Marching through a bye week, the nerds who dig beyond the NCAA’s official statistics catalogue declared that No. 9-ranked BYU’s offense had the nation’s No. 1 success rate through the first three weeks of the season.
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What exactly is success rate? How meaningful is it? Can it hold up? Is it way too early to consider it “a thing” this season?
Well, hold on, and we’ll learn exactly what the formula is, how it is figured. At this stage of the season, it is reasonably meaningful, but we have yet to see if it holds up and becomes a real thing.
What we can say is it is attracting notice from national pundits and AP pollsters.
Success rate is a standard advanced efficiency metric in football analytics used by both the NFL and colleges, and according to Outside Zone, BYU led the country in it through three weeks, followed by Army, Houston, Georgia and Miami.
Most efficient offenses in college football through 3 weeks
Success rate
1. BYU 59.5%
2. Army 58.4%
3. Houston 58.2%
4. Georgia 57.8%
5. Miami 56.2%Georgia is the only one of the five averaging 59 points a game with it.
— Outside Zone (@OutsideZoneIO) September 23, 2026
What does “success rate” mean?
It measures how consistently an offense stays “on schedule” and puts itself in favorable down-and-distance situations rather than relying on occasional big plays.
For instance, BYU’s offense has found itself in a ton of third and 2s or fewer in its first three games. A higher success rate means the offense is efficiently moving the chains and avoiding long-yardage situations that force difficult third/fourth downs.
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It is one of the more predictive efficiency stats in college football and forms a core part of systems such as Bill Connelly’s SP+ (along with explosiveness and other factors).
Average FBS offenses typically land around the low-to-mid 40% range; rates in the mid-to-high 50s (as shown for BYU, Army, Houston, Georgia, and Miami) are excellent, especially early in the season.
Here’s how success rate is calculated.
A play counts as “successful” based on down and distance:
- 1st down: Gain of at least “50 percent” of the yards needed for a first down (Example: first and 10 is successful if it gains 5+ yards).
- 2nd down: Gain of at least “70 percent” of the yards needed (Example: second and 10 is successful if it gains 7+ yards).
- 3rd or 4th down: Gain of “100 percent” of the yards needed or a conversion.
“Success Rate” is the number of successful plays plus total offensive plays. It is usually calculated on standard downs or all plays (excluding certain special-teams or garbage-time situations in some advanced implementations), and it can be tracked for the offense overall, by run/pass, or opponent adjustment.
Slight variations exist across sites, but the 50/70/100 thresholds above are the longstanding consensus definition.
This kind of work should be credited to Football Outsiders, in particular Aaron Schatz. It was popularized for NFL analysis in the early-to-mid 2000s. Connelly adapted, refined and heavily promoted it for college football. It is key to his SP+ ratings and “Five Factors” framework ( efficiency, explosiveness, field position, finishing drives and turnovers).
The concept traces back to earlier coaching insights (San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh-era emphasis on staying ahead of the chains), but the version used today comes from the analytics community.
There. We have it.
With a quarter of the season done for BYU, offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick has people taking notice of what he’s calling, how it’s getting done and how successful it is for an undefeated top 10 team.
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Carry on.