I’m short on time right now so this week’s QB rankings will be presented without commentary. [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back to give us his thoughts on this week’s quarterbacks. It’s been fun to follow his progression from hopeful fan to ranting madman over the course of just fifteen weeks.

This is starting to sound like a broken record but we just witnessed yet another week of terrible quarterbacking. Only 9 of 32 qualifiers even cracked a QBR of 50! We can’t even blame this on backup QB’s dragging down the average as the bottom 10 were all regular starters aside from Mike Glennon. If anything, the backups outperformed the starters with Tyler Huntley taking the week 15 crown and Nick Mullens placing eighth. [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back with another quarterback recap. He has a broken arm and a detached retina, and he’s ready to win it.

This may have been the least interesting week of the 2021 season for overall game quality (favorites were 12-2 with some totally noncompetitive matchups), but it was still a fascinating slate for analyzing quarterback performance. [continue reading…]

As has been the case for nearly two months now, the steady decline of NFL offenses continued in week 13. Scoring has dropped from 24.8 points per game last year to 22.9 this year. The league is currently averaging 11.0 yards per completion; if this holds it will be the lowest in NFL history. There’s also been a marked shift in touchdown passes vs. interceptions. Early in the season there were 3.5 TD passes for every INT; that ratio is now below 2 to 1. For the first time in several years the NFL has found a nice equilibrium between offense and defense. It’ll be interesting to see if the competition committee devises rule changes to boost offense again in 2022.

Here are the week 13 rankings: [continue reading…]

This week I’m excited to introduce a new data set into my quarterback rankings, courtesy of Pro Football Focus. I’d like to give a helmet knock to our good buddy Bryan Frye for working out some details behind the scenes to make this possible. ^[1]Note from Bryan: all I did was ask.

From this point forward, I will be using two metrics to rate quarterbacks: QBR and PFF offensive grades. This makes me giddy because both systems attempt to isolate the QB’s contribution from that of his teammates. That’s a significant step up from ANY/A, DYAR, and EPA which simply assign team offensive statistics to the QB taking the snaps. I can live with that for historical comparisons where we don’t have anything better, but in today’s world of robust data there’s no reason to settle for such a high degree of entanglement.

As neither QBR nor PFF grades account for workload, I needed to make an adjustment to prevent low usage QB’s from hogging the top of the rankings. After experimenting with a few ideas I settled on adding a z-score for play count (based on qualifiers only) and giving it half weight compared to the z-scores for the two metrics. It’s not perfect but it gets the job done without too many arbitrary decisions.

Let’s see how the new system looks for week 12: [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back, and he’s eschewing the expository fluff (which I am re-adding, right here). Enjoy, friends.

Here are this week’s quarterback rankings: [continue reading…]

As with the rest of these recaps, the ideas and analysis presented here are from Adam Steele. I’m just a dunce with admin rights.

We’ve seen a steady decline in quarterback play across the last month, and this week hit a new low. The unweighted average QBR for week ten qualifiers was a dismal 44.7. That would have ranked 27th in the league last year! This isn’t a surprise as offense tends to decline in the second half of every season as defenses jell and the weather starts to make an impact.

Here are this week’s numbers: [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back, continuing to refine his methods in real time, and we get to benefit from it. Thank you Adam, for working it out publicly.

After tabulating the numbers for week nine I realized I needed to make one more tweak to the formula. Since EPA per play and QBR are both agnostic to volume, QB games with a low number of plays were disproportionately clustered at the top and bottom of the rankings. Obviously it’s harder to maintain an extreme performance over a larger sample than a smaller one. My solution was to regress EPA/P by adding 20 plays of 0.1 EPA (roughly league average) to everyone’s stat line before calculating their z-scores. This fix strikes a nice balance between efficiency and volume.

Onto this week results: [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back with a brand new convention, and we thank him for keeping the site humming.

With the NFL trade deadline taking place this week, I decided to make a trade of my own. I’m ditching DYAR in favor of EPA per play. After Davis Mills placed seventh in DYAR by turning into Dan Marino down 38-0, I knew I had to switch to a metric that filters out garbage time.

