With a Healthy Offense, IND is a Poor Man's TEN
This article is the first of a 2 part series on TEN.
Part 1: Following IND’s recent win streak they are, by any market metric, ranked ahead of TEN. But given that these teams are constructed similarly, when TEN is fully healthy— as they should be come playoff time—I think it is fair to say: IND is just a poor man’s TEN. Diving into my#hottubhottake will be part 1 of this series.
In part 2 we will shift towards the application of my thesis and in the usual @throwthedamball way, we will explore some angles that further make TEN a very compelling futures bet. We will talk about randomness, market certainty, and market pricing and volatility. All the good stuff.
Come for the football analysis, stay for the betting angles-- let’s dive in!
Why the Uncertainty?
TEN has played 6 games this year with Tannehill, Brown, and Henry(and fewer with Julio Jones out, but who knows if he will be healthy again). This is especially important to note since Brown and Henry account for nearly ¾ of the share on offense. This is to say that this offense is highly highly concentrated and looks vastly different when these guys are all on field. Considering the time lost to injury, we are only left with really a 6 game sample of what this offense will look like come playoff time. To compound the issue of a small sample, the team also underwent some schematic changes along the way(changes in ADOT, PA rates etc) with some clear outlier games as well, making it particularly difficult to pinpoint the factors at play.
My Approach and Prior:
My response to uncertainty is to look to strongly held priors which we luckily have in this case. Why look to priors? They provide grounding in a sea of noise that is the NFL. I must note though, holding onto a dead prior will bury me, so fleshing out of my ideas in this space will, I hope, give us all a better sense of whether the prior is logical and borne out in the data, or if I’m holding onto a sinking ship. (Please let me know what you guys all think!)
Prior: Since Tannehill took over as TEN QB in Week 8 of 2019, when playing with Derrick Henry and AJ Brown, this offense has been elite—a word I don’t use unwittingly. And what’s more, over the course of a year and a half, this presents as sizable a sample as we’ll get in football. And yes they lost Corey Davis & Arthur Smith, but as we will see, I’m not so sure those loses change TEN’s probable future output.
As the chart below suggests, in 2019, TEN was basically with KC in their own tier of offensive dominance.
Quick Key:
On X axis: Drive EPA= How many expected points did each add on their drives
On Y axis: Success Rate (SR)=How often a play added expected points.
TEN, as you can see, was 2nd in Drive EPA & SR.
In 2020 it was much the same story: TEN was similarly dominant on offense, though this time not in their own tier.
No matter how you slice it, EPA, SR or if you want to use PFF grades, DVOA, YDS/play, whatever the metric--the TEN offense has been elite with these 3 healthy. That is not to say because they were good the 2 last years they will be good this year. But it is to say with similar scheme and personnel, we know they can realistically reach this elite offensive output.
Current Moment:
Now that we’ve outlined the reasons for holding such a high and strong prior, we can return to the current moment: Can we learn anything from the 6 games this year?
Here is how they have fared, analytically, in those 6 games:
The SR’s remain similar to the TEN of the past few years, though the EPA is dragged down from an especially poor Week 1 performance. In Week 1, TEN only ran 11% Play Action, (down from the 30% rates Tannehill is accustomed to) and lost nearly 17 expected points to fluky turnovers. Granted this is poor statistical methodology, but stripping away that 1st game—in the likely event it was an outlier— in the small 5 game sample we have, here is how TEN’s efficiency metrics would rank over the course of the full NFL season:
3rd in Success Rate,
5th in Drive EPA.
This is pretty much in line with what we’ve come to expect from TEN. When healthy, as they should be come playoff time, TEN has given us little reason to think they are not a top 5 offense.
Team Comparison TEN vs IND:
So I’ve begun to make the case that we can project TEN as a top 5 offense, but where does that leave IND? Why is IND a poor man’s TEN?
Let’s first start with scheme: Both teams rely heavily on their run games, running well above expectation: 7% above expectation for TEN, 3% for IND. And Wentz’s 8.3 ADOT is exactly the same as Tannehill’s 8.3 ADOT with Henry in the lineup. The teams are both schematically similar and built similarly.
But while IND has been good on offense, they are not in the same elite category as TEN. (Side note on methodology: we can only really use 2021 as sample for IND considering this is Wentz’s first year in IND).
IND is 6th in Drive EPA, and 15th in SR.
And filtering out garbage time, they are 12th in both EPA and SR.
Football Outsiders has IND ranked as the 9th best offense, and PFF the 17th.
This paints the picture of an IND team above average, but a clear tier below TEN if factoring in our prior. Not to mention, IND has been on the right side of turnover variance this year with the 5th fewest points lost as the chart below indicates. Do we expect this to continue with Wentz at QB who notoriously led the NFL in PFF’s TWP’s last year? I’m not so sure.
The difference in tier should make intuitive sense considering the QB play for each team. While the run games are roughly similar in terms of their efficiency--IND’s Rush SR and Rush EPA basically mirror TEN’s from last year-- the difference lies in the QB play for each of these teams.
