Are the Titans Overrated?

If you want a higher rating, they'll have to beat some better teams and more convincingly also.

Beating the Saints in Week 1 would have helped.

I don’t think there’s anything to learn from this game. The packers have half of a roster and the cardinals are too good for that. If they meet in the postseason, then we will have an opportunity to learn how they compare. This game only becomes meaningful (as much as a single game is ever considered meaningful) if Arizona loses or if the packers lose Adams, Lazard, Alexander, Bahktiari, etcetera for the season (aka if their future roster starts to reflect the Thursday night roster). 

Was it the 2015 regular season when the Packers came to Arizona and got demolished with Rodgers getting sacked several times?

It was regular season, I know that.

That's kind of how I think this game might go, unless the Packers can get the ball out quick.

and efficiency isn't going down. That should be peoples first clue.

One day we'll see a team that has everything locked up entering week 17...I mean 18...just go all out pass (or maybe) for the sake of trying it out. But until I'm hired we'll have to wait!

The general premise that you seem to be missing, at least with my arguments about it.
I'm one of the people that said passing efficiency will likely go down as run attempts are replaced by passing attempts. I didn't say passing efficiency would get worse than running efficiency or that it was always a bad idea. It was a per team metric, I firmly believe there is a sweet spot between running and passing, of course I also feel that a swing pass to WR at the LOS is essentially a run. Since a team needs a short area game, if they run less they will pass more in the short area which is not as efficient as passing deeper for basically the same reason running is less efficient. Though of course passing has the inherent advantage of occurring with few players around the ball, which of course makes a big play more likely. Of course if the game weren't played by humans who are affected by trends and psychology and mistakes and successes then you could apply theory crafting even better. Of course those effects are mitigated by training, and NFL players do train to mitigate that even if they don't know they are. But it's still played by people and that is why a play in the first quarter can still have an effect in the 4th quarter and players and coaches who can recognize the situations where that is true tend to be a little better than their peers.

I've also agreed that in most cases the pass to run ratio should be higher. Passing should generally happen more. Since we are not at the optimal balance efficiency changes can get swamped by running a more optimal ratio. Teams are passing more but not so much that they have to replace runs with it to keep a defense honest so what they are adding first is the most efficient passing plays. Basically they are still at the point of replacing the garbage plays with better passing options and everyone agrees that replacing garbage with something serviceable is better.

Eventually they will get closer to the optimal point and start replacing some of the useful runs with passes and that will drop the passing efficiency a bit because they will be using passes to do the set-up grunt work that runs are doing now. In addition a team that never runs or runs very little will likely have a significant advantage for an entire season, I'm guessing that advantage drops the next season as defenses figure out ways to deal with it better too. They will find things to key off of, they'll know patterns and formations better, etc. 

Stats are fun let's do silly things with them
So I grabbed teams sorted by passing DVOA, how efficient they are at passing. Then I went and looked at how many rushing attempts they had per game and did some ordinal ranking here's the bottom 1/3rd of the league in Passing DVOA followed by their ordinal rank in rush attempts per game. 

Team, Passing DVOA Rank, Passing DVOA, Rush attempts per game rank.

PIT    20  12.30%    30
SF     21  12.10%    10
WAS  22   8.70%    14
PHI    23   8.20%     28
ATL   24    4.70%    20
NYG  25   -2.60%    21
MIA    26   -3.00%    31
DET   27  -6.50%    25
JAX    28  -7.80%    27
HOU  29  -12.50%  18
CAR  30  -18.00%  12
CHI    31  -27.70%   8
NYJ   32   -33.10%  32

7 of the of the 13 teams with the worst passing DVOA are also in the bottom 13 of rushing attempts per game. Only 4 are in the top half of the league. So you can say the teams with the worst passing DVOA's also tend to be the teams that don't try and run the ball. Or that if you don't run enough passing efficiency goes down. Of course that's all a bunch of crap too since the correlations are not causation. It's completely possible, even plausible for many of them, that if those bad passing teams ran more the passing game would get even worse. If I would have cut it off at the bottom 10 teams my numbers would have looked even since then you drop off 2 of the teams with top 16 attempts/game. But like I said, and like your results and rushes data, that isn't what we're trying to figure out here.