Thanks to Ben Baldwin and his nifty site rbsdm.com, it’s easy to query EPA/P with various amounts of garbage time removed. After some experimentation I settled on a 4% filter; plays which occur when win probability is below 4% or above 96% are thrown out. The vast majority of plays are still counted but nonsense like the Davis Mills experience is rightfully ignored. To wit, Mills drops from -.149 to -.474 EPA/P with this filter applied.

Here are the week eight numbers: [continue reading…]

Guys, gals, and nonbinary pals, Adam Steele is back with his quarterback recap. And we thank him for it.

I’m going to keep the commentary short and sweet today, so here are the week seven rankings: [continue reading…]

After offenses lit up the scoreboard in week five, we were treated to the poorest quarterbacking of the year in week six. Both DYAR and QBR hit their low points in the 2021 season. What’s shocking is that this happened with the Jets on their bye week!
[continue reading…]

Finally, a week in which the best QB games were more extreme than the worst. The league saw DYAR and ANY/A reach their high points for any week in 2021. Oddly, this was the second worst week for QBR despite the meteoric conventional stats. There seemed to be an unusual number of highlight reel catches and long completions on busted coverages, both of which are likely discounted in QBR.

Fittingly, old man Brady tops the chart in the same week he became the all time leader in total DYAR. Brady and Lamar Jackson had the two best games of the year according to DYAR but fared much worse in QBR. In Brady’s case it’s likely because he faced almost zero pressure vs Miami, while Jackson gets taken to the woodshed for his goal line fumble (another example of QBR overweighting running plays).

Josh Allen had the opposite result – dominant in QBR but merely good in DYAR. He was very successful on his runs, completed his average pass a whopping 13 yards downfield, and didn’t have enough plays to pump up his counting stats. [continue reading…]

With it being the (almost) quarter point of the 2021 season, I’m going to skip commentary on the week four games and focus on quarterback performance across the first month of the season. [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back with his quarterback recap for week 3, 2021. Thank you, Adam, you beautiful man.

The theme of week three is the same as week two: terrible rookies. Remarkably, the eleven worst QB games this season have all been more extreme than the single best game. Anyone reading this is well aware of Justin Fields‘ spectacularly awful sack-fest performance against Cleveland. But according to DYAR, that wasn’t even the worst game this week!

Here are the week three numbers: [continue reading…]

The following post attributes authorship to Bryan Frye, but everything under the line comes from the mind of Adam Steele. We thank him for his contributions to the site and to football discussion.

For the second week in a row, the worst quarterbacks had more extreme performances than did the best. By absolute value, the eight worst games this season have been more extreme than the single best game. I don’t have a good explanation for this other than sheer randomness. [continue reading…]

The following post attributes authorship to Bryan Frye, but everything under the line comes from the mind of Adam Steele. We thank him for his contributions to the site and to football discussion.

With Chase being such a busy man, I have taken over posting weekly passing reviews during the 2021 season. While the classic ANY/A formula has served its purpose over the years, I’m going to tap into a couple of more advanced metrics to rank quarterbacks on a weekly basis.

Each week, qualifying QB’s will be scored using Football Outsiders’ DYAR and ESPN’s QBR metrics. I think this will give us a nice balance between play-by-play and charting stats, as well as a balance between counting stats and pure efficiency. The qualifying players will have their z-score calculated for DYAR and QBR then averaged to create their overall score.

Here are the week 1 results: [continue reading…]

Decker after another score

For his career, Eric Decker has 5,222 receiving yards and 52 receiving touchdowns.  That means he’s grabbed one touchdown catch for every 100.4 receiving yards, an incredible ratio for a non-tight end.  And while touchdons can be fluky, that doesn’t feel the way with Decker, who has been a touchdown machine for his entire career across two teams and multiple quarterbacks.

To put this into perspective, I looked at all wide receivers who entered the NFL since 1978 who have at least 2,000 receiving yards through the end of the 2015 season.  Decker has the third lowest (i.e., most touchdown-heavy) rate at a touchdown every 100.4 receiving yards ^[1]For Decker, I included 2016, but for every other player, I have not updated their numbers, if any, with the results of this year.  The only two players ahead of him? Randy Moss and Dez Bryant.

