2013 NFL thread

[Lukie]

I agree with everything you just wrote. Just don't go editing it and writing in something crazy instead.

[baudib]

What you guys are saying, I pretty much agree with.

Some background: There was a time (let's call it the late 1990s) when I was pretty damn sure I had a better idea of how baseball games were won and lost, and could easily evaluate, say, free agent signings or trades in a more objective and intelligent manner than 80% of major league baseball managers and general managers. I say 80% and not 90 or 100 because in any field where there are visible, high-paying jobs and lots of candidates, there is always going to be a few smart guys who are either good at math and figure things out, or who intuitively figure them out, or there will be someone out of a group of 30 guys do something RANDOMLY that is correct and start winning by doing that, and then keep progressing in that field.

Anyway, I had been reading Bill James for a decade or so, and started corresponding with him, and would find groups of fans like me on the Web. Now in 2013, every team has paid sabermetricians on staff. Everyone knows what things like on-base percentage and WAR mean, and hell, even pitchers with losing records can win Cy Young Awards now.

The NFL is an insanely competitive league. Strategies come and go quickly. Something that is all the rage and seemingly unstoppable (say, the 46 defense) quickly gets solved and it exists as an occasional ploy or the basis for a more complex/nuanced system.

Serious statistical analysis is now the norm in all sports: NBA, NHL, NFL included. In a game like football where plays are such set/easily recorded events, the level of study is pretty intense. You can bet that every team runs simulations and knows stuff like "Team X will blitz on third-and-5 or more within their own 40 at least 45% of the time" or that "Play Slant Z-XY Fly will net us 6+ yards vs. a Cover-2 press 40% of the time" etc.

I think we can all agree, and I am certain that most football people acknowledge, that teams need to go for it way more often on fourth down. There are head coaches who talk about this and sometimes even do it. Chip Kelly spent a lot of time talking about how often he likes to go for it on fourth down, and earlier in the year, fans and even sportswriters (FFS) were grilling him on why he didn't go for it in some obvious spots.

It's going to be difficult for someone to make widescale change in this regard when the norm is one thing, and the math says something different. It'll be a slow, creeping evolution, similar to the ever-increasing tendency to more passing instead of running, which has really been going on for 50 years.

It's not just facing the press, the fan base, or team owners. Believe it or not, I think that the occasional "I believe in my defense, and I have to give them a chance to make a stop" is a real thing. Managing 50 players is a pretty monumental task, and if half of them think they are just hanging you out to dry every time, you are going to lose the respect of the whole team pretty quickly. So there are marginal +EV spots that need to be sacrificed.

[drmcboy]

If it's a real thing, then you are also really telling the offense they can't get X yards. How are you determining which EV is greater? Have you seen the Peyton Manning face every time his teams punt on 4th and short?

The idea football players can't think about something differently, quickly, doesn't work for me. Already you see a lot less hits on guys over them middle and guys trying to lead with shoulders not heads, and these really just became an issue (in penalty terms) the last two years.

Giving the defense less margin for error isn't the same as 'hanging them out to dry'. Good defenses almost always play even better after a turnover, I have painfully watched both pitt and bltm do it many, many times. Some emo defenses probably do get sad they have less field to work with, but many emo offenses would similarly be helped by the extra down.

[surviva316]

To be fair, I do concede that things like momentum and motivation and getting your QB in rhythm and such are probably more of a real thing in football than they are in most sports. I also absolutely agree that a head coach's biggest jobs are getting 53 people's head in the right place and out-scheming the other coach and things like that (which is why in football I'm like, "Andy Reid's a great coach; he just shouldn't be in charge of game management decisions" whereas in baseball, I'm like, "Just fucking fire Charlie Manuel"). On any given play, you have to have 11 out of 11 players focused and knowing what their role is because just one penalty or one blown assignment fucks a whole play. As home vs away rushing stats can attest to, getting the guys in the trenches confident and emotionally jacked up has a very real effect on play (though getting off the line faster due to crowd noise at home obviously has something to do with it).

But, I don't think this applies to most cases of punting or going for it (though it might in some). As drmcboy pointed out, there are two sides to that pancake. I think pulling an offense off the field every time they get 8 yards instead of 10 can be pretty harsh. Going for 4th and shorts in drives where they've already put together a first downs (which is usually the case when they're in the middle of the field) is such a good way to keep your offense in rhythm. All week, the coaches preach about staying on time, getting yards on 1st down, setting up 3rd and shorts, don't give yourselves 1st and 20s or 2nd and 10s. Almost every drive where it's 4th and short at the 40+, they've gotten a couple of first downs and performed well on 1st and 2nd down, and yet it just takes one misfire on 3rd down to make all that futile, and honestly, I think it harshly punishes offenses for not being perfect, which can make them press more.