Yes I would like a rigorous study that helps pinpoint what the optimal ratio is. I mean the league is mostly getting there, running backs are getting fewer carries, most teams (my Packers not included, grrrrr) realize that financially and for on the field production you probably should never give a running back a second contract. There might be a few exceptions, and with the salary cap floor if you can't find a better use for that money then fine but it should certainly be one of the first places you look to save money. Heck a good versatile back-up offensive lineman might be more valuable than a starting running back given injury rates and how good defenses are getting at taking advantage of offensive line weaknesses. But that isn't the argument either.

Is per play efficiency the best measure of team success? Is it the most predictive of wins and losses and future success?
I also think that efficiency on a play by play basis isn't always the best metric of success. I'm still pulling data, but one of the things about the Packers under LaFleur is that they seem to score more points per drive than their DVOA would suggest, but I need to gather a lot more data and do way more analysis. I know the FO team has toyed with ways to try and work drive statistics into the model to see if it makes things more predictive. I do tend to pay a bit more attention to drive stats. The reason why I was even looking is that I know they had one of the best points per drive offenses in the history of the NFL last year (post 18 in this thread for more details on that). So efficiency on a per drive basis might correlate better with W/L than efficiency on a per play basis and GB has been pretty good at that under LaFleur and it might explain why they haven't had the DVOA of a 13-3 team because he's sacrificing per play efficiency to increase per drive efficiency. I know that they use the run game, and other plays to set things up. They admit it and you can find film analysis that shows it. Every team does this of course, but I think it might be something LaFleur is actually quite good at so I was trying to poke a bit to find out.

I've also noticed that 2020 when they had their best DVOA and points per drive under LaFleur they also had the lowest percentage of their plays being passes. It was like 58% in 2020 vs the 63% it was in 2019 and so far in 2021. So maybe he was getting the best results he could out of the team, or maybe, like many things it's not a straight line, but a curve and they need to push from 63% to 68% to be more efficient than they were at 58%. Or maybe that's all just a result of them running more later in games because they were better earlier and could do that. Having watched all those games that isn't my impression. It's all data I could pull to try and suss it out.

It could also be that they score more per drive than expected because they have been lucky and not simply doing something else better. Hard to say. I would love them to finish getting all their DVOA data into a real DB so that making a histogram of expected outcome based on per game DVOA or correlation between DVOA and points per drive was a quick thing, and not what I suspect it is now of linking up a bunch of different spreadsheets and running the analysis.

Anywho it's a fun discussion and I agree that teams probably should throw more, the interesting question is how much because I don't think per play efficiency is necessarily the best metric of how well a team will do, and since the game is played by humans who don't always do exactly the right thing, or hide their intentions that the running game will always have some place in the game. Finally I'm getting into my budding curmudgeon years and I like watching a good running play still so my bias to hold onto that might be coloring my opinions.

"For those who think that running at the end of the game with a lead is the main reason for poor run DYAR and DVOA, look at this week's stats:"

I personally never said that running into stacked boxes at the end of the game is the primary cause of poor run DVOA/DYAR. I can believe you ran into other people who claimed that, but the reason people think that game score has an outsized effect on rush success is probably because it does. 

A single week of run DVOA correlating or not with win loss percentage really doesn't mean much to me. It is obviously true just by watching the game that teams stack the box and sell out to stop the run in obvious running situations. And the opposite is true, which is why draw plays often go for 15+ yards. Certainly at a higher rate than traditional run plays. 

Teams tend to get the lead by their success in the pass game. However, teams tend to try to keep the lead by having success with the run game, even into stacked boxes. This naturally leads to lower rush DVOA than the opposite team, which will typically get softer coverages in the form of deeper safeties, and LBs more concerned with big PA passes. You need to do a whole lot more analysis than you did to support the blanket statement of "teams should pass more," even if I also feel intuitively that to be true.