In the graph below, I’ve plotted career receiving yards (’78-’15) on the X-Axis, and Receiving Yards/Receiving Touchdowns( ’78-’15) on the Y-Axis. In that case, lower = more of a touchdown machine. [continue reading…]

Friend of the program Bryan Frye is back for another guest post. As regular readers know, Bryan operates his own fantastic site, http://www.thegridfe.com. You can view all of Bryan’s guest posts here, and follow him on twitter @LaverneusDingle.

The 2015 regular season is in the books, and all the relevant stats are at our disposal to poke and prod as our hearts desire. Chase already discussed the fact that, statistically, this has been the best passing season in NFL history. League and team passing records fell on a seemingly regular basis, and a few receiving records were in serious jeopardy by season’s end. ^[1]We probably all know by now that Julio Jones and Antonio Brown became just the third and fourth receivers ever to break the 1,800 yards mark in a single season. It’s also pretty common knowledge … Continue reading [continue reading…]

Change is inherent in the very fabric of the NFL. From year to year, little stays the same for most teams. But the team that changed the least from 2013 to 2014 was … the Dallas Cowboys?

There were six Dallas players who produced 12 or more points of Approximate Value last year: DeMarco Murray, Tony Romo, Tyron Smith, Dez Bryant, Zack Martin, and Travis Frederick. Of that group, all but Martin were key contributors in 2013, too. As measured by AV, the only big changes for the Cowboys were the losses of Jason Hatcher (8 points of AV in 2013), DeMarcus Ware (5) and Sean Lee (5). And other than Martin, the only notable players for the team last year that weren’t key parts of the team in 2013 were DE Jeremy Mincey, FS J.J. Wilcox, OLB Anthony Hitchens, ILB Rolando McClain, and DE Tyrone Crawford. And, perhaps, another reason the Cowboys may have appeared to have little turnover last year? Dallas generally stayed very healthy, which is one way of keeping the same players in the lineup year over year. [continue reading…]

On Sunday, I looked at the single-season leaders in estimated offensive points per estimated drive. Today, let’s look at the reverse: the teams since 1950 with the fewest points per estimated drive.

The 1977 Bucs ranked last in the NFL in points, yards, first downs, passing yards, passing touchdowns, net yards per attempt, rushing yards, and rushing yards per carry. The team ranked third from last in rushing touchdowns and interceptions. It was that kind of year for Tampa Bay, as the team was shut out 6 times in 14 games, and held to just a field goal in three others.

Tampa scored just 103 points, but the defense scored four touchdowns! As a result, the Bucs get credit for just 76 estimated offensive points (the offense does get credit for one missed extra point), the fewest of any team since 1950. [continue reading…]

Is week 1 a window into a team’s soul? Or is week 1 best left ignored by analysts, since results are skewed by teams that are still shaking off the rust from the summer? As it turns out, week 1 isn’t just like any other week: it’s more like any other week than, uh, any other week. What do I mean by that?

Let’s begin with a hypothesis. The best teams in the league are [more/less] likely to win in week 1 than they are normally. This is because the best teams are [at their best/rusty] in week 1. How would we go about proving this to be true?

One method would be to take a weighted average winning percentage of teams in week one, with the weight being on the team’s actual season-ending winning percentage. For example, the Patriots went 16-0 in 2007, which means New England was responsible for 6.25% of all wins in the NFL that season. That year, the Colts went 13-3, so Indianapolis was responsible for 5.1% of all wins that year. If we want to know whether good teams play [better/worse] in week 1, we care a lot more about how teams like the ’07 Patriots and Colts fared than the average team.

By using weighted average winning percentages, we place more weight on the results of the best teams, which is exactly what we want to do. So when the ’07 Patriots and ’07 Colts won in week one, rather than being responsible for 6.25% of the league, they are now are responsible for over 11% of the NFL’s weighted week 1 winning percentage. Of course, you can probably figure out pretty quickly that by using this methodology, we are ensuring that the “average” winning percentage over the course of the season will be quite a bit over .500, since the best teams will win more often than not. And that’s exactly what we see: the average weighted winning percentage across all weeks, using this methodology, was 0.574. As it turns out, that’s exactly what the average is in week 1, too. [continue reading…]

During the 2013 offseason, I wrote 32 articles under the RPO 2013 tag. In my Predictions in Review series, I review those preview articles with the benefit of hindsight. Previously, I reviewed the AFC West, the NFC West, the AFC South, the NFC South, the AFC North, the NFC North, and the AFC East. Today, we finish the series with a look at the NFC East.

