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HOW TO READ THE DRIVE TRACKER

BY PROFESSOR CHEDDARHEAD  |  UPDATED: JUNE 2026  |  6 MIN READ

The Drive Tracker is not a box score. It's a drive-by-drive breakdown of what actually happened in a game — not who scored, but what each possession contributed, what it cost the other team, and where the game was really decided.

This guide walks through each section of the interface. If you haven't opened the tool yet, start here and read along.

// NAVIGATING TO A GAME

1
Select a season — the dataset covers NFL seasons back to 1999, with 2025 the most recent complete season.
2
Select a team — the game list filters to that team's schedule for the season.
3
Select a game from the dropdown — entries show opponent and week. Once a game loads, its header reads FINAL. New games land in the tracker the morning after they're played, not live during the game.

Free tier note: Free members see the most recent Green Bay Packers game and a text-only drive list. Paid members get all games, all teams, full charts, and CSV export.

// THE DRIVE LOG

The main panel lists every drive in the game. Each row shows:

TEAM / RESULT
Which team had the ball and how the drive ended — TOUCHDOWN, PUNT, INTERCEPTION, and so on.
WP SHIFT (corner badge)
The color-coded number in each drive's corner: how much that drive moved the Win Probability needle (+/−%). Green is a swing toward the possessing team, red is against it. The largest swings are where the game was actually decided.
START / PLAYS / YARDS
Where the drive started, how many plays it took, and total yards gained — useful for context, but the WP shift tells you whether any of it mattered. A 10-play, 60-yard field-goal drive and a 3-play, 70-yard TD drive both gain yards; only one moved the needle.
T.O.P. (TIME OF POSSESSION)
Clock time the drive consumed. A short T.O.P. with a big WP swing is a quick-strike drive; a long one that barely moves the needle is clock control with no payoff.

Click a drive to open its own tempo breakdown — a dedicated panel comparing that drive's seconds-per-play against the game average — and its EPA-for-that-play detail in the Play Log below. See the EPA explainer for what EPA measures.

// THE PLAY LOG

Click any drive row to expand the play-by-play log. Each play shows:

  • Down & distance — the situation before the snap
  • Play description — what happened (pass complete, rush, penalty, etc.)
  • Yards gained
  • EPA for that play — positive (green) means it helped; negative (red) means it hurt

The play log is where you find the actual turning point in a drive. A 15-yard pass on 3rd-and-14 shows up green with a large positive EPA; a 12-yard pass on 3rd-and-14 shows up red (it's still a punt). Yards lie. EPA doesn't.

// THE WIN PROBABILITY SHIFT CHART

The WP Shift chart (paid tier) is bar-per-play, scoped to the single drive you have selected — not the whole game. Green bars are plays that pushed the offense's win probability up; red bars pushed it down. The number at the top is the drive's net shift, all those bars added together.

Use this to find the one play that actually mattered. A drive can gain 60 yards on eight plays and still be a wash for win probability — grinding out 1st downs when you're already up three scores barely moves the needle. One 3rd-down conversion in the two-minute drill can dwarf all of them combined.

// THE EPA & WIN PROBABILITY CHART

The performance chart (paid tier) plots two lines across every play of the whole game, for whichever team is on offense in the drive you're viewing — not always the home team. The green line is EPA per play; the dashed orange line is win probability. The highlighted band marks where your selected drive falls in that sequence. Look for:

  • Big spikes — turnovers, long TDs, or failed 4th downs that swing the game dramatically
  • Sustained upward/downward trends — a team slowly grinding the other side into submission
  • Flatlines near 50% — a genuinely competitive game where neither team has a clear advantage
  • Late-game cliff drops/spikes — where the game was actually decided, often a single play

// CSV EXPORT

Paid members get an [↓ EXPORT_CSV] button in the game header. The export is a flat play-by-play CSV — one row per play, with drive metadata repeated per row. Useful for building your own analysis in Excel, R, or Python.

// OPEN THE TOOL

Ready to use it? The Drive Tracker has data for every NFL game since 1999. Start with a game you remember and see if the numbers match your recollection. They usually don't. That's the point.

[OPEN DRIVE TRACKER →]
// TEAM_EXAMPLES_TO_START_WITH

Buffalo ran the highest-EPA offense in 2025 — their drive logs are a masterclass in efficient possessions. Las Vegas's are the instructive counterexample.