Week 15 Stats & Angles

Intro Note:

Football is a matchup and indisoynrcatic game where teams change their behavior over the course of a season, players improve,and random results and injuries can skew outcomes that don’t necessarily reflect underlying value.

I personally find that so much of my success betting at this point in the season relies on sifting through the data to understand the sample sizes that are the most relevant/predictive going forward. Simply taking averages or medians can get you some of the way to good pricing, but I think it misses the mark and certainly so on the tails.

By taking an intensive look at our data and understanding the context in which it lives we can (hopefully) stay a bit ahead of the market. This column, then— which is an experiment for now, feedback appreciated— will look at some of the stats and angles I’m monitoring as I parse through the data and try to stay ahead of the market. I won’t capture everything and the structure and style is all in flux, but a start nonetheless. Let’s dive in.

Again, this piece will be a work in progress so please let me know if you have some feedback and how I can make this better/change format etc.

Week in Review:

Let’s take a look at some defensive tendencies and performance from last week to set the frame for further analysis. Now obviously we don’t want to look at one week as a sample dispositive for future success, but an interesting chart to review on its own and as a springboard for some further angles.

No shockers here that Bills, Bears and Falcons had the worst weeks in pass defense via EPA/Play or YPA as each team was eviscerated by opposing QBs. But some nuggets from this chart that stood out to me with some further context + stats.

Quick Hitters:

CHI D

• Chicago allowed the highest explosive pass rate of any team in any game this season allowing an absurd 26% of pass plays to go for 20+ yards. Over the last month + of the season the team is allowing a league worst 8.6 YPA, has 3rd lowest quick pressure, rate, 4th worst in EPA and bottom of most defensive metrics. T

• he full season numbers look decent for Chicago (8th best EPA/pass) but that is not the current state of this defense and is one of the most attackable units in the NFL, especially relative to market pricing. (and FWIW, it seems that Brock Purdy shoulder is juuuuust fine).

CAR O:

• Bryce Young’s game against the Eagles is perhaps a bit of a mixed bag in my view. When dropping back to pass, he and the Panthers only generated 4.5 yards per play and a -0.03 EPA/Play. But on the other hand, those results don’t look awful when considering the team faced an absurd 65% disruption vs a tough Eagles D—though part of that is Bryce’s own doing. Young has obviously improved, but he still has not had an uber efficient day yet this season and is yet to crack 7 YPA in a game this season (the NFL average is around ~7.05 YPA). It’s a good reminder that the situation isn’t great in Carolina and that while he has been much improved and there plenty of reasons for optimism, it is relative to his situation and past self and he still has a long way to go to enter the conversation as a legitimate good NFL starter. Can certainly happen, just not there yet imo.

CAR D:

• But let’s talk a bit about the Carolina D which is I think the bigger story from that game. The team played 46% man coverage which is line with their base rates post bye and way up from earlier in the season. From Weeks 1-10 this was a team that played man at around a 18% clip and that number has been around 40-50% in the 3 weeks post-bye. I would anticipate this trend continues and will make them more volatile and matchup dependent going forward. The team has been much better against the pass since the switch to much more man coverage, but we’re of course dealing with a small sample and some confounding factors.

• For this week, considering that Dallas gets rid of the ball quicker than any team in the NFL this should mean matchup advantage to Carolina, as DAL is dead last in separation generated by WRs.

PIT O:

• Russell Wilson continued to have a bunch of success via the deep ball with a 16% explosive pass play rate. And Wilson has continued on the path of only generating positive outcomes via the deep pass. Wilson has added ~48 points via the deep ball and has lost 10 expected points on all other plays.

• This makes him volatile by nature (a few plays go a long way in determining their offensive success), but some tests will be forthcoming without Pickens and facing some tougher defenses, starting with PHI this week.

PIT D:

• No real shocker here, but the Steelers pass-rush has been dominant. The team had a 30% quick pressure rate once again, marking the 3rd straight game above the 30% threshold. Of course this is the healthiest they have been and coincides with Nick Herbig’s return and is now with Highsmith who returned this past week. For context, aggregated over the full season (which we can’t really do statistically b/c we want to compare only like samples) that would be #1 in the NFL.

• The point is: with Herbig, Watt, and Highsmith healthy this projects as the best pass-rush unit in the NFL in my view. The secondary is a bit leaky which will make them vulnerable to QBs who can scramble and mitigate pressure, but especially for those QBs who need to stay in structure to succeed, the Steelers are going to be a scary defense to go up against.

SEA D:

• The Seattle D’ continued its dominant post-bye stretch with a +50% disruption rate against the Cardinals. The team is now #1 in Pass EPA allowed since the bye along with top 5 disruption rate. This is to go along with a run D top 5 in both Success Rate and EPA per rush during this timespan.

• Now it is one thing for any team to perform better as the season goes along and oftentimes that is a function of small samples and opponents. (The Cardinals are a good example of a team that put together a good month of play despite no notable changes that would indicate it to be sticky and have struggled again over the last few weeks).

• But for SEA we have 2 reasons to think the success might be sticky. 1) the team was decimated by injury early in the season as virtually every started missed some time. But the defense is the healthiest now that it as been all season. 2) The team is in a 1st year scheme with Mike Macdonald and teams tend to improve as the season goes along in new (good) schemes. And we should have a strong prior of success for Macdonald given what we saw in Baltimore which also included a rough first half of year one. (Will never forget the 2022 Week 2 SGPs we hit on the Dolphins against Baltimore in Macdonald’s first year). This Seattle defense in my view projects as one of the top defenses going forward contrary to what the market might be implying now.

TB D:

• Another team that stood out with their performance was TB who generated an absurd 46.5% quick pressure rate on Sunday, the best of any team in any game this season. And this comes as the team has gone increasingly blitz heavy in recent weeks. The team’s blitz rate was 40% heading into Week 10 but in the past 4 games the team has been blitzing on a whopping 60% of snaps. And the team has generated quick pressure at a crazy 34% (best in NFL by a mile) to go along a 48% pressure rate 6% better than next best team.

• Now of course we’re dealing with small samples but the turnaround from the Bucs pressure is not coming from nowhere but is a function of a schematic change where the team is going with any extreme blitz heavy approach.

That is all for today! As always, appreciate the support and spread the good word about Throwthedamball! Sharing these posts really helps me out and I’m extremely grateful to all those who have and continue to share them. Will be back in the inbox tomorrow with some thoughts on TNF