Eli Manning was about as good in 2012 as he was in 2011, July 15, 2013

On the surface, Eli Manning’s numbers dropped significantly from 2011 to 2012; after further review, his “decline” was entirely due to two factors: attempting fewer passes and lower YAC by his receivers. And since Victor Cruz and Hakeem Nicks were largely responsible for those declines, it seemed fair to wonder how much of the blame should go to Manning. [continue reading…]

During the 2013 offseason, I wrote 32 articles under the RPO 2013 tag. In my Predictions in Review series, I review those preview articles with the benefit of hindsight. Previously, I reviewed the AFC West, the NFC West, the AFC South, the NFC South, and the AFC North. Today, the NFC North.

The Detroit Lions will win more games in 2013, June 21, 2013

In 2012, Detroit finished 4-12, but they seemed like an obvious pick to have a rebound season. The Lions went 3-9 in games decided by 8 or fewer points that year, which was the worst mark in the league. Since such a poor record is usually a sign of bad luck rather than bad skill, Detroit wouldn’t need to do much to improve on their 4-win season. The Lions had 6.4 Pythagorean wins, and no team fell as far short of their Pythagorean record in 2012 as Detroit. There was one other reason I highlighted as to why Detroit would win more games in 2013: the Lions recovered only 33% of all fumbles that occurred in Detroit games. As a result, the team recovered 7.6 fewer fumbles than expected.

Of course, none of this was a surprise: Vegas pegged Detroit as an average team entering the season. And even though the Lions did finish 7-9, a three-win improvement wasn’t enough to save Jim Schwartz’ job. After a 3-9 record the year before, the 2013 Lions went 4-6 in games decided by 8 or fewer points, which included losses in the team’s final three games.  Detroit did improve when it came to fumble recoveries, but only slightly: the Lions recovered 42.6% of all fumbles in their games in 2013, which was 3.6 recoveries fewer than expected.

What can we learn: When it comes to records in close games and fumble recovery rates, we should expect regression to the mean.  Last year, the Colts (6-1) and Jets (5-1) had the best records in close games; Andrew Luck has been doing this for two years now, but no such benefit of the doubt should be given to the Jets. Meanwhile, Houston (2-9) and Washington (2-7) had the worst records in close games. All else being equal, we would expect both of those teams to improve on their wins total in 2014 (for the 2-14 Texans, it will take some work not to win more games in 2014; and, of course, such rebound seasons are already baked into the Vegas lines).

As far as fumble recovery rates, well, that’s one area where the Jets are hoping for some regression to the mean.

The 2012 Chicago Bears had the Least Strange Season Ever, August 2, 2013

Here’s what I wrote about the 2012 Bears:

The 2012 Bears played two terrible teams, the Titans and the Jaguars. Those were the two biggest blowouts of the season for Chicago. The Bears had five games against really good teams (Seattle, San Francisco, Houston, and the Packers twice): those were the five biggest losses of the season. Chicago had one other loss, which came on the road against the next best team the Bears played, Minnesota.
…
But the Bears didn’t just have a predictable season. That -0.89 correlation coefficient [between Chicago’s opponent’s rating and location-adjusted margin of victory] is the lowest for any 16-game season in NFL history. In other words, Chicago just had the least strange season of the modern era.

This post was not about predicting Chicago’s 2013 season but analyzing a quirky fact I discovered. The Bears struggled against the best teams in 2012, and that cost Lovie Smith his job. In 2013, Chicago’s season was much more normal; in fact, the Bears had a slightly “stranger” season than the average team.

The Bears did manage to defeat the Bengals and Packers (without Aaron Rodgers), but Chicago still finished below .500 against playoff teams thanks to losses to New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Green Bay (with Aaron Rodgers). After a 2-6 performance against playoff teams in 2012, I suppose a 2-3 record is an improvement. But the irony is that the reason Chicago’s season was less normal in 2013 wasn’t due to better play against the best teams, but because Chicago lost to Minnesota and Washington. In the first year post-Lovie, the Bears missed the playoffs because they lost to two of the worst teams in the league, causing them to miss out on the division title by one half-game. Here’s one stat I bet Lovie Smith knows: from 2005 to 2012, Chicago went 30-0 against teams that finished the season with fewer than six wins. As for which teams had the strangest and least strangest seasons in 2013? Check back tomorrow.

