Explaining explosive plays, the NFL’s most nebulous important stat

We often hear the term “explosive plays” used on NFL broadcasts and in coverage of the league. It’s a really important stat, they say, but it’s often really confusing. We know it means a big play, but how big is big?

How many explosive plays did your favorite team have last year? Where did that rank among the rest of the league?

Well, it depends on who you ask. 

What is an “explosive play” in the NFL?

An explosive play is a big play on offense. Depending on where you get your information, the yardage constituting an “explosive play” changes. Is it a 20-yard play from scrimmage or a 16-yard pass play and a 12-yard run play? I made a trip around the internet, from statistic-based sites to blogs to newspaper articles trying to find a predominant use and their rationale.

I found neither. 

What I did find were at least seven combinations:

• 20-yard pass, 20-yard run
• 20-yard pass, 15-yard run
• 20-yard pass, 10-yard run
• 18-yard pass, 12-yard run
• 16-yard pass, 12-yard run
• 15-yard pass, 10-yard rule

This all seems a bit much and can be confusing when reading articles, listening to a game commentary, and looking at the endless stream of plotted data on social media.

The history of explosive plays and toxic differential in the NFL

I was first introduced to the concept of explosive plays by former Baltimore Ravens head coach Brian Billick in a 2011 article. Billick describes explosive plays as part of something he called “toxic differential,” which combined turnover differential with your team’s big play differential to create one handy number.

Billick defined an explosive play as any scrimmage play, run or pass, of 20 yards or more. The beauty of using toxic differential — the number of positive big plays your offense produces minus the negative big plays your defense gives up — is that it makes it useful in evaluating the story of a particular game. Some games may be shootouts while others are slugfests, and a differential helps us level set to understand each game’s outcome. 

I believe over the years, statistics-based sites ran with the concept, finding different yardage markers they likely believed revealed a better or more interesting result. However, these sites fail to provide a clear rationale for changing the values qualifying for explosive play status. 

What should an explosive play actually measure in the NFL?

The good news, after crunching the numbers of every NFL game since 2000, is there’s an answer to which combination we should use moving forward. 

To try and find the optimal yardage boundary for explosive plays, I took the yardage ranges mentioned on the various sites and laid them out on a grid. Inside the grid, I calculated the winning percentage for every game between 2000-2025 for teams that won the explosive play differential. For example, the upper left box (65.06%) shows the winning percentage for all teams from 2000-2025 that won the explosive play differential if we defined explosive plays as 15-yard passes and 10-yard runs. 

We have a clear answer. The combination of 20-yard pass plays and 10-yard runs gives us the best result when tying explosive plays to winning football games.

Those with a keen eye will see that the winning percentage increases in each row as you move left to right, favoring the longer pass yardage option at every run yardage. You might also notice that the win percentage decreases as you move down each pass yardage column, favoring the shorter run distance.

A 68.33% winning percentage by just winning the explosive play differential is a significant edge for just one statistic.

How much does the explosive play differential matter in an NFL game?

What’s even more interesting is that the winning edge shows up with a differential at +1 and simply increases from there. The chart below shows the total wins and losses and corresponding winning percentage for the team winning the explosive play differential at each value. This follows logically as a team with more big plays than their opponent will come out on top more often and increasing that differential should increase the likelihood of a win.

Do explosive plays matter over the course of an entire NFL season?

The next question to ask is if explosive play differential holds up over the course of a season? If we plot the season cumulative total differential against a team’s regular season winning percentage, it turns out there is a moderate correlation.

We won’t dive too far into statistic values but when we plot our regular season winning percentage against the seasonal cumulative explosive play differential, we see an “R-squared” number of 0.3388. The R-squared number tells us how much effect the explosive play differential has on regular season winning percentage on a scale of 0 to 1. In a game as complex as football, the result of 0.3388 tells me it is useful in partially explaining a team’s final record, but it’s a little too noisy to exist as a standalone stat over the course of a season.

How should NFL fans treat explosive plays in the future?

Ideally, all outlets would use the same numbers to talk about explosive play numbers. Tying the differential to winning football games is an elegant and defensible method. I’d be curious to see if outlets that use different combinations offer a better rationale. Stick with Billick’s 20/20 or go with this 20/10 analysis. It is undeniable there is a significant high correlation this stat has to winning football games and building competitive playoff teams.