I think this is especially the case when the defense is playing poorly so the offense is likely to have to sit on the bench for several minutes and/or not get back onto the field until the score's changed. Just imagine the team's down by 3 on their first drive of the 3rd quarter, and the offense is doing a good job getting the running game going, and they drive from their own 20 to ~midfield, then on 1st they run for 4 yards, 2nd and 6 run for 3 yards, and 3rd and 3, throw an incomplete pass. If they punt it and get the ball back down by 10 in the waning minutes of the third, that just throws everything in the shitter. They finally got their run game clicking and felt like they had the whole playbook at their disposal, and now they're not *quite* in panic mode yet, but the score's certainly gonna start to affect play-calling and just create an overall sense of urgency. I think the gun's to the head of the offense more in that situation than it is on the defense when they get the ball at the other teams' 43 down by 3 (also, as drmcboy said, I think this can focus a defense a lot; just focus on not giving up a touchdown and you've done your job; if you get a turnover or a punt here, then you've just been gifted momentum).

As for the late-game, more desperate 4th down attempts I was talking about, in those cases most of your winning permutations are when you keep the ball, so you're really only sending your disheartened defense out there in low-leverage situations.

Now, granted, I'm saying all of this as a millennial who's been watching a lot of NFC East football this year, which is a bunch of teams whose only chance to win games is by outpacing their opponents. If you have the Chiefs' punter (good god, he should be banned from the game for making it not fun at all) and the Chiefs' defense, then by all means, pin them at the 3 yard line and know that the other team's not driving 97 yards, and they'll often be punting from the shadow of their own endline. But the Eagles are much better at getting 3 yards on the QB keeper/McCoy handoff option play than they are at stopping people from driving the length of the field; the Cowboys are much better at completing a 3-yard pass to the most open man between Witten/Bryant/Beasely/Murray than they are stopping people from driving the length of the field. But that's not a momentum discussion or anything, so I've gotten off-topic.

I also think it's one of those things where you'll just have to get the team to believe in what the manager's doing and not give room for them questioning it, like baseball managers taking the baseball away from pitchers. Sure, taking a pitcher out when he felt he still had a chance to turn it around could be disheartening, but they're taught that if they get butthurt over that, that's their problem; the manager's just trying to give the team the best chance to win, and you can't let that affect your job.

But yeah, even if I personally disagree on this account, at least I think it's an important factor to consider and that it's definitely worthy arguing about in football. If this were like sending runners from 3rd base with 2 outs and the whole momentum and confidence thing got brought up, I'd be JFCing.

[surviva316]

I also imagine there's some quite delicious advantages to your metagame if you're capable of running the ball on any 3rd down of shorter than 8 yards on any part of the field from your own 40 to the opponents' 35 (or even deeper into the opponents' territory, depending on conditions). Honestly, the same goes for 2nd and 10, but now we're getting kinda marginal.

Again, this has nothing to do with the point you brought up, but I just kinda suspect that there's untapped potential for a whole different offensive approach that goes beyond just wondering if you should flip the coin those 1 or 2 times per game you happen to get in those situations.

Oh and super-off-topic: I laughed out loud when in the Lions/Eagles game the Lions were going for a 2-point attempt and the broadcasters were like, "They must think they have a better shot of making this than they do an extra point." I was like, facepalm, you two *do* realize that you get a different amount of points when you make a 2-point conversion than you do when you get an extra point. I mean, it's right there in the names.

[swiggidy]

Advanced NFL stats started a podcast a couple months ago (12 episodes so possibly 3 months). So far, some super nerdy interviews with people who did sabermetrics before it was cool.

[Lukie]

One point I wanted to make about the 4th downs thing that I have never seen pointed out before is that all of game models/suggestions on when to go for it on 4th downs, which collectively are well beyond what even the average fan wants to see, probably even undersells the game theory optimal rate to go for it. The reason is that all of those models are based on actual NFL data points and all that implies-- like it is already taking into account what coaches are actually doing. Well if we make the rather safe assumption that coaches are doing things that aren't optimal (whether it be poor run/pass balance, bad play selection, or not going for it enough on 4th downs), all those things bring down the average value of a possession. As the value of a possession goes up, so to does the reward for getting another possession. I'm not sure how much 'extra' that is worth, it probably isn't very much, but it's something to consider if/when the paradigm starts shifting.

Anyway...

I have a feeling whoever comes out of the depleted AFC (Gronk and Von etc) is going to get shellacked by whoever wins the NFC. Probably Seattle.

