There are still three games left to play in the 2023 NFL regular season. And for San Francisco, that includes a game Monday night against the AFC’s best team, the Baltimore Ravens. But let’s just pause for a moment and appreciate how dominant San Francisco has been this year.

On offense, the 49ers are averaging 9.45 Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt. ^[1]ANY/A is simply yards per attempt, with a 20-yard bonus for sacks, a 45-yard penalty for interceptions, and includes sack data. That is significantly better than the rest of the league; Miami ranks second at 7.89, and Houston ranks third at 7.07. The league average this season is 5.79 ANY/A, meaning San Franciso is averaging 3.66 ANY/A more than the average team. How remarkable is that? Well, if it holds up, it would finish as the third best of the Super Bowl era:

Yes, that means this San Francisco offense — with Brock Purdy, Christian McCaffrey, Deebo Samuel, George Kittle, Brandon Aiyuk, and Trent Williams — is already one of the best of the Super Bowl era even after you adjust for era. ^[2]Without adjusting for era, the 49ers rank as the 2nd-best passing offense ever. Think about that: every other offense in the Super Bowl era, besides Peyton Manning in his best year and Dan Marino in his best year, has been less efficient than this year’s 49ers team. [continue reading…]

The 2022 season was another groundbreaking season for black quarterbacks in the NFL. There were 21 black quarterbacks who threw at least one pass this year, the highest number in a single season in NFL history. The graph below shows how many black quarterbacks in the NFL ^[1]Or AFL or AAFC. threw at least one pass in each season since the league began recording passing statistics in 1932:

Black quarterbacks also started 29% of all games, another high-water mark for the league. In 2022, 15 of the league’s 32 teams started a black quarterback in at least one game, including the PFWA Comeback Player of the Year (Seattle’s Geno Smith), the Most Valuable Player in the league (Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes) and the quarterback of the league’s best team during the regular season (Philadelphia’s Jalen Hurts).

The charts above tell a remarkable story. Consider that the year of the first Super Bowl (1966), there were no black quarterbacks in the AFL or NFL. When Tom Brady was born (1977), there had never been an NFL game where both teams started black quarterbacks. And when Brady was drafted, there had never been two black quarterbacks to face off in an NFL playoff game. Now, on the day that Brady is retiring, it’s a noteworthy sign of progress that we are just days away from the first Super Bowl featuring two black quarterbacks (Mahomes and Hurts). It has been a remarkable journey for black quarterbacks in the NFL, one that started over one hundred years ago. [continue reading…]

San Francisco 49ers rookie quarterback Brock Purdy is on the verge of making NFL history. If the 49ers can upset the Eagles in the NFC Championship Game, Purdy would become the first rookie quarterback to ever start in a Super Bowl.

Only a few rookie “quarterbacks” have ever led a team to an NFL title, with quarterbacks in quotation marks the farther back in time we go. In 1946, a 25-year-old Otto Graham led the Cleveland Browns to an AAFC title in his first season. The prior year, a 25-year-old Bob Waterfield led the NFL in touchdown passes as a rookie and then threw two touchdown passes in the NFL title game to help lead the Rams to their first ring. Perhaps the best rookie season of them all came from Sammy Baugh in 1937, as he led Washington to the championship. And three years earlier, rookie Ed Danowski helped the Giants stage a fourth quarter comeback to beat the Bears in a famous title game.

Purdy has only started five regular season and two playoff games in his NFL career so far, and he sports a perfect 7-0 record. An appearance in Super Bowl LVII would be his 9th NFL start; believe it or not, that would only rank as the third fewest by a starting quarterback in the Super Bowl. On the other hand, at just over 23 years old, Purdy would in fact be the youngest quarterback to start a Super Bowl. [continue reading…]

When the Jets drafted Zach Wilson, the hope was that the kid from BYU would end a long line of Jets draft busts. Because after having their hopes dashed by Mark Sanchez, Geno Smith, and then Sam Darnold, the Jets were due for some good luck. Right?

[continue reading…]

Throughout NFL history, having a strong running offense and a dominant pass defense has been a recipe for success. But the 2022 Eagles are currently doing something that hasn’t been done in 40 or 45 years, depending on your view of the 1982 strike season. Through 13 games, the Eagles have one of the top running games in the NFL. Powered by quarterback Jalen Hurts and running back Miles Sanders, Philadelphia is tied for 2nd in the NFL in rushing yards and leads the NFL in rushing first downs. The Eagles are also averaging 4.87 yards per carry, good enough for 5th best. Meanwhile, Philadelphia’s pass defense has been phenomenal. Even ignoring the NFL-best 15 interceptions (and NFL-best 3.4% interception rate), Eagles opponents are averaging just 4.80 net yards per pass attempt, the top rate in the league.

