In week four, Tom Brady, Matt Cassel, and Brian Hoyer started at quarterback, and all three exited Sunday with a victory.  Cassel and Hoyer are former Patriots quarterbacks, which got me to thinking about quarterback alumni. It isn’t that unusual for there to be three starting quarterbacks who all have ties to one team: over the past few years, Matt Ryan has been joined by former Falcons Matt Schaub and Michael Vick as starting quarterbacks in many weeks.  And at various times over the past few seasons (and in week five), Bengals fans have seen Andy Dalton, Carson Palmer, and Ryan Fitzpatrick as starters.

Which made me wonder: what is the record for most starting quarterbacks in a single week who all once played for the same franchise? As it turns out, the answer is six. In week 6 of the 2007 season, the following men who once donned a Dolphins jersey started at quarterback: Brian Griese in Chicago, Damon Huard for the Chiefs, Gus Frerotte for the Rams, Daunte Culpepper for the Raiders, Joey Harrington for the Falcons, and yes, Cleo Lemon for the Dolphins. Think about that: of the thirteen games played that week, nearly half involved a starting quarterback who had previously played for the Dolphins! The group went 1-5, with Huard’s Chiefs providing the sole win.

In the first two weeks of the ’02 season, six different quarterbacks with Washington ties were starters: Shane Matthews in Washington, Frerotte in Cincinnati, Trent Green in Kansas City, Rodney Peete in Carolina, Rich Gannon in Oakland, and Brad Johnson in Tampa Bay.

In the last few years, the closest any team has come to matching that record was in week 8 of the 2011 season, when A.J. Feeley (St. Louis), Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, and Charlie Whitehurst (Seattle) — all men who had worn Chargers jerseys — were starters. That week, Feeley’s Rams pulled off one of the biggest upsets in recent history, defeating Brees’ Saints. Don’t feel bad if you don’t recall Feeley’s days with San Diego: Nick Saban traded him in the middle of the ’05 season, but Feeley simply sat on the bench behind Brees and Rivers.

This week, the Steelers and Ravens both made trades in an attempt to shore up their team’s blind spot. In Baltimore, Bryant McKinnie has taken every snap at left tackle this season — with mixed results. According to Pro Football Focus, McKinnie has been average as a pass blocker (although he’s allowed 11 quarterback hurries) and poor as a run blocker. After making a huge investment in Joe Flacco, Baltimore now must focus on protecting their franchise quarterback. Obviously the Ravens weren’t happy with McKinnie, but is Monroe the answer?

PFF gives Monroe slightly better grades, but Mike Tanier wrote a pretty scathing review after studying film on the the former Jaguars’ left tackle. On the other hand, PFF loved Monroe last season, ranking him as their 10th best left tackle. So was this a good deal for Baltimore? For Jacksonville?

The Jaguars end seems easier to analyze. Monroe is a free agent after the season, and the team didn’t view him as an elite left tackle (after all, the Jaguars drafted Luke Joeckel with the expectation that he would take over after Monroe left). That left them with three options: trade him now, let him play out the season and then walk, or franchise him and try to trade him for more in the spring. The latter would be the riskiest option, given that (1) they would be overpaying him, since he isn’t worth franchise tackle money, and (2) Kansas City was unable to unload Branden Albert last season (and for all we know, the Jaguars unsuccessfully tried to deal Monroe last year, too). So for Jacksonville, the benefit to keeping him would be getting 12 more games out of Monroe in a lost season and a 2015 compensatory pick (probably a 4th or 5th rounder).

Instead, Jacksonville received the Ravens 4th and 5th rounders next season. That’s hardly a good return on the 8th overall pick the team invested in him, but that’s a sunk cost at this point (and goes on the ledger of prior management). Trading him was the right move, although we don’t know if they could have gotten more from another team.

As for Baltimore? The team is now without its 4th, 5th, and 7th rounders last season, and may not have much to show for it in 2014 (the 7th was a conditional pick for A.Q. Shipley, currently backing up Gino Gradkowski at center). Baltimore does not have much cap room, which (1) will make it more difficult to resign Monroe (although he already has stated that he wants to stay in Baltimore), and (2) makes it even more important for the team to hit on its draft picks. The outlook isn’t much better for 2014: perhaps the Ravens can restructure the contract of Terrell Suggs, but Baltimore already has $115M allocated to just 40 players next year (and Haloti Ngata ($16M), Flacco ($14.8M), and Lardarius Webb ($10.5M) all have huge cap numbers).
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Advanced NFL Stats has rolled out a podcast this year, and host Dave Collins invited me on the show this week. You can hear me ramble for 35 minutes here, where we discuss two point conversions, game scripts, and gush about Peyton Manning. Brian Burke has had a great site for years, but Dave is now bringing yet another way to learn about Advanced NFL Stats — you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Through four weeks, there have been 28 cases where a team, trailing in the 4th quarter, sent in the kicker or the punter. In general, that’s a pretty low rate — it’s just under once every two games. But while going for it on 4th down isn’t always the right decision when trailing in the 4th quarter, even 28 kicks/punts is too many.