[bikes]

seattle wins this year barring a major disaster imo i concur

[Hawk]

Go Hawks! You guys can all just give up now and get ready for next year. This season is ours.

I don't think anybody outside the NFC West matches up very well against us, except maybe Carolina. If it's ever going to happen for us, it will be this year.

This team would crush our 2005 super bowl team.

[baudib]

Have some stuff I wanted to say about the Eagles and didn't know where to say it, so I chose here.

First off, I want to say that I didn't see this year coming in any way, shape or form. Coming into the season, I would have been pretty happy with 7 wins and finding a few core players to build around. Of course, this is the NFL and the NFC East was decidedly mediocre, so anything is possible. But I felt if there was some surprise playoff run, it would involve Michael Vick being healthy and cutting way down on turnovers and being a force like he was early in his Eagles career.

That said, the way the season ended was extremely disappointing. I'm realistic, I think, and didn't consider the Eagles to be better than the 10th-best team in the playoffs. But the Saints were beatable, and there were scenarios in which I could envision them getting to host a home game -- if SF knocked off Seattle. The Eagles were on a roll, winning 7 of 8. Foles, McCoy and Jackson will likely never be collectively this good again.

But it's over. There's a lot of reason for optimism. The Eagles are very young, have some major stars. The offensive line is loaded and should get better with another year under Lane Johnson's belt.

I'm actually not convinced that Foles is a superstar in the making. Obviously he is very impressive and his season was just incredible. He works hard, seems like a smart, humble kid and his improvement from week to week was impressive. He's actually much more mobile than anyone gives him credit for being. That said, I think he ran really well this year. His receivers helped him a lot, as did the running game. Regression is obviously going to happen, but it's nice that there's a long way to regress from 27 TDs 2 INTs that will leave him as a still above-average QB.

LeSean McCoy-DeSean Jackson remain perhaps the most dynamic, devastating WR-RB combo in the league. Jackson's season was really more important than McCoy, who was obviously already a franchise back. Jackson proved he could be more than just the deep threat but could be counted on to make important catches as well.

That said, the Eagles need another WR. Someone physical who can beat press coverage and be a target in the red zone. Foles has great chemistry with the racist, Riley Cooper, but Cooper may get a lot of money in free agency. I'd rather come back with Maclin and draft a big WR early, or find someone in FA (don't know who's available). Other than that, offense is set. The TEs are terrific and I love the 2-/3-TE sets with Celek, Ertz and Casey.

Defense:
I think the front 7 is actually pretty good, and there's room for improvement with the younger guys like Kendricks, Cox, Thornton, Logan, Curry. Still, a dominant pass rusher at OLB should be a priority.

The secondary is a mess. The best player is the nickel back, Boykin, who will need to move outside eventually -- he's too good. The starting corners, Fletcher and Williams, were actually an improvement, but neither are Pro Bowlers. Safety is an absolute disaster -- Patrick Chung was easily the worst player on the team. Rookie Earl Wolff showed some promise, but he's a 5th-rounder who was hurt a lot. Nate Allen was serviceable

Draft:
1-3 rounds -- Target 3-4 OLB, big WR, S
4-5 rounds -- DL, CB, another S

Free Agency:
Target S

[bigred]

TOM BRADY

[Lukie]

Pats at Broncos

49ers at Speedhawks

This is probably the best championship week I can remember...

[bigred]

TOM BRADY

[bigred]

And people wonder how my post count is so high

[givememyleg]

HEY NFL FANS LET'S GAMBLE ONTHE SUPER BOWL, BUY SOME SQUARES: http://www.flopturnriver.com/pokerfo...ng-196961.html

[wufwugy]

Made some money on Seattle in the last game. Trying to figure out how big of favorites I think they are in this game. The line has them as a dog, but that's wrong. I haven't followed NFL in forever, but from everything I've caught up on in the last couple games, it looks like the Legion of Boom will frustrate Manning too much and then the hawks win. The most likely way Denver wins is if Manning gets out ahead early, but that isn't terribly likely

[Lukie]

Just wait til the refs start calling ticky tack pass interference that they haven't called all year on Seattle, and the important 50/50 calls go Denver's way.

I'm not saying, I'm just saying. Or something like that.

[wufwugy]

can you show me an example?

[wufwugy]

Also I wouldn't be surprised if the refs pay extra special attention to not calling on Seattle since they already won the SB once but refs gave it to Pittsburgh instead. Not saying but saying

[Lukie]

can you show me an example?

An example of what?

