HOW TO READ THE DRIVE TRACKER
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
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:
// 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.
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 →]Buffalo ran the highest-EPA offense in 2025 — their drive logs are a masterclass in efficient possessions. Las Vegas's are the instructive counterexample.