The obvious answer to the title is that 3rd down conversion rate should only look at what a team actually did on 3rd down. But nobody actually cares about a team’s 3rd down conversion rate. What people are really talking about when looking at that stat is how often can an offense keep the drive alive for another set of downs.

Below is my attempt at ranking every team by their adjusted 3rd down conversion rate. All I did was simply add a team’s 4th down conversions to their 3rd down conversions, then recalculated their 3rd down conversion rate.

Team 3D% 3D% Rank Adj3D% Adj3D% Rank
Philadelphia Eagles 50.0% 1 60.3% 1
Buffalo Bills 49.2% 2 53.3% 2
Dallas Cowboys 47.2% 3 52.8% 3
Green Bay Packers 42.7% 8 50.8% 4
Los Angeles Chargers 42.4% 9 50.4% 5
Minnesota Vikings 41.5% 11 49.6% 6
Detroit Lions 39.7% 15 49.2% 7
San Francisco 49ers 44.8% 5 49.0% 8
Chicago Bears 43.6% 7 48.9% 9
Kansas City Chiefs 45.5% 4 48.2% 10
Los Angeles Rams 42.1% 10 47.6% 11
Baltimore Ravens 44.1% 6 46.5% 12
Atlanta Falcons 41.4% 12 45.7% 13
Carolina Panthers 37.7% 19 45.4% 14
Houston Texans 41.1% 13 45.2% 15
Miami Dolphins 39.6% 16 44.8% 16
Indianapolis Colts 39.2% 18 44.8% 17
Tampa Bay Buccaneers 39.5% 17 44.4% 18
Denver Broncos 40.5% 14 43.2% 19
Washington Commanders 37.2% 21 42.6% 20
New Orleans Saints 36.5% 22 41.9% 21
Las Vegas Raiders 33.1% 29 41.5% 22
Cincinnati Bengals 37.3% 20 40.7% 23
Arizona Cardinals 35.7% 24 39.7% 24
Jacksonville Jaguars 35.3% 25 38.7% 25
Pittsburgh Steelers 36.1% 23 38.5% 26
Cleveland Browns 33.8% 27 38.2% 27
New England Patriots 34.1% 26 37.9% 28
New York Giants 30.5% 31 37.7% 29
Tennessee Titans 33.3% 28 37.7% 30
Seattle Seahawks 31.5% 30 35.2% 31
New York Jets 25.0% 32 30.0% 32

Not too big of a surprise at the top and bottom. The Eagles, Bills, and Cowboys are great at getting a fresh set of downs and the Jets are awful at doing so.

But there are some interesting results in the middle. The Lions for example are only 15th in 3rd down conversion rate, but when you account for how many times they are then able to convert on 4th down, they are 7th in keeping drives alive.

The Chiefs on the other hand are 4th in pure 3rd down conversions, but have only converted 3 4th down attempts all season dropping them to 10th in adjusted 3rd down rate.