I guess my post was too cryptic to have any meaning. I agree with you on the football stuff that the Speedhawks should be favored but I have a hunch that the refs are going to favor Denver in this game. Again that is just a hunch/gut feeling/intuition and I understand the implications of where that can lead. I don't know if it will be manifested as a wink/nod agreement from the league office or just the refs subconsciously favoring who just about everybody else is favoring or maybe all of this is just batshit crazy, bordering on absurd conspiracy theorism. Probably that last one.

[wufwugy]

Oh I just didn't even know what you meant by "ticky tack". I haven't followed football in forever and don't know many terms. Did some googling though, and this was one of the first examples

http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-game-h...s-interference

Looks like a great call to me though. Left hand on left elbow in end zone, not much else to say. As for an example, I was hoping you could show times when the hawk secondary was doing the ticky tack and not getting called where they should be getting called. I don't know of any because the first game I've paid attention to in years was the NFC championship

[Lukie]

My main point (or joke? or whatever), and it wasn't a very good one, was more about the refs than it was about Seattle's style of defense. I don't have any examples. I actually enjoy the way they play and wish sports leagues would avoid ticky tack calls in general. Ticky tack basically meaning calling silly shit instead of letting the players beat the hell out of each other, which is more entertaining.

[Lukie]

I remember when we had a weekly NFL thread here. Now I can only get 1 person to respond when I insinuate that the Super Bowl might be rigged... damn Euros don't want to talk about handegg interrupted by 2 hours of commercials

[wufwugy]

you'd think they'd love the excitement of the nfl since they already love watching paint dry i mean watching soccer

[Savy]

You only like it for the snack food porn that's on after every 5 seconds of play for 10 minutes.

[a500lbgorilla]

Welp.

http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/...oblem-20121127

Great read.

edit:

Probably the craziest paragraph:

Three days later, Lucas was on an examining table at PAST's surgical center in Clifton. "The nurse who took my pressure ran out to get the doc. I'm thinking, Hmm, this probably ain't good," he says. After 12 years of pilling, his heart had doubled in size, and his blood-pressure readings ran so high that any strain could have triggered a stroke. He was rushed to see Dr. Bart DeGregorio, PAST's pulmonary director, and put on a crash course of diuretics and beta- blockers. Through diet and medicine, doctors reduced his triglycerides while weaning him off a dozen toxic drugs. That October, PAST's Emami performed a spinal fusion, resolving at least some of the pain in his neck and allowing him to enter rehab.

[surviva316]

There are a lot of problems with the NFL's rulebook and their general refereeing philosophy, but a big one is that they don't have default calls. There is no leeway for the ref to make a call that is the generally accepted call unless they definitively see otherwise. They have to make the perfect call all the time. This is obviously an impossible ideal, so what happens is that they make the call that's most likely right. So if a receiver falls down and the defender was close he enough that there's a good chance he might have caused that, then a flag gets thrown.

The MLB, on the other hand, does a great job with this. Balks rarely get called though things that might have been balks happen quite often; there's this beautiful thing called "the neighborhood rule" where unless the umpire definitively sees that the baseman was not on the bag when he had the ball, then they make the default call that the runner was out. The most you'll hear from a broadcaster on anything other than balls/strikes or safe/out is "Wow, he really *could* have called that." Okay, so once in a blue moon there are missed interference calls or something that everyone talks about, but it's very very rare. Even safe/out has this glorious "tie goes to the runner" tradition, though in the world of super slo-mo, replay, zoom-in, 360 pan shot, NB-SEE-IT that's becoming and more and more meaningless distinction.

And here's the kicker ... MLB umpires as a whole aren't even good at what they do!! Okay, maybe that's a bit dramatic, but I don't think it's a talent problem in the NFL among the officiating crew. They're just thrown into this insanely high-paced game with 22 things going on at once and a rulebook the size of a phonebook, and they're given zero outs.

And I don't just mean for penalties either. There was a play a few years ago that boiled my blood: receiver makes a seemingly impossible shoestring catch in the endzone that surely had to've touched the ground because only superman himself could have kept that from touching the grass. So they called it incomplete. They review the play, and as it turns out, it was a superhuman catch; the ball didn't hit the ground. I assume that the refs did not hallucinate seeing something that didn't happen (they didn't see the ball skip off the grass because, you know, it didn't skip off the grass), so from there I assume that they didn't call what they saw; they called what probably maybe was the case if they had to guess. Okay, so they got the call right at the end of the day, so who cares, I just think it's symptomatic of the problem that plagues other parts of the game. (How many superman-like catches have been disallowed because there wasn't a camera angle that showed the ball hovering above the ground in the receivers' impossible grasp? And then there's the obvious; most penalties aren't reviewable, so defenders get dicked by this "if there's smoke, there's fire" shit allllll the time.)