Can Adrian Peterson break Emmitt Smith’s rushing record?, August 3, 2013

What a difference a year makes. Eight months ago, the debate regarding whether Adrian Peterson could break Smith’s record was a legitimate talking point. After a “down” season with 1,266 yards in 14 games, nobody is asking that question anymore. Of course, Peterson never had much of a chance of breaking the record anyway, which was the point of my post. Not only had Smith outgained him Peterson through each of their first six seasons, and not only did Smith enter the league a year earlier than Peterson, but Emmitt Smith was also the leader in career rushing yards after a player’s first six seasons.

Peterson just turned 29 years old. He ranks sixth in career rushing yards through age 28, but Smith has a 1,119 yard advantage when it comes to rushing yards through age 28. Barry Sanders has them both beat, of course, but he retired after his age 30 season. The problem for Peterson? He needs to run for 8,241 yards during his age 29+ seasons to break Smith’s record. The career leader in yards after turning 29 is Smith with 7,121 yards.

What can we learn: Unless Peterson finds the fountain of youth, Smith’s record won’t be challenged for a long, long time.

Witnesses to Greatness: Aaron Rodgers Edition, August 30, 2013

In late August, I wondered if we had taken Rodgers’ dominance for granted. After all, he had a career passer rating of 104.9, the best ever. Then in 2013, he produced a passer rating of … 104.9, the fifth best mark among qualifying passers.

Passer rating stinks, as we all know, but Rodgers is dominant in nearly every metric. If we break passer rating down into its four parts we see:

• Entering 2013, Rodgers was the career leader in completion percentage. Drew Brees now holds a 0.1% edge over Rodgers in this category. Rodgers completed 66.6% of his passes last year, the 5th best mark of 2013.
• Rodgers was the career leader in interception rate entering 2013, and still holds that crown. Believe it or not, his 2.1% interception rate last year ranked only 12th.
• With a 5.9% touchdown rate in 2013 (5th best), he remains the active leader in touchdown percentage. Everyone ahead of him on the career list began their career before 1960.
• Rodgers was the active leader in yards/attempt prior to 2013, and then he had another dominant year by producing an 8.7 average (2nd best). He’s now widened his lead in this metric and should remain the active leader for the foreseeable future.

What can we learn: That Rodgers is the man? Of course, this year we got to see that first-hand. The Packers went 6-3 in Rodgers’ 9 starts and 2-4-1 without him, but remember, he threw just two passes in his Bears start, which the Packers lost. Count that as a non-Rodgers game, and Green Bay went 6-2 with him and 2-5-1 without him. From there, one might infer that he added 3.5 wins to the Packers last year, tied for the 4th most ever from a quarterback relative to his backups.

The only area where Rodgers struggles is with sacks, and it’s worth remembering that all of his other rate stats are slightly inflated because they do not include sacks in the denominator. He’s still the man, of course, but sacks, era adjustments, and the fact that he isn’t done producing top seasons is why he “only” ranked 12th and 14th on these lists.

During the 2013 offseason, I wrote 32 articles under the RPO 2013 tag. In my Predictions in Review series, I review those preview articles with the benefit of hindsight. Previously, I reviewed the AFC West, the NFC West, the the AFC South, and the NFC South. Today, the AFC North.

Marvin Lewis, Jim Mora, and the Playoffs, May 30, 2013

In this article, I noted that Marvin Lewis had coached the Bengals for ten seasons without recording a playoff victory.  That was pretty unique: Since 1966, only Jim Mora had coached a team for longer without notching a playoff victory, and he was fired by the New Orleans Saints in his 11th year after a 2-6 start. Well, Lewis now stands alone in the Super Bowl era, as the only coach to fail to record a playoff win in 11 straight seasons and then be brought back for season twelve.

Since I wrote that article, though, I’ve become much more sympathetic to Lewis.  For years, it was easy to take pot shots at his ridiculous use of challenges or his failure to be aggressive when the situation warranted it, but I now think Lewis is one of the better coaches in the league.  He seems to have a knack for connecting with his players, he’s surrounded himself with very good coaches, and you get the sense that he has more on his plate organizationally than the typical head coach.  He’s the de facto GM, unless you consider Mike Brown the real man building the franchise.  And he’s developed one of the most talented rosters in the league, even if Andy Dalton turns into a pumpkin every January.

