2022 Week 6 Reflections
Welcome (back) to Throwthedamball!
First want to start with my apologies for not being in this space last week. Between Jewish holidays, a new job and additional football content, I didn’t want to force the issue for the sake of having something up there. Apologies, but we move on.
If this is your first time reflecting with us, I'd recommend first reading the inaugural piece of this series to get a sense of what I'm trying to do in this space.
General Trends/Macro Thought:
Our “macro thought” this week actually functions itself as a league wide trend. Outside of the Bills, Chiefs, and(maybe) Eagles, I don’t think it is clear who the consistently good teams will be in 2022. The below graph helps illustrate.
This graph essentially captures how well teams can move the ball(and prevent opponents from moving the ball.) We have the Bills and Chiefs in their own tiers with the Bills being far better than every other team considering their defensive prowess. The LAC/BAL/SEA etc cluster has “good” offenses but pretty bad defenses. In the center-right we have CIN/NE/MIN/JAX— the “good” teams on both sides of the ball, but each team has their flaws and are unimpressive especially relative to last year’s “good” teams. And the left side is just an absolute mess with nobody really terrible on both sides of the ball aside from the Steelers. There is only one team firmly in the top right tier! One team!
My takeaway and observation: I think we as bettors— or even football fans—need to have some humility in evaluating teams seeing as we don’t really have a clear idea yet of each teams fundamentals. I’m not quite sure I’m ready to buy the Lions, Falcons, Browns and Seahawks as “elite offenses” and there really are no teams firmly in that good tier like we saw las year. All of this is to say: I want to be patient this year before building in such a firm on who is and who is not good. I think relying on matchup angles should hold more weight until we get a clearer sense of the fundamentals at play.
Teams like LAR, GB, TB are legitimately worse than last year. Now that doesn’t mean we should ignore their ceilings if they figure it out. But until we start to see consistent good performances I don’t think these teams should be power ranked/rated in the top 10.
Week in Review:
Mostly an ugly week of football but can’t ever complain about getting to watch this beautiful sport.
Another good week in @leesharpe’s prediction game relative to the market, moving me to 35th out of 693 players. (I promise we will have some cool metrics coming from this section shortly)
Bets:
Jets ML(+290)/Jets -5+500
Featured play in Leveraging Tails column for PFF, so I recommend reading that in full, but I’ll include gist of it here.
The belief here was that the market is moving too slow to upgrade the Jets and too slow in downgrading the Packers, leaving room for opportunistic bettors(us!!) to capitalize.
In terms of moving the ball, these teams have played at roughly the same caliber through these first five weeks and are both right around league average — or at least in the same tier in terms of production(EPA, Drive Quality etc). Lest we forget, the Jets were without Zach Wilson for the first 3 games. In a smaller sample, of course, the Jets' EPA with Zach Wilson is higher than the Packers' EPA in five games with Aaron Rodgers.
Now, it is only two games for Wilson, and there still is massive uncertainty regarding his play. I’m by no means suggesting this is a good futures bet to make. But we’re in the mode of leveraging tails, and there is at least good evidence to suggest Wilson has made serious improvements, and it is early 2022 season returns that should be most influential in our evaluation.
QBs tend to improve as they progress from Year 1 to Year 2, and Zach Wilson is showing early signs of improvement in 2022 that should not be ignored in this spot. Again—and it is worth repeating—being early on a trend of evidence before the market prices it is precisely the kind of play where we can leverage tails and cash a +470 bet. Let us look at a series of graphs from PFF’s Kevin Cole, which suggest areas of improvement for Wilson in his sophomore season.
2.Jags ML +115/-5.5(+190)
The Jaguars were years ahead of the Colts in our drive quality metric. Taking the total drive quality and extrapolating that to a market rating would make JAX the 6th best team in the NFL and IND the 31st. The teams were so far apart fundamentally up until that point, so I was leaning into that information and continuing to fade the Colts as I have all season.
Reflection note: For those who have followed me on the @sportfoliokings streams, we often discuss forming 2-sided handicaps— trying to have both buy and sell angles on each team before placing bets. And I think this spot was a good example of a 2- sided handicap in terms of process. The Jags offensive side came to fruition, but we really fanned on the Colts side. I’m honestly not sure whether I was too low on the Colts side and they’re much better than a #31 team would indicate— or this was one of the few spots where everything game together. Or some combination of the two. Time will tell with this team, but this is a bet I’d make again.
Cin -5.5 +140
I thought this was the spot where the Bengals would find their explosive offense from last year against a team top 10 in explosive plays allowed and who would be without Marshon Lattimore. The Saints were—and are— dead last in pressure rate which would leave Joe Burrow with time to throw and pick up apart their hurt secondary.
I also saw a mismatch between The CIN defense and the NO offense. CIN was 2nd in DEF Drive Quality and NO would be without 3 starting receivers. While the Saints used Taysom Hill as a weapon in the SEA game a week prior, with the tape now out—and considering his more “gadget style,” I thought CIN would gameplan to take him out of the game. I wasn’t really sure where the offense would come from for NO.
Bottom line: explosive offenses who could score quick against an opponent I saw as struggling to move the ball is ripe for the alt line.
Reflection: The Saints ran all over CIN which I did not see happening, but the Bengals did their explosive offense thing. While the -5.5 didn’t hit following a missed 2 pt, I kept on betting CIN live which made up for this number falling short of 5.5.
SGP’s/DFS Breakdown
Here are my 3 SGP’s and the process behind them
That’s it for this week. As always, thanks for reading and we will be back in this space next week! For graphs and articles on my process before Sunday, be sure to give me a follow on twitter @throwthedamball.
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