Week 5 Quick Reads

I haven't seem him play since he was in Denver. He had an astounding game, didn't he? Is the Bear's o-line really bad, or is the Detroit d-line really good? Hard to think of many quarterbacks who wouldn't have gotten destroyed behind that Bear's line last night.

I've always heard bad things about Bobby Carpenter, but he seemed to have a good game.

I'm actually a little surprised too, I did a quick look through, and it seemed like he had about a 70% success rate, 1/2 on 3rd down.

I wonder if the Jets opponent adjustment isn't particularly strong right now, since they got torched by the Raiders, and got beat up a bit by the Jaguars.

Okay, now that I actually run through the columns I see "YAR" in Brady's entry. But it'd be nice to have it presented for all players.

Painter and Cassel actually share a blurb.

Read the comment below. The Painter and Cassell comments were combined.

His comment was rolled into Cassel's, right below him.

Maybe in five years, we're all lighting up the Irrational Cassel vs. Painter thread ("It took Painter to make Garcon into the Second Coming of Jerry Rice! Cassel had no weapons until KC traded for Mike Wallace!") and the Colts' homer blog is named "7 to 85."

Also, you might have missed the Eli comment later on, where the phrase "more than any starter except Curtis Painter" was not preceded by "stip-sack-sixes".

Schaub's were both poor throws - batted ball at the line & last gasp 5yd throw straight to Huff in the endzone instead of trying to run it in.

I still disagree entirely with this premise. Biggest example of the weekend: Wes Welker catches a deep Brady pass beyond a Jets safety and Revis. Welker is quick, but his top end speed isn't dazzling. Revis catches up with him and tackles him before he reaches the end zone.

There is a ton of value in actually making it to the end zone and a guy like CJ, though he's not tearing up the league this year, doesn't get caught where other backs would. Speed matters - it's valuable, and DVOA almost penalizes it by disregarding it.

According to the comments, he had something over 30 DYAR rushing, but the -16 DYAR from dumpoffs killed him.

Cutler reminded of watching, when I was in the fourth grade, Tarkenton on the then-hideous New York Giants, against the soon to be world champion Dallas Cowboys, which was the greatest one man performance I (along with, as I learned a few years ago, Dr. Z) have ever seen.

Cutler was like the hero in a zombie movie, fighting valiantly and alone against wave after wave of relentless attackers, until finally he was overwhelmed and Ndamukong Suh ate his brain, which drew the requisite 15-yard penalty.

Frankly, I've about had it with all these rules about what the defenders can't do to the quarterback. They're sissifying the game. Johnny Unitas would've slapped Suh on the butt and congratulated him on a good eat.

I felt, after watching the game, that it was Cutler's finest as a Bear. He was eluding pressure like Aaron Rodgers does, and making some sick throws on the run and while being hit.

I am a little surprised FO's metrics liked the game so much, because the results really weren't there. I seem to remember quite a few plays where Cutler had to bend space and time simply to throw a one-yard completion on first-and-ten, which looks great subjectively (when evaluating the QB only), but not so great when simply looking at the outcome of a play from a success point of view.

Regardless, this is the quarterback the Bears traded for. And they've surrounded him with that abomination of an offensive line.

For the most part, fantasy stats line up with standard stats: high yardage is considered good, touchdowns are considered very good, and interceptions are considered bad. Really, the only thing missing is completion percentage or passer rating. It doesn't seem like something to get too upset over.

Yeah, I saw that Smith had like +23% WPA for basically 1.5 excellent quarters.
In baseball they divide WPA by "leverage index" to get a more balanced number... I wonder if you could do that for football as well.... although that might make Alex's numbers higher - since leverage is lower at the beginning of the game. I guess when the score is close it's higher. I guess that's probably close to EPA (expected points added).

Your first point deserves more discussion -- those were not entirely Stafford's fault. I seem to recall back-to-back throws down the left side of the field, the first to Johnson and the second to Burleson. Those were the two most egregious misses, and I am pretty sure you are just referring to those two, as they happened early when the game was still scoreless. So, here is my view.

Watching it live, it definitely looked like all Stafford. However, watching it again, and watching replays, he just simply threw the ball beyond the distance that Johnson could have run in that time, unless Johnson was able to full-on sprint from the line. Since he was not, and could not get outside of Tillman, he actually had to cut back inside. The pass was to the outside, and about three more yards down the field. If Johnson was able to cut outside of Tillman, he could have hit him. This was partly on Stafford for not adjusting the throw, but it was partly some good LOS play by Tillman.

On the following play, Burleson slowed down. When the ball was about five yards behind him and closing, he slowed down enough to underrun the pass by about five yards. I do not know if there was earlier contact (I did not see any), and there was nothing incidental down the field, so Burleson simply just stopped running as hard. I am not sure if the first read was Burleson, as the receiver on the offensive right got the first look, but was pretty well covered. It just seemed like Burleson "Randy Moss'd" the play. Again, no Stafford adjustment, incompletion.