Twelve of those 28 plays were field goal attempts, and all were successful.  Four kicks were to tie or take the lead, but only one of them — Rian Lindell’s 37-yarder, trailing by one point with 38 seconds remaining in week one against the Jets was an obviously correct decision (not that Greg Schiano’s conservative play-calling on the prior three plays deserves the same treatment). Two other kicks were noncontroversial: Facing 4th-and-9 from the Vikings 11, trailing by 10 with 3:40 remaining, I don’t blame Mike Tomlin for sending in the kicker. Even more obvious: Jeff Fisher having Greg Zuerlein kick a 38-yard field goal on 4th and 8 from the Arizona 20, trailing by 3, with 9 minutes left in the game. What about the other 9 field goal decisions? Let’s start first with four end-game strategic blunders:

1) John Harbaugh sent out Justin Tucker to kick a 30-yard field goal on 4th and 4 trailing by 18 with 5:33 remaining at the Broncos 12-yard line. Yes, Harbaugh thought Baltimore’s best chance of winning was to kick a field goal, stop Denver, score a touchdown, stop Denver, score another touchdown, convert the two-point attempt, and then win in overtime. Even though a 30-yard field goal is close to automatic, this one is pretty easy to analyze.  In both situations, you need to stop Denver twice and score two more touchdowns. So the question becomes, it is easier to:

(a) kick a 30-yard field goal and (assuming the other events all unfold in your favor) then have only a 1-in-4 chance of winning (i.e., convert on the 2-pointer and win in overtime); or

(b) score a touchdown on a drive at the Denver 12, facing 4th and 4?

2) Mike Smith had Matt Bryant kick a 25-yard field goal with 3 minutes to go, trailing by 10 against New England, facing 4th and 1 at the Patriots 7-yard line.

This one is not terrible, but I agree with Bill Barnwell’s analysis that going for it would have been the preferred move. Note that you don’t need the benefit of hindsight: Jason Lisk correctly predicted in real time that by going conservative on 4th-and-1, Atlanta would have to go for it (and fail) in a more challenging 4th down play later in the game.
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This week at the New York Times, I examine the brothers Manning:

Twenty months ago, Eli Manning and the Giants won the Super Bowl at Lucas Oil Field in Indianapolis, the home stadium of his All-Pro brother, Peyton. This year, Peyton seems poised to return the favor. No team is hotter through four weeks than the Denver Broncos. Although five teams are undefeated, the Broncos’ scorched-earth pace makes them the front-runners for the Super Bowl at MetLife Stadium.

At least, that is how it appears. The Broncos have outscored opponents by an average of 22 points. The Patriots are 4-0, too, but New England has won by 8 points a game. As it turns out, that differential means the Broncos are much more likely to be the better team over the rest of the season.

Consider that from 1990 to 2012, 66 teams began the season 4-0; on average, those teams won a more modest 61 percent of their games over the final three-quarters of the season. In other words, a perfect start to the season does not guarantee much, to which the 2012 Arizona Cardinals can attest.

By looking at points allowed and points scored, we can get more precise estimates of how many wins we can expect from a team over the rest of the season. Using the 66 undefeated teams to start the season since 1990, a linear regression model — using points scored and points allowed as the two input variables — has the Broncos winning 13.5 games this season, well ahead of the Patriots. (Of course, the regression model does not know that the Patriots will be getting Rob Gronkowski and Danny Amendola back from injury.)

You can read the full article here.

Every week, I’m posting the Game Scripts and Average Field Position data for each team. In an effort to get these up a bit quicker, I decided to get these numbers crunched before the Monday Night Game in the result – let me know if you like this method better than waiting until the end of the week. For new readers, you can see the results from the first three weeks here.

For the second week in a row, the Jaguars had the worst Game Script score. And for the second week in a row, Peyton Manning’s Broncos held an average lead of over 15 points. These two teams play in Denver in week six, and the early reports suggest that the line will be 27 points, the highest spread in N.F.L. history. The current record was set in 1976, when the expansion (and winless) Bucs traveled to Pittsburgh to face a Steelers team that had won the past two Super Bowls and had allowed just 28 points in their last seven games. That game had a spread of 26 points, and the Steelers won 43-0.

Here’s how to read the table below. The Colts won in Jacksonville (you can click the boxscore to see the full PFR boxscore), 37-3. Indianapolis won by 34, and held an average lead of 15.5 points throughout the game. Andrew Luck, Trent Richardson, and the rest of the Colts had 41 passes and 29 runs, giving them a 58.6% pass/run ratio. Meanwhile, the Jaguars threw 35 passes and had just 17 runs, giving them a 67.3% pass/run ratio. With few exceptions, the team with the positive game script has the lower pass/run ratio, and that effect is just magnified when the Game Script is large.
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