Week 7 Leveraging Tails & Matchup Angles

Hi all, once again running very low on time on a week with holiday and with sundown getting earlier each week. Next week full week! Waiting on some SGP lines here so going to start with the Leveraging Tails & Matchup Angles tonight. As usual, want to get this out before going offline tonight so apologies for the inevitable typos and will be back with the rest in the next 36 hours.

Leveraging Tails:

ATL Alts:

Let us begin as usual, by looking at the team fundamentals to set the stage for our analysis.

Courtesy of our team chart from Timo Riske we see that this is a Falcons team that has had a surprisingly terrific defense with an offense performing better than the 49ers from a fundamentals point of view. Inpredictable, which uses look-ahead lines to derive team tiers suggests that the market is still not believing in this Falcons defense (0.0 pts) for 17th best in the NFL, while still maintaining that the 49ers are an above average defense, 12th in the NFL with a 0.5 rating.

But this has simply not been an accurate measure of how the 49ers have performed. Without Nick Bosa, the team has allowed a 0.37 EPA/Play and absurd 57% Success Rate Allowed, both bottom 3 in the NFL. And to make matters worse, the team lost the best graded defensive player in Fred Warner last week. Accounting for injuries, this is perhaps the worst pass defense now in the NFL and certainly not a unit 12th best or anywhere near that number. Even on the fundamentals level, this is a spot I see some value on the Falcons here.

Matchup Angles

An area where the Falcons defense has had immense success has been with their blitzes. No team has a higher rate of pressure on their blitzes than the Falcons who are leading the NFL in blitz % as well. This is perhaps reason to believe that this Falcons defense which has been one of the best in the NFL has some stickiness to it– and the 4.9 Yards Per Dropback (2nd in NFL) lends itself to that as well.

But more important for our purposes is understanding the Falcons defense in this matchup. And Mac Jones has struggled immensely against the blitz this season (Mac Jones is anticipated to start per Kyle Shanahan).

The only non-starter with a worse EPA against the blitz than Mac Jones is Cam Ward this season as Jones has been abysmal when facing the blitz to the tune of a -0.25 EPA/play. This figures to be a problem against this blitzing Atlanta defense.