Of course, that is just cold comfort to Bengals fans who have witnessed the team go 0-11 in the Lewis era when it comes to recording a playoff victory. On the other hand, Cincinnati didn’t win a playoff game in any of the 12 seasons immediately preceding the Lewis hire, either.  But Lewis’ streak is particularly notable for just how rare his tenure has been in today’s environment. [continue reading…]

During the 2013 offseason, I wrote 32 articles under the RPO 2013 tag. In my Predictions in Review series, I review those preview articles with the benefit of hindsight. Previously, I reviewed the AFC West, the NFC West, and the the AFC South. Today, the NFC South.

Who Will Win 2013 Head Coach of the Year, July 25, 2013

For reasons that are not quite clear to me, I have an unusual fascination with the Coach of the Year award. There’s no harder award to predict in all of sports, since the winner is essentially the coach of the team that had the least predictable (in a good way) season. Still, I threw my hat into the ring in 2014 and predicted that Sean Payton would win Coach of the Year. Here is what I wrote in July:

Rob Ryan is now in charge of a defense that ranked last in yards allowed, net yards per attempt allowed, rushing yards allowed, rushing yards per carry allowed, first downs allowed, Expected Points Added, and defensive DVOA. The 2012 Saints also ranked 31st in points allowed. Ryan himself won’t fix that, but first round pick Kenny Vaccaro should begin to help the problem secondary.

But the real reason for optimism is the always explosive Saints offense. Drew Brees, Jimmy Graham, and Darren Sproles are three of the more unique players in the NFL, and help give the Saints an outstanding passing offense. Of course, New Orleans passing attack was great before either Graham or Sproles arrived, as the Brees/Payton engine (with a dash of Marques Colston and Lance Moore) is at times unstoppable. …

Predicting who will win AP Coach of the Year is a fool’s errand, but I’m willing to put my chips on Brees and Payton leading the Saints to the playoffs in a “bounceback” year. The real question is whether that will be enough to convince the voters to select Payton.

As it turned out, Payton did lead a resurgent Saints team from 7-9 in 2012 to 11-5 in 2013; unfortunately for him, a playoff berth was not enough to get him Coach of the Year. That honor instead went to Ron Rivera, although in my eyes, Andy Reid was an immensely more deserving choice.

What can we learn: In week 16, the Panthers defeated the Saints on a touchdown pass with 28 seconds left in the game; had New Orleans won that game, the Saints would have finished 12-4 and won the division and a first round bye, knocking Rivera’s Panthers down to the 5 seed. Would that have been enough to swing the COTY award to Payton? Probably not, although it likely would have meant Reid would have won the honor. The Coach of the Year award remains impossible to predict.

Did you just grab my torch?.

Julio Jones and Roddy White star in Stealing The Torch, July 31, 2013

My other three NFC South posts were more walks down memory lane than predictions. The Falcons post was a look at other star wide receiver tandems that were similar to Julio Jones and Roddy White in 2012. This was a fun way to look at comparable receivers, but there was nothing fun about the Atlanta offense in 2013.  Jones averaged 116.0 yards per game last year, but that came over just five games. A foot injury suffered against the Jets in week 5 ended what looked to be a special season: Jones was leading the league in receptions (41) and was second in receiving yards (580) at the time. White, meanwhile, had an absymal start to his season that dragged on for months.

Hamstring and ankle injuries caused White to miss three full games and hampered his production in most of the others. At the end of November, he just 20 catches for 209 yards; at that point, the Falcons were 2-9, and I won’t fault you if you put Atlanta on “ignore” for the rest of the year. But White exploded with 43 catches for 502 yards in December, joining Josh Gordon (658) and Alshon Jeffery (561) as the only players with 500+ receiving yards in December 2013.

The Steve Smith Post, August 7, 2013

In August, I decided to compile the loose odds and ends I had collected on Steve Smith over the years. When the time comes, I plan on using that post to augment Smith’s Hall of Fame case. Unfortunately for Smith, the time may be coming sooner than he’d like. On December 1st, I wrote that Smith’s poor production may have been a reason for why Cam Newton’s numbers had declined.

