Today at 538: Is it time to freak out for fans in Carolina and Arizona?

The Carolina Panthers and Arizona Cardinals were the two most successful teams during the 2015 regular season. Carolina posted the league’s best-record, at 15-1, and led the league in scoring margin (+192). Arizona had the second-best record in the NFL (13-3) and finished with the second-best margin (+176). Carolina’s quarterback, Cam Newton, was selected as the league’s most valuable player and the first-team All-Pro quarterback by the Associated Press, while Arizona’s quarterback, Carson Palmer, received the second-most votes for that All-Pro slot.

The two teams met in the NFC championship game, with Carolina winning in a blowout, 49-15. And, of course, the Denver Broncos upset Carolina in the Super Bowl. But ugly performances by Carolina and Arizona in their final games of the 2015 season didn’t temper preseason expectations: NFL.com’s preseason power rankings had the Panthers and the Cardinals as its top two teams. But with both teams starting the 2016 season with a 1-3 record, is it time for panic?

You can read the full article here.

For the last couple of years, I have introduced the first edition of the College Football SRS Ratings after five weeks.  So with five weeks in the books, it’s time to release the first college football ratings. And while it’s too early to put too much weight on these ratings, they help to at least begin framing the discussion of which are the most impressive teams in college football.  As a reminder, here is the methodology:

1) For each game not played at a neutral site, 3 points are given to the road team. After that adjustment, all wins and losses of between 7 and 24 points are recorded exactly as such. This means that a 24-10 road win goes down as +17 for the road team, -17 for the home team.

2) With one exception, wins of 7 or fewer points are scored as 7-point wins and losses of 7 or fewer points are scored as 7 point losses. So a 4-point home win goes down as +7 (and not a 1) and a 1-point home loss is a -7 (and not a -4). The one exception is that road losses of 3 or fewer (and home wins of 3 or fewer) are graded as ties. So a 21-20 home victory goes down as a 0 for both teams.

3) Wins/Losses of more than 24 points are scored as the average between the actual number and 24. This is to avoid giving undue credit to teams that run up the score. So a 75-point home win goes down as a 48-point win.

Once we have a rating for each team in each game, we then adjust each result for strength of schedule. This is an iterative process, where we adjust the ratings hundreds of times (to adjust for SOS, you have to adjust for the SOS of each opponent, and the SOS of each opponent’s opponent, and so on.) in Excel. Then we produce final ratings, where the SRS rating is the sum of the Margin of Victory and Strength of Schedule in every week. [continue reading…]

The 1992 San Diego Chargers are the inspiration for all 0-4 teams.  San Diego, under new head coach Bobby Ross, were 0-4 at the end of September, with three losses of at least 14 points. San Diego then won 11 of their final 12 games. Since 1990, no other team has started 0-4 and won 10 of their final 12 games, and only one other team (the ’04 Bills) went even 9-3.

Similarly, there is one team since 1990 that began 4-0, and then went 1-11. That was the 2012 Cardinals, who unlike the ’92 Chargers, at least showed signs of things to come. At the end of regulation of three of those four games, Arizona outscored is opponents by just six points. The Kevin Kolb/John Skelton/Ryan Lindley Cardinals finished the year 5-11, albeit against the toughest schedule in the NFL.

We know the ’92 Chargers and ’12 Cardinals are outliers, but by how much? The bubble graph below shows every team from 1990 to 2015, how many wins they had in games 1-4 on the X-Axis, and how many wins they had in games 5-16 on the Y-Axis. The red bubble represents the average result, while the size of each bubble shows how many teams met those criteria (i.e., the most common result was 3 wins, 7 wins: [continue reading…]

Julio Jones is typically the main driver of the Falcons offense. Last year, he had 33% of all Atlanta targets, and in 2014, he had 28% of Atlanta’s targets in the 15 games he played. But, as Adam Harstad noted, Jones has just under 20% of Atlanta’s targets this year.

Entering the season, Jones had averaged over 100 receiving yards per game over his previous 57 games, while the book on Matt Ryan was that he had reached his ceiling (or was on the downward slope of his career).

But this year, Ryan leads the league in yards per attempt, while the Falcons lead the NFL in both points and yards. If I told you that before the season, you would probably have guessed that Jones had about 500 yards, but in fact, he’s having a below-average year by his standards: he’s averaging a career low 63 yards per game, likely due to a calf injury that kept him to just 16 yards last week.

But right now, Ryan is averaging 9.4 yards per pass on throws to Jones, and and 9.5 yards per pass on throws to everyone else! Regular readers know I am not a fan of yards per target, but it is interesting to look at in certain situations. Let’s take a look at Atlanta’s breakdown: [continue reading…]