Week 13 Reflections
Team Trends
Welcome to Throw The Dam(n) Ball!
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.
Unfortunately, this week we had some technical issues—aka my computer broke out of the blue— so we will only be covering team trends. Will be back to recapping Bets and DFS as usual next week.
Another solid week for me in the prediction game, now up to 77/908!
Team Trends:
AZ:
Team is in a tier alone in terms of EPA and AZ is 3rd in offensive Success Rate (SR) to go along with their EPA efficiency. They are still being power ranked in the 3-7 range, despite their dominance and despite finally being healthy on offense. In my view, they are the best and most complete team in the NFL.
LAC:
CIN played a 2 high look on 24/64 snaps vs LAC and Herbert responded with 7 deep attempts, matching his total from the previous 4 weeks combined, recording 188/319 yards on those deep attempts. Obviously this a small sample but he is #elite when he throws deep. It remains to be seen how defenses will play him and if the 7 deep shots are the norm or the outlier. But should they be able to attack deep, as I said last week, watch out for LAC come playoff time.
KC:
I want to revisit my Chiefs thesis from week 6-- that the defense will regress to average and that this team is no different than KC teams of old. I was half right, I think. Following week 6, The defense has been a above average:
14th in Drive EPA
12th in SR allowed
14th yds/play
17th explosive play rate allowed
The offense? Well it hasn’t been good. Of Mahomes 65 career games, 4 of his 5 worst games by EPA standards have all been since that writing. Could he right the ship? Of course! But perhaps it is time to adjust my prior that the Chiefs are # 1, as this new information comes in.
This chart above does a great job getting to the root of the issue here—it’s not just that Mahomes has been bad this year, but that prior to this year he basically never had a bad game.
DAL:
Through 7 weeks, DAL ranked 5th in Rush SR and 9th in Rush EPA. Following the bye in Week 7, DAL ranks 30th in SR and 27th in Rush EPA. But DAL has not adjusted to pass more, still sticking with the same R/P rates despite their lack of success on the ground. Pretty surprisingly, this team is 21st in Drive EPA and 30th in SR since the bye. If they stick with a hurt Zeke and don’t increase their pass rates, this team will be a sell for me going forward. (very sad because, if you remember, I have an enormous SB bet I made early this season)
CIN:
CIN has been right about average offensively in terms of EPA but as you can see below have been heavily dragged down by turnovers. But what is most interesting about CIN is how many points per turnover they are losing. While the avg turnover costs a team 4.6 EPA lost, for CIN, that number is 5.56 EPA lost. Meaning, they are losing points in the highest leverage spots, something extremely random and also extremely costly.
But it is not as if this team is prone to more turnovers either-- Burrow is right about league average in PFF’s turnover worth plays metric despite leading the league in INT’s. This is all to say that the Bengals are due for serious turnover regression, and the EPA profile will look far better as a result.
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