Smith has had largely the same role in the Panthers offense for years, so it’s not unreasonable to compare his advanced metrics from each of Newton’s seasons.  In 2013, Smith caught 58.2% of his targets, which is in line with his production from 2012 (52.9%) and 2011 (61.2%). However, Smith started running much shorter routes — according to NFLGSIS, his average reception came just 8.9 yards downfield in 2013, compared to around 12 yards over the prior two years. Smith’s YAC also decreased (which is unusual, as shorter passes tend to lead to more YAC, making this another bad sign); as a result, his yards per target dropped from 10.8 in 2011 to 8.5 in 2012 to just 6.8 in 2013.  It was a down year in a Hall of Fame caliber career. Smith turns 35 in May; unfortunately, it seems safe to suggest that the best is behind him.

Can Tampa Bay Win the NFC South With the Worst Passing Attack?, August 13, 2013

Just about everyone assumed the Bucs would have the worst starting quarterback in the NFC South. What interested me was the rest of the team. The question I posed was more trivia than analysis: how often does the team with the worst passing attack in the division wind up winning the division?

The answer: Since 1950, only nine teams pulled off that feat, with nearly half of them coming since the league moved to a four-teams-per-division-for-each-division format in 2002. No team pulled off that feat in 2013, although the Panthers ranked 3rd in the NFC South in Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt. The team that ranked last in the division was, of course, the Bucs.

The Bucs ranked 32nd in NY/A and finished the year 4-12. But remember: Tampa Bay faced the hardest schedule in the league in 2013. Early DVOA estimates project the Bucs for 7.7 wins in 2014, and there are reasons for optimism in Tampa Bay in 2014.

During the 2013 offseason, I wrote 32 articles under the RPO 2013 tag. In my Predictions in Review series, I review those preview articles with the benefit of hindsight. Previously, I reviewed the AFC West and the NFC West. Today, the AFC South, beginning with a straightforward case in Tennessee.

Britt smoked the Eagles secondary.

Spoiler alert: Kenny Britt did not become the next great wide receiver, at least in 2013 (apparently, I still can’t quit him). Britt is an easy player to fall in love with, if you ignored the warning signs. He was just 20 years old when he played in his first NFL game in 2009. In 2010, he led all players in yards per route run according to Pro Football Focus, but his raw numbers underhwlemed because the Titans were a run-heavy team and Britt missed 30% of the season with a hamstring injury. In 2011, he matched his elite YPRR production, but a torn ACL/MCL tear ended his season after 94 pass routes.

He struggled in 2012, but I was willing to write that off due to recovering from the ugly knee injury, additional hamstring and ankle injuries, and a first-year starter in Jake Locker. That set up 2013 as a season where I thought Britt had great breakout potential. I interviewed Thomas Gower, of Total Titans and Football Outsiders, and asked him his thoughts. Gower was more pessimistic than I was about Britt, and for good reason.

As it turned out, Britt never seemed quite right mentally (in more ways than one); he struggled with drops and was eventually dropped behind Justin Hunter and Kendall Wright on the depth chart. He finished the year with 11 catches for only 96 yards and no touchdowns. In late December, Britt said he would definitely be a #1 wide receiver somewhere in 2014, which means I’m susceptible to falling into the Britt trap again. [continue reading…]

During the 2013 offseason, I wrote 32 articles under the RPO 2013 tag. In my Predictions in Review series, I review those preview articles with the benefit of hindsight. Last week was the AFC West; this week, the NFC West.

Let’s begin in Arizona, where I actually got one right.

Questioning the Narrative on Larry Fitzgerald, June 20, 2013

The conventional wisdom was that Larry Fitzgerald was going to have a bounce-back year in 2013. That view was widely-held: in fact, I caged a lot of my negative Fitzgerald comments with caveats, as it felt like criticizing Fitzgerald was just something football writers didn’t do. Fitzgerald was one of the game’s best wide receivers when Kurt Warner was under center, and it felt wrong to argue with folks who wanted to give him a pass for the mediocre numbers he produced with John Skelton/Ryan Lindley/Kevin Kolb. With Carson Palmer in Arizona in 2013, the expectation was a big year for Fitzgerald. Instead, he produced 82 passes for only 954 yards, although he did score 10 touchdowns.