Without those two, he was 19/24; with those two, he was still 19/26. He was not terrible.

I'm a bit surprised Sacnhez's game graded out this highly as well. Pats defensive issues notwithstanding, the Jets went three and out for pretty much the entire first half, and Sanchez repeatedly threw the ball 1-2 yards short of the marker on third down.

As an aside, if Schottenheimer wants to run a short passing game, he needs to just start throwing in some old school West Coast concepts. The Jets have the personnel to run it--at least when Tomlinson (or McKnight) is in the backfield--and I think Sanchez would do very well with it. As is, there is too much 1-3 step drop/one-read stuff that relies on some sort of deception to freeze the defenders and gives Sanchez nowhere to go with the ball if the primary is covered.

well when you have 63 total DYAR, then praising your 64 4thQ DYAR sums up your day quite nicely.

Apart from that I was also surprised that getting 150 yds against the 40th best defense of the league gets you net positive dyar.

As a Jets fan, I disagree with the idea that Jets receivers were "open all game on Sunday, and Sanchez repeatedly misfired". I can think of 3 incomplete passes in the 1st half; 2 were dropped passes. 1 was a good ball that was dropped by Conner on 3rd and 2, one was a dropped pass by Holmes, that was not perfectly thrown, but should have been caught.

Otherwise, the Pats were so far up on Jets receivers, that they were begging to stretch the field. I don't know if it was a gameplan decision or Sanchez, but it was clear that the Pats made no real effort to concern themselves with the deep ball. I don't recall many plays where the Jets were open on. One that does come to mind was a 3rd down play where Sanchez threw to Burress and got a first down, but could have hit Kerly for a possible TD, however, it didn't matter as the Jets scored later in the drive.

WTF? RaiderJoe????

ndeed. DYAR by quarter: -36, 37, -1, 64. He had 11 plays with positive value all day, and six of them came in the fourth.

Weird. Sanchez's 4th quarter passes:

Drive 1:
14 yards on 1st-10
19 yards on 2nd-7
4 yards on 1st-10
7 yards on 3rd-6
INC on 2nd-7
21 yards on 3rd-7 (TD)

Drive 2:
9 yards on 1st-10 (tackled in bounds)
22 yards on 2nd-1 (tackled in bounds)
SPIKE on 1st-10
INC on 2nd-10
SACK on 3rd-10.

The first drive came early int the 4rd quarter, with the Jets trailing by 13. The second drive came late, with them trailing by 9, having less than a minute, and no timeouts.

I'm trying to figure out which six plays had positive DYAR value. Obviously, there were four very good plays on the first drive, and one marginal play, and only one bad play. But not six. Was that first drive really worth 64 DYAR? I guess Sanchez accounted for 65 actual yards and a TD, but did so against a team with a terrible pass defense, so I would have expected the DYAR on that drive to be something less than 64.

On the second drive, I would expect the "garbage time" modifier to discount all these plays, as there's almost no realistic way a team can win when down by two scores with less than a minute and no timeouts. If these plays did give postive DYAR, it implies that maybe the garbage time corrections should be more aggressive. It also highlights a long-known flaw in DVOA and DYAR...that they don't take time and clock stoppage into account in end-of-game scenarios. That 9-yard completion on 1st-10, which would be nice and positive valued in the 1st quarter, was actually an extremely negative play for the Jets becasue it kept the clock running, and changed their "almost no realistic way to win" into "absolutely no way to win".

I know that some "special" circumstances are taken into account. There is a garbage time adjustment, for instance. Not sure if any of the above are included, but doubt it.

Even those that are included are imperfect by definition. Good teams spend many hours working on specific circumstances - down and distance, long slow drive vs need points quick, trading yards for clock, prevent defense, etc. No system that reads only data can be perfect.

The garbage-time adjustment mentioned above is better than nothing, but cannot understand that sometimes games are over by halftime. On the other hand, sometimes a 21 point lead indicates that an underdog has made hay early - turnovers, luck, etc - but against a high powered offense, that might indicate that a presumed blowout might be closer than expected.

I was listening to the official Denver radio station for the radical wing of the Tebow Wonk party last week and there was a caller complaining about all the "Orton apologists" pointing out that the Broncos' offensive line should shoulder some of the blame for the team's offensive struggles claiming that "Cutler's line is awful and no one ever mentions that, so why does Orton get a free pass?" I really wanted to call in and explain that everywhere other than Denver, where the narrative is that Cutler is the anti-christ, the sheer awfulness of the Bears' line is well documented.
But it is very nice to see it laid out in such clear terms as this post has done.

I was amazed to see Omiyale in the starting lineup last night. It was already clear from a few plays in previous weeks that the line improves when they put Louis in at RT, which is a pretty serious indictment, given that Louis is #1) a guard, #2) not very good, and #3) hurt.