Lacrosse Faceoff Win Percentage: Does It Decide Games?

Lacrosse faceoff win percentage (FO%) measures how often your team gets the first possession after a faceoff, and that is all it measures. A strong number gives your offense extra chances, but it does not tell you whether those chances turned into shots or goals. Read it next to ground balls and over several games, and it becomes a useful number instead of a verdict on your faceoff specialist.

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What is faceoff win percentage?

Faceoff win percentage is faceoffs won divided by faceoffs taken. A specialist who wins 15 of 25 is at 60%, and one who wins 12 of 25 is at 48%.

Girls' lacrosse uses the draw instead, and the matching stats are draw controls and draw percentage. Everything below applies the same way to the draw.

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How many extra possessions is a good FOGO worth?

Not as many as the percentage suggests. Say your team takes 25 faceoffs in a game. At 50% you win about 12 or 13 of them. A specialist at 60% wins 15, which is two or three extra possessions across the whole game.

Those are real chances, and a team that scores on a good share of its possessions will feel them. But two or three possessions are a small edge next to the result of a single bad stretch of turnovers. If the rest of your game is shaky, a dominant specialist covers a few mistakes and leaves the others in place.

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Does winning the faceoff mean winning the possession?

Winning the faceoff only gets the ball to a scrum, and the possession belongs to whichever team comes out of it with the ground ball. Your specialist, the wings, and the nearest midfielders all take part, so a faceoff win can be a team result as much as an individual one.

That is why a low FO% sometimes points at your wings, not your specialist. If your specialist clamps the ball and nobody is there to scoop it, the stat shows a win that never became a possession. Track ground balls alongside faceoffs and look at games where the two disagree. A good FO% with a poor ground ball share usually means the wing play needs work.

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When does faceoff win percentage matter less?

It matters less when your team already holds the ball well after the restart, when you shoot at a low percentage, or when your offense is built to run a long clock. A team that scores on few of its possessions gains little from getting a few more.

It matters more in close games and in games where your defense is stretched. If your opponent keeps winning faceoffs and then scoring quickly, your defense is back on the field before it has caught its breath. Check how your goals against line up with the quarters where you lost the faceoff battle.

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Why is one game of FO% not enough?

A single game is too small a sample to judge a specialist. A specialist who goes 4 for 15 on Saturday may have faced an opponent's best specialist, or had a bad day, and a few faceoffs in either direction move the percentage by a lot. The same swing is smaller across a month of games.

Look at the season trend, and at who your specialist faced. A specialist at 45% against the league's best and 65% against everyone else gives you information a single average hides. For a quick read during the game, you can still ask whether your specialist is winning clean or losing to the same move over and over.

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How do you track faceoff stats in SquadProfile?

The boys' lacrosse stat keeper records each faceoff as a win or a loss, and SquadProfile calculates the faceoff win percentage from those. You can see the full list on the men's lacrosse stats page. Faceoff wins (FOW) appear in the season leaders for boys' teams, and the team Analytics section shows faceoffs as a percentage with the won and total counts underneath, next to ground balls per game and clear percentage.

Keep the same person on faceoffs all season so the calls stay consistent. Our guide to setting up a stat crew covers who to assign and what to settle before game day.

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What to look at after your next game

Open the box score and pull three numbers: your FO%, your ground balls compared with the other team's, and your goals in the quarters right after you won or lost a faceoff. Do that for four or five games before you decide anything about your specialist or your wings. If your FO% and your results keep moving together, the faceoff is worth practice time. If they don't, spend that time on the scrum behind it.