For the second year in a row, Fitzgerald failed to lead his team in receiving yards per game, with Andre Roberts (2012) and Michael Floyd (2013) instead earning those honors. So what’s happened with Fitzgerald? I have no idea, but he’s certainly not the same player he was during the Warner/Anquan Boldin days. And while the touchdowns made sure he wasn’t a complete fantasy bust, he gained just 22.2% of all Cardinals receiving yards in 2013, somehow falling short of his 23.6% mark in his miserable 2012 season. [continue reading…]

During the 2013 offseason, I wrote 32 articles under the RPO 2013 tag. For some of the teams, the article functioned as a team preview, but in most cases, it was just my way of researching something I found interesting about each team. I thought it would be fun — and perhaps educational — to go back and review each of those articles. Today, we’ll begin with the AFC West.

Are the Chiefs better than your average worst team?, May 16, 2013

The point of this article was to examine a Chiefs team that was inconsistent on paper. Kansas City was a bottom-2 team in the NFL in 2012 based on record, SRS, and the efficiency models of both Advanced NFL Stats and Football Outsiders. On the other hand, Kansas City sent six players to the Pro Bowl in 2012, and went 17-15 over the prior two seasons.  Here was the threshold question in the article:

So, when projecting the 2013 Chiefs, how much “bonus” credit do we give them for having a bunch of Pro Bowlers or for being a pretty good team (based solely on record) the prior two years? And what about the fact that they added Andy Reid, Alex Smith, Anthony Fasano, and Donnie Avery (and Eric Fisher, Travis Kelce, and Knile Davis) on offense and Sean Smith, Dunta Robinson, and Mike DeVito on defense?

I questioned the legitimacy of some of the value of the six Pro Bowlers, but noted that having a good record the prior two seasons may net the team an extra win or two. Here was my conclusion:

Most bad teams experience a lot of turnover, and the Chiefs are no different. As bad as they were in 2012, a new coach and a new quarterback can solve a lot of problems. According to Vegas, the Chiefs are projected to be about 2.3 points worse than average, which jives with the 6.5 win total projected for the team. Kansas City has also hired Chris Ault as a consultant, and the father of the Pistol offense could mean the Chiefs are actually fun to watch this year. I’m cautiously optimistic about the Chiefs, but they seem unlikely to resemble last year’s version in style or production. That has to be considered a very good thing.

We all know what happened: Kansas City started the season 9-0, and finished 11-4 before resting 20 starters in the season finale against San Diego. The additions of Reid and Smith turned out to be outstanding, and defensive coordinator Bob Sutton did an excellent job with the defense. But the biggest change between the Chiefs in 2012 and 2013 was in the turnover department. After finishing with 24 more giveaways than takeaway in 2012, the Chiefs were +18 in the TO department in 2013. That’s the biggest improvement in one season since 1970, and the fourth largest improvement ever: [continue reading…]

So far this season, one thing is obvious: the NFL scheduled Thursday night games every week for the express purpose of screwing with people who do data analysis. Even though week three has started, I’m not ready to close the door on week two, in which nearly every game was competitive into the fourth quarter. But that doesn’t mean the game script for every game was close.

Steven Jackson was injured early in his revenge game against the Rams (and is expected to miss two-to-four weeks), but consider: Atlanta had 45 pass attempts against just 16 running plays in a game in which their average lead was 13.4 points. And that was with a gimpy Roddy White! Last year, I noted that the Falcons were the most pass-happy team in the NFL after adjusting for game script, and it appears that the model hasn’t changed in 2013.

There weren’t any huge comebacks this week, a byproduct of all the competitive games. The Cardinals scored nine points in the fourth quarter to beat the Lions, in a game where Detroit’s offense was shut out in the second half. Matt Stafford and company gained just 90 yards and four first downs on 24 second half plays, enabling the Cardinals to steal a win. Half of the team’s six second half drives were three and outs, one was a fumble on the second play, and the final drive was five plays and ended on downs. The only successful drive of the half was a 51-yard march that put the Lions at the Cardinals 27, but David Akers’ field goal attempt was blocked.

But while the offense had an off day, there’s a hidden factor that explains why Detroit didn’t score more than 14 offensive points (DeAndre Levy intercepted a Carson Palmer pass for 66 yard touchdown, accounting for the other seven points).
[continue reading…]