Because you don't understand why they're running.

You can't figure it out from the play by play. The information's not there. Some, you might be able to figure out from film: watch the QB, if he stares at a defender who doesn't move before handing off, it's likely not actually a run play.

It's really, really easy to create a zero sum game model that acts like football, with teams choosing a less effective play more often than you'd expect: let one player peek at the other player's choice. If you make it so the information's not perfect, you get exactly the situation we have now: plays you call "passes" do much better than "runs," but if you tried to pass *more*, you end up with *worse* overall performance.

It's just a consequence of pretending football is the world's dumbest rock/paper/scissors game. It's not. There are *way* more play categories than "run/pass" and splitting them up that way is pointless.

The Eagles and their "pass every down" strategy are looking so unstoppable right now.

I think the boundaries are more blurred than you are implying, and that you are also implying a generic nature to the 22 people on the field that does not exist. I would not be surprised if many teams would have more success if they passed further downfield more often. I also think that most discussions of playcalling ignore the first rule of playcalling, which is that the particular talents of the people that are on the field has significant impact on what playcall is optimal.

You are assuming that all run plays on RPO’s would result in incomplete passes.   That assumption seems a bit flawed to me

Yeah, you're right. They wouldn't all result in incomplete passes. It'd be worse. They'd result in interceptions.

A super-basic RPO model reads a defender reacting to a handoff - if he stays home, you hand off and pick up the yardage between the RB and the defender you read. If he crashes, you hit the receiver in the space he just vacated. If he stays home, what the heck are you going to do? Throw the ball at him?

And yes, of course, the run might pick up more yardage than just that short distance. So what? The pass can too, and it's more likely to if the defender plays run.

Now, you might ask "what the heck is the defender playing run for, they're terrible, they should always play pass and stay home." Except, of course, the most consistent way to limit a passing attack is with pressure, which means they need to close to the QB. So "staying home" hurts all pass plays, not just the RPOs.

Again, this is just the limitation of thinking of the game like it's rock/paper/scissors (or really, odds and evens). It's just not that simple. Sure, the offense is trying to get yards, but they've got to react to the defense, too. Sometimes the defense just wins.

I do not understand your first statement, rushing is not worse, passing is better.  Please clarify.

DVOA is zero-normed, if passing performance declines (which it does over the year) rushing DVOA increases because the average value of a play declines.

I don't really agree with you regarding weather. Rain/snow have a much bigger effect than wind. Wind exaggerates the differences between offenses, rain/snow hurts everyone.

The check down pass is usually not an intended play, but the backup plan to a more dynamic pass.

Runs are often a backup plan to a more dynamic pass. Even before RPOs, you had run audibles all the time from certain QBs. If a QB sees at the line that the pass they called won't work, and checks to a run and they pick up 2 yards, why are you classifying that play as a run? It's not a run. It was a called pass that they realized wouldn't work.

Also, you seem to think that quarterbacks aren't involved on running plays ("if passing wasn't important, why are QBs so valued"). See above.

 but there are more offensive holding calls on running plays 

Are you sure? Brief glance looks like 50/50. 17 holding calls in week 1 of last year, split 8 run/9 pass. 

At this point I see ARI, DAL, LAR, TB as SB contenders.   I would place GB, MIN as darkhorses in the NFC.  

In the AFC, there's Buffalo and then everyone else.  I would have CIN, TEN, BAL, LAC as darkhorses.

The modeling in PFF, Fivethirtyeight and FO seem to point to a Tampa/Buffalo SB, failing that an Arizona/Buffalo SB.

Of their remaining schedule, Tampa only has Buffalo as an elite opponent left.  That will tell us more about their secondary.

I expect the Rams to be there barring injury.

I'm not a believer in Dallas due to their bottom-half defense.  They play the Vikings this week on the road, so we'll see.

Arizona will likely walkover a depleted Green Bay team tomorrow.  I will be ready to congratulate Rodgers if he can pull off a win.

"Hot Garbage" is probably being too kind to some of those teams.