Uncle MOE

An interesting entry over at Blue-Gray Sky highlights a tool used by Ralph Friedgen called "Major Offensive Errors" (MOE). Basically, MOE is: Mistakes / Total Plays. Friedgen adds up all of his offense's interceptions thrown, fumbles lost, sacks allowed, penalties, and dropped passes and then divides that total by the number of plays in the game. The Fridge wants his team to keep MOE below 12%, and when the Terps are able to do that, they win just about every time.

I wondered what our MOE has looked like over the last few years; unfortunately, as BGS notes, drops aren't included in box scores, and if I were going to sort out the offense's penalties from the overall total, I'd have to comb through all of the play-by-plays. I tried running through them, but I saw "PENALTY NCS false start (Holt, J.)" so many times that I started going cross-eyed.