God, I'm so chockfull of rants in this thread, but these kinda solvable problems that plague an otherwise awesome game legitimately grinds my gears. The mocking NFL coaches for their game management skills is more of me just swilling my tumbler and snootily saying, "Mmmmm yesssss" with my fellow snobbish game theorists.

[surviva316]

That was all in reply to Lukie, btw. I can also see the Seahawks having a difficult time for reasons that don't necessarily have to do with talent/scheming/any of that. In fact, it's fascinating to me that they've won 16/19 games so far with their formula given how much defenses have to put up with. But on the massive stage of the Super Bowl, facing an incredible offense, I can totally see something happening. Maybe not even a bad penalty or anything but just something not going their way that breaks their backs.

And I am by no means an old school, smash-mouth football guy. Give me the greatest show on turf any day of the week. I just think it's a shame how tough it is for defenses to get off the field for reasons that have nothing to do with talent and scheming and all that.

[Hawk]

I'm not worried about the refs throwing more flags than we've been getting. It seems like every week we have opposing coaches complaining and going to the league about our style of defense, often in advance of a game trying to get help. If it was going to be a problem, the league would have told the refs to call us on it before. Our reputation already earns us some BS flags, but I'll take that any day when it also comes with the upside of how we can disrupt the passing game. All in all, it works out in our favor and, being a copycat league, I'm sure that other teams will start getting more physical as well if they think they can train their guys to toe the line like we do. I love it, and not just because I'm a Hawks fan, but because I've always been a fan of the "running game/tough defense" type of play.

My only complaint about how the league wants the refs to flag defenses is how they pretty much throw the flag at any violent hit because "it must have been helmet to helmet." The big hit from Chancellor on Vernon Davis last year is a great example. I don't blame them for getting the calls wrong as they are usually so hard to see at full speed, but I do think they should be reviewable. It would be worth the delay to avoid penalizing a defender for a text-book perfect hit.

Is it Sunday yet?

GO HAWKS!

[wufwugy]

got maximum dollars riding on seattle. i haven't followed nfl closely enough to know for sure, and im merely dealing with theory, but it looks to me like the hawks should be a pretty huge favorite. denver has manning and that's it; hawks have everything that reliably stops manning, then they win. teams that rely on their passing game as heavily as denver should only win against the most well-rounded team in the league a small percentage of the time. manning's stellar year isn't so stellar when you account for the fact that the game has evolved away from rushing and denver has mostly played weak defenses

[Lukie]

Cliffs notes so far: Seattle looks by far the better and more prepared team, perhaps caught a couple breaks, up 22-0.

My point about whoever coming out of the NFC (probably Seattle) shellacking whoever came out of the AFC looks spot on.

My prediction about the refs favoring Denver, not so spot on.

[wufwugy]

put substantially more money on seattle than i have with other bets, but should have put more. all signs pointed towards them being pretty significant favorites. i wonder if the claims that nfl betting is a disaster only apply to regular season, not the playoffs. it seems by the time the playoffs come around it might be easy peasy to analyze matchups stylistically and be right

[Lukie]

put substantially more money on seattle than i have with other bets, but should have put more. all signs pointed towards them being pretty significant favorites. i wonder if the claims that nfl betting is a disaster only apply to regular season, not the playoffs. it seems by the time the playoffs come around it might be easy peasy to analyze matchups stylistically and be right

I'm not a sports bettor but this might help: http://www.footballoutsiders.com/

super duper abbreviated primer on their efficiency stuff and how it related to this SB: many football statistics are extremely flawed. for example team defense (points allowed) or yardage allowed doesn't take into account so many factors such as what phase of the team (O, D, ST) allowed the points, how many snaps they faced, what the game situations were, etc. For example the Browns for many years have had pretty good/respectable team defense numbers but a lot of that has to do with the crappy, slow paced offensive nightmare they have had to deal with. teams just don't have to play up tempo, aggressive, or take many risks to fairly reliably beat the browns. the pats on the other hand have had some great, fast paced offenses in recent memory and the defensive numbers suffer as teams need to keep up.

so they have a bunch of formulas to get a macro sense of how good teams are. seattle and denver were #1 and #2 in their efficiency rankings and had Seattle pegged a comfortable favorites. obviously this is purely mathematical stuff so it leaves out a lot of info.

[Hawk]

Go Hawks! You guys can all just give up now and get ready for next year. This season is ours.

Think of all the ACL tears and concussions that could have been avoided if the league just listed to me.

GO HAWKS!