Wentz in 2021:(courtesy of RBSDM)
12th in EPA/Play (.122) & Adjusted EPA/Play(.140)
18th in Dropback SR (47.7%)
17th in EPA/CPOE composite(.086)
Tannehill in 2019-2020:
2nd in EPA/Play(.291) & 1st in Adjusted EPA/Play (.315)
2nd in Dropback SR(55.4%)
1st in EPA/CPOE composite (.186)
In 2021, again throwing out the outlier AZ game, Tannehill was playing at roughly the same pace he had been the previous 2 years:
EPA/Play(.282)& Adjusted EPA/Play (.294)
Dropback SR(56.3%)
EPA/CPOE composite (.171)
Tannehill has been producing at an elite rate, while Wentz has been right around average. And the PFF grades, capturing underlying play more so than the efficiency results above, reflect the same narrative:
In the healthy Titans games this year, Tannehill has a 87 PFF grade which would rank 5th in grading extrapolated to total grades this year. This is right in range of Tannehill's 2019+2020 grades: 92.5, 90.3 which ranked 1st and 6th respectively.
Wentz, meanwhile, is 21st in PFF grading this year, with a 72.2 grade, in a tier slightly below his efficiency marks above would indicate.
All of this is to say: Wentz, unlike Tannehill, is not producing at an elite rate, holding this offense back from entering the top tier of NFL offenses.
Now you ask about defense?
The teams are both middle of the pack, the Titans doing a better job limiting successful plays, and the Colts doing a better job in Drive EPA. But defenses are less stable, and these 2 defenses are in roughly the same tier. Some more metrics to illustrate their similarities:
ESPN’s DEF FPI: IND: 0.4(17th), TEN: 0.7(14th)
DVOA: IND: -5.8%(9th), TEN: -2.4% (11th)
PFF: IND: 74.9 (12th), TEN: 73.3(16th)
What emerges is that these teams' defenses are roughly the same depending on your preferred metric or companies methods. The strength of defenses, as much as they matter with regards to stability and predictability, are roughly the same.
Bottom line:
The defenses are in the same tier. With such a strong efficiency profile, and with continued efficient QB play, there is good reason, I think, to hold our strong prior. TEN is an elite offense when these 3 are all healthy. Sure IND runs the ball well, but until Carson Wentz strings together some good QB play like Tannehill, IND will remain a poor man’s TEN.
That’s all for now— I will be back with reflections tomorrow, and with the 2nd part of this series shortly before or shortly after— stay tuned!
Editors note: I’ve copied part 2 below in case you want to read as one, it is also available as a stand alone- here
Part 2:
So we established in Part 1 above, that there is good reason to think TEN can reach an elite offensive ceiling with everyone healthy come playoff time. But aside from the comparison to IND, this team has a few angles that, in my view, make them an extremely compelling futures and SB bet at 20:1. Let’s dive in:
Certainty:
Perhaps what has most defined the 2021 NFL season is the lack of consistently dominant teams. Whether it be the numerous shocking upsets we’ve seen this year, or the constant flip-flopping of “best teams” atop the market power rankings, no teams have been consistently dominant.
We can also see this lack of dominant teams borne out in the data. Consider the scales of the following 2 charts which detail the offensive Drive EPA of teams in 2020 and 2021 so far.
What these charts, and especially the scales, suggest is that most of the good teams this year aren’t as dominant as they have been in the past. The gap between the “best” and “rest” just isn’t that large this year and is minuscule compared to last year. But the market is pricing in its usual certainty despite a seemingly lack thereof(The SB odds mirror past years in pricing top 8 teams).
Markets View & Inefficiency :
Here is where TEN ranks by 2 market standards: slightly below average(-0.1) using point spreads
And similarly, most power rankings have them slightly below average(17-20) with the exception of PFF.
TEN is being priced for their current output—how this team looks in short term. But in context, we can project TEN to be a vastly different team come playoff time. And this is what we detailed in Part 1 of this series-- that this 2021 TEN team, once in the playoffs and healthy, should produce close to the TEN 2019 & 2020 teams that were top 5 offenses. The market inefficiency lies in that TEN’s future output is far different than their short term output but the market is pricing the two as the same.
But because this bet can be seen more as a financial “trade” than “let it ride” bet, we can also benefit from market volatility. By this I mean that while the market is now pricing TEN for their current output as a 17-20 ranked team, we also know how they will price TEN if everyone returns to health. That is, rather than being closer to TD underdogs — as would be the case if a 17-20 ranked team played a top tier playoff team— come playoff time, the market will likely revert back to pricing TEN as they did in weeks 8-10, when they were considered a top 10 team. So rather than being closer to 7 pt underdogs, as current prices would suggest, the spreads of TEN playoff games will likely be revolving around 3, and we could even see TEN as home favorites, making this TEN trade far easier to hedge for profit.
Hopes for the # 1 seed:
Lastly, this team is not dead for the #1 seed. Writing this before Week 17, TEN is favored by 3.5 vs MIA and 12 facing Houston in Week 18. Should TEN win out , and KC lose to either CIN or DEN, TEN would clinch the # 1 seed. Now while this is not the likeliest scenario, it represents a legitimate possibility. Most projections have this as about a ⅓ chance of happening.
It need not be stated how beneficial the #1 seed would be for the chances of this bet hitting, and for the value of holding a 20:1 ticket.
Bottom line: This bet plays on a few different theses. TEN is being priced in both game-by-game and futures for their current mediocre output. But we can project them to be far better in the playoffs with their team fully healthy. In a season defined by uncertainty, we are getting a team at 20:1 with a legitimate possibility at the # 1 seed, getting healthy at just the right time. As a valuable ticket to hedge, or to ride to a possible SB run, TEN is the best futures bet on the market right now.
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My DM’s are open and I really love all kinds of suggestions, comments, criticism! See ya next week!