Week 14 Quick Reads

He also fumbles a lot.

I was going to suggest the same thing

If Eli Manning makes the hall of fame it is a travesty.  His all time numbers on the above chart show that he is an average QB, and his all time record is one game under .500 with the loss on Monday.  His team won two super bowls, and he has no playoff wins other than those two years.

QB runs are usually successful so the bar for positive DYAR is fairly high. 

That was Kamara with the fumble.  Deuce McAllister (Saints radio color commentator) was saying all day that Kamara didn't look right and they should have kept feeding Murray who consistently gashed SF's defense for solid gains.

Passing-wise, I agree with you. In terms of my personal impression, adding in his runs tips it to an excellent performance. (Every run was high-impact and successful, and without those plays it would have been a completely different game.)

But I agree with you that people are wildly overreacting. If you believed fans and media in both Chicago and Dallas, Trubisky should be the one with the all-time great game, not Brees, and Prescott should be below Josh Allen. And I know, DYAR is a counting stat and garbage time and all that, but Dak is sitting there one notch ahead of Mitch.

Opponent adjustments - Buffalo is 22nd against the rush, so that drags Jackson's numbers down.

Face it - Brees and Brady are superior runners to Jackson.

Brees' one carry was fourth and goal from the one, so it was about as high-leverage as it gets. 

On the other hand, short-yardage situations are probably more about the defensive and offensive lines than they are about the ball-carrier. So while these are the most important running situations, they're also the situations where the rusher's identity probably matters the least. It's a paradox.

McMahon's rating makes me wonder just how bad the other Bears QBs were in his era. Because they couldn't win with those guys.

"Taken at face value, that statistic is "how much you were carried by a great team while not really playing all that well" or, more succinctly, "overrated index." And looky who's there at #3."

Is that really surprising? Of course Brady's overrated if you look at winning percentage, because by winning percentage (which is a rate stat, mind you!) he's the greatest QB ever to play the game, by far. Of course he's not that (again, as a rate stat) - by his 'expected winning percentage' he's "only" the 8th best.

Except it's not an "overrated index".  It's not even a "how much were you carried" index.  It's a measure of how good the team around the QB was, on average, over the QB's career.

That Jim McMahon would have won fewer games if he hadn't been blessed with the '85 Bears defense is hardly a shocking proposition to throw out there.  That Phillip Rivers and Drew Brees would have won more games playing for average teams than they've actually won:  that too passes the "smell test" for most football fans.

Nor is it shocking to suggest that Tom Brady playing for most organizations would have won fewer games than he did playing for the Belichick-coached Pats.  It also doesn't invalidate the proposition that the Belichick-coached Pats would have won fewer games than they did if they'd had an average QB instead of Brady (this latter proposition doesn't come from the table, I'm just saying the table also doesn't preclude that it's true).

It's not at all unreasonable to say he has slipped quite a bit. What's good and bad is that it certainly appears to be little more than a case of mental laziness, sometimes known a Cutler's Syndrome. The good news is that there are cases of the syndrome being put in