Yes, that means the Eagles gain more yards per rush than their opponents average per pass. Which is pretty ridiculous!

It’s not unusual for teams to come pretty close here: the Buffalo Bills nearly pulled this one off last season with very similar numbers. Buffalo averaged 4.79 yards per carry and allowed 4.84 net yards per attempt in 2021. [continue reading…]

In 1946, the Pittsburgh Steelers went 5-5-1. While the sum of the team’s parts may have been perfectly average, their components were far from it. The head coach was newly-hired Jock Sutherland, who had been a local hero after taking the Pitt Panthers to four Rose Bowls. After a stint in the Navy during World War II, he returned to the city and coached the Steelers for two seasons, beginning in 1946. In the 10-team NFL, Pittsburgh allowed the fewest points in the NFL at 10.6 per game, a mark that would not be matched again until the Lombardi Packers in 1962. The NFL average in 1946 was 18.9 points per game, and every other team allowed at least 14.4 points per game. Unfortunately, the Steelers offense was as bad as the defense was good: the black and gold finished last in the league in scoring at 12.4 points per game.

That 1946 team was led by Bill Dudley, an all-world star who won the league’s MVP award. In addition to leading the league in rushing yards… and punt return yards and average… Dudley intercepted 10 passes that season! That remarkable fact came despite the Steelers only facing 162 pass attempts that season, meaning Dudley intercepted one out of every 16.2 passes the Steelers defense saw that season. It remains arguably the greatest season of thievery in NFL history.

Those ’46 Steelers were otherwise an unremarkable team, notable for this one fact: Pittsburgh is the last team to finish as the league’s lowest scoring team and to also allow the fewest points in the league. But this year, the 2022 Denver Broncos are challenging that mark. Through 9 games and 10 weeks of the season, Denver ranks last in scoring and first in points allowed. The Broncos have 131 points scored through 9 games — a very bad number although not a particularly low mark for the league’s worst-scoring team. ^[1]Last year, Houston scored 128 points through 9 games, and this year, the Colts have just one more point than Denver And they have allowed 149 points despite facing 11.8 drives per game (thanks, offense), tied for the most in the NFL.

A few teams have come close to pulling off this rare achievement, but it’s remarkable to consider that no team has done this since Sutherland’s Steelers. ^[2]Only one team has gone in the other direction: the 2000 Rams led the league in scoring but also ranked last in points allowed. There have been just 31.1 points per game scored in Broncos games this season.  In the last 25 seasons, only two other times has that happened: the famed 2000 Ravens teams, and the 2005 Bears team that tried to replicate that approach, using Brian Urlacher as Ray Lewis and Kyle Orton as Trent Dilfer. [continue reading…]

October 5th, 1924 was not the most exciting day in pro football history. The Cardinals defeated the Packers 3-0 in a game that was representative of things to come. Elsewhere, the Duluth Kelleys beat the Minneapolis Marines 3-0, the Akron Pros won in Rochester against the Jeffersons by a 3-0 score, and the Milwaukee Badgers hosted and defeated the Kansas City Blues by the score of — you guessed it — three to zero. It was the only time in NFL history that four games all finished with the same score on the same day. [continue reading…]

The New England Patriots, New York Giants, New York Giants and Philadelphia Eagles are undeniably in the northeast. I think most would include the Buffalo Bills are as well, although they do play in western New York. The state of Pennsylvania is commonly included in the northeast, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to include Pittsburgh, on the western border, in as a team in the northeast. The Baltimore Ravens are only 100 miles away from Philadelphia, but they are also only 40 miles from Washington, D.C., and no sensible definition of “Northeast” should include the nation’s capital.

So I’m going to stick with the NE-NYG-NYJ-PHI-BUF pairing as the definition of Northeast football. And only two years ago, it looked really bad: [continue reading…]

From 2002 to 2021, NFL teams converted 38.9% of all third down attempts. Third down performance is really meaningful when it comes to winning games, but it can also be pretty random from sample to sample. So as a result, third down performance has an outsized performance on who wins and loses that game, but is probably not all that predictable as to who will win the next game.

I thought it would be interesting to look at this in the context of the pre-game point spread. Let’s start with a few basic numbers, looking at this 20-year period.

• Teams that were favored by 1 to 5.5 points won 58.7% of their games.
• Teams that were favored by 6 to 8 points won 73.6% of their games.
• Teams that were favored by more than 8 points won 83.4% of their games.

But let’s say you know that the favorite would lose the third down battle. How does that change things?

• Teams that were favored by 1 to 5.5 points but were worse on third downs won only 43.4% of their games.
• Teams that were favored by 6 to 8 points but were worse on third downs won only 54.2% of their games.
• Teams that were favored by more than 8 points but were worse on third downs won 68.2% of their games.

Now, saying an underdog just needs to win the third down battle is not very helpful, and only a little more precise (and about as useless) as saying they just need to score more points. But it does help to provide some guardrails about the magnitude of third down performance. It can flip a big favorite into a coin flip, and a huge favorite suddenly has a real chance of losing.

Can we quantify exactly how important third down success is? I’m glad you asked. As we know, each team has a 38.9% chance of converting an average third down. Suppose each team has 15 third down attempts in the game. Let’s say one team coverts 10 of 15, while the other only converts five opportunities. The expected number of third down conversions for both teams is 5.8 (0.389 multiplied by 15), so one team converted 4.2 more first downs than expected, while the other converted 0.8 fewer than expected. The net difference, of course, is five conversions — let’s call that the net third downs added. [continue reading…]

Yesterday, I did a fairly simple analysis to compare interception numbers across eras. Because I covered the methodology in the previous post, I am not going to regurgitate that information here. Instead, I want to just get right into it. When I did the career adjusted sacks post, I went step-by-step in the same manner I did in the single season article. This time, however, I think we can skip past all that and look at the end results.

Career Adjusted Interception Totals

The first table is sorted by the last column, but you can re-sort by any header you like. Using Rod Woodson as an example, here’s how you read the table: Woodson intercepted 71 passes against 8401 attempts at a 0.85% rate. His passing environment modifier (Mod) is worth 142%, and the softened version of that (Soft) is worth 121%. Taking the average of his actual interceptions and interceptions per 500 attempts in order to account for volume gives us the Mid adjustment, which is 98% in Woodson’s case. Applying my homebrewed league strength multiplier (LSM) gives him a 99% adjustment.

If we multiply Woodson’s 71 interceptions by Mod, Mid, and LSM, we get a whopping 97.7 adjusted interceptions for his career. If we dampen it by multiplying those 71 picks by Soft, Mid, and LSM, Woodson’s career adjusted interceptions come to 83.2, good for the highest mark ever. ^[1]For the ModTot, that’s 71 * 142% * 98% * 99%. For the SoftTot, that’s 71 * 121% * 98% * 99%.

Using the actual historical average as a baseline appears to be a bit much, going by the numbers it produces. I think having Charles Woodson, Ed Reed, Rod Woodson, a serial rapist, and Aeneas Williams as the top five (by ModTot) is fine; giving Chuck credit for 101 interceptions is a bit much for me. Moving the all time leader in picks, Paul Krause, down to ninth also feels a tad harsh as well. Sure, I think he tends to be overrated by people who look at one number and base their entire evaluation on that single data point, but I also think having such a commanding lead over any modern player should count for something. For this reason, I think the SoftTot column produces results with greater face validity.

The last column gives us a top ten of seven Hall of Famers, one senior candidate who will likely get the necessary votes soon, possibly the best safety of the 1990s who would be in Canton already if he played for Dallas or San Francisco, and a a vile monster who was good at picking off passes and not really much else.

Let’s Be Reasonable

The wacky looking career totals form the table above convinced me to try using a new baseline. I decided to use the last 40 years of football, which incorporates nearly the entire period of open offense football. ^[2]I refer to football in the wake of the Mel Blount Rule and rules enabling offensive linemen to extend their hands to block in 1978, as well as the subsequent offensive revolution heralded by the … Continue reading When I looked at that timeframe, the historical baseline moved from 4.80% to 3.16%. because of that, I have dubbed the new baseline the Austin Percentage. Having a lower baseline means that fewer players will see their totals go up, and only the most recent players will their totals go up significantly.

The table below is sorted by the last column, but you can sort by any of the headings. Using Krause as our example, read the table thus: Krause picked off 81 passes against 5623 attempts at a 1.44% rate. His volume adjustment is worth 117%, and his league strength multiplier is worth 88%. His Austin figure is 60%, which comes to 80% when the effect is halved. ^[3]Recall from the first table that his Mod and Soft were 91% and 96% because of the highest baseline. If we apply the Mid, LSM, and Austin modifiers to Krause’s 81 actual interceptions, his total plummets to 49.9, which ranks tenth on the career list. If we replace the Austin modifier with the softened version, Krause’s number falls to just 66.4, which allows him to maintain his place atop the interception mountain. ^[4]To arrive at the numbers in the Austin column, we use: 81 * 117% * 88% * 60%. To find the results for the HalfTot column, we use: 81 * 117% * 88% * 80%. These figures are rounded and will produce … Continue reading

If you earnestly believe older players relied too much on archaic passing to glean their big interception totals, the Austin column might be for you. Before we find Krause at number ten, only Rod Woodson and Eugene Robinson had any action prior to 1990. Recent ball hawk Richard Sherman is in a fourteen-way tie for 104th place in career interceptions, with 37. However, when Austin 3.16 comes around, Sherman jumps to 18th, which does feel more appropriate for one of the premier turnover artists of recent vintage. In fact, his 8.4 interception boost is the highest number of any player, just beating out the bonuses of 8.3 and 8.1 for fellow playmakers Xavien Howard and Marcus Peters. Wandering mercenary Aqib Talib finds himself pretty high on the career list when looking at the Austin total.

While some recent players saw modest gains, older players saw their totals fall off a cliff with the lower baseline. Emlen Tunnell, a real life hero who picked off 79 passes—but did most of his damage in the 1950s—suffers a reduction of 43.6 from his total. He goes from ranking second on the official list to 54th on the Austin list. That seems a little steep, even to a noted old school player hater like I am. Night Train Lane and Johnny Robinson join Krause and Tunnell as the only other players to lose at least 30 from their totals. Turn-of-the-century players like Sam Madison and Patrick Surtain see almost no change in their career numbers.

I think the last column makes the most sense at first glace. Tunnell, Robinson, and Jim Norton all lose more than 20 from their real numbers, and no one gains more than 3.6. Krause loses 14.6, but because Tunnell lost 22 and his lead over anyone else was huge, he remains in first place. Rod Woodson loses 4.7 from his total, while Charles Woodson and Ed Reed each lose about half a pick, resulting in the three ending pretty clustered, and all close to Krause at the top. While Tunnell has a large reduction, his actual number of interceptions was so high to begin with that he still ranks sixth here.

I am often interested to see where Ken Riley and Dave Brown will fall, relative to one another. Riley has 65 interceptions to Brown’s 62. The Austin adjustment puts Brown ahead, while my preferred adjustment leaves the Bengals legend with a 54.6 to 53.4 lead. Riley never made a Pro Bowl, but he earned first team all pro honors once and second team honors twice. Brown made one Pro Bowl and one all pro second team. Given how close together these two are in terms of actual production, the gap in their public perception is pretty interesting to me. When you consider the fact that Brown was his team’s top corner, while Lemar Parrish was the top corner in Cincinnati until 1977, the issue is further muddled.

I will leave further commentary to the FP faithful, if any remain.

I recently reopened a discussion about sacks Chase started years ago. Today, I’m going to rehash another topic our prolific host has covered time and again (and again): adjusting interceptions for era. Unlike sacks, which have official number dating back to 1982 and unofficial ones published as far back as 1960, interceptions have official records as far back as 1940. This gives us much more data to work with, but it also provides similar challenges that Sid Luckman presents when adjusting passing stats: the game is so different now from what it was in the 1940s that trying to compare the numbers side by side ends up killing newer players when adjusting for dropbacks or hurting older players when adjusting for passing environment. But getting it 85% right is better than not doing anything at all, so I’m going to do it anyway. As I did with the sack posts, I will go through my progressions of adjustments one step at a time, so that you can see how we arrived at the final numbers.

Normalizing for Volume

It stands to reason that intercepting ten passes against 300 attempts is more impressive than intercepting the same number of passes against 600 attempts—at least, as far as getting interceptions is at all impressive when divorced from other aspects of play. Because of this, it is necessary to put players on a more even playing field. Using Bill Dudley‘s frankly ridiculous 1946 season as an example, follow the table like so: Dudley, playing in 1946 for the Steelers, appeared in 11 games and snagged 10 interceptions against 162 opponent pass attempts. That comes to an outlandish 6.17% interception rate. If we adjust for volume by giving all players credit for their interception rate multiplied by 500 attempts, Dudley’s 1946 comes to 30.9 picks per 500 passes. If you look at that number and mutter “well, that’s just too high,” then we are in agreement. Thus, I took the average of their actual picks and their attempts per 500 passes to find the number in the last column, which I have labeled Mid. Using that adjustment instead, Dudley’s season was only good for 20.4 volume-adjusted interceptions.