVOA
These two come up constantly once you start reading analysis, and both sound harder than they are.
EPA (expected points added)
Every situation on a field is worth something. Given a specific down, distance and spot on the pitch, there’s an average number of points the team with the ball goes on to score from there. EPA measures how much one play moved that number.
That’s why it beats raw yardage. A four-yard gain on third-and-eight is a failure, because the drive is probably over. The same four yards on third-and-three is a first down and the drive continues. Identical yardage, opposite EPA. When someone quotes EPA per play, they mean that figure averaged across everything a player or team did.
DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average)
DVOA compares every play a team runs with what an average team does in the same situation, then adjusts for the quality of the opponent. It’s expressed as a percentage: zero is exactly average, and the number tells you how far above or below that a team sits.
This confused me for ages, so here’s the bit nobody explains. The D in DVOA does not mean it’s a defensive stat. It means opponent-adjusted, as in adjusted for the defense you happened to be playing. There are separate offense, defense and special teams DVOA figures. And for defense, a negative number is the good one, because a defense wants to hold opponents below average.
It was created by Aaron Schatz at Football Outsiders and now lives at FTN, which took over the metric and its historical archive in 2023.
Where NFL betting fits in
A short note, because you’ll see NFL stats used this way constantly and it helps to know what you’re looking at.
Betting lines are built from stats. A total, also called the over/under, is a bookmaker’s estimate of the combined points both teams will score, and it comes from scoring and efficiency numbers like the ones on this page. A spread is a handicap: the favourite has to win by more than a set number for a bet on them to pay.
Common questions about NFL stats
Do NFL preseason stats count?
No. Preseason stats are recorded and published, but they don’t count towards official regular-season or career totals and they don’t appear in league records. Starters play very little of the preseason, so the numbers mostly describe players competing for a place on the roster rather than telling you much about the season ahead.
What does COMB mean in NFL stats?
COMB is short for combined tackles, and it’s the column you’ll see on ESPN’s defensive stat pages. It’s a player’s solo tackles plus his assisted tackles, added together. A solo tackle is one he made on his own. An assisted tackle is one where he brought the ball carrier down along with a teammate.
What is the most important stat in the NFL?
There isn’t a single one, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. If you made me pick, points scored minus points allowed across a season describes how good a team really is better than its win-loss record does. For an individual player it depends entirely on position, which is why the guides here are split by position group.
Are NFL tackle stats reliable?
Less than you’d think. Tackles are credited live by statisticians watching from the press box, and deciding who actually made a tackle in a pile of bodies is a judgement call. Counts vary noticeably from one team’s crew to another, which is why analysts lean on sacks, tackles for loss and pressure numbers instead.
Where to go next
Start with NFL QB Stats Decoded if you want the numbers you’ll see most, or NFL Team Stats Decoded if you’d rather understand whole teams before individual players. If a rule is what’s confusing you rather than a number, the NFL Rules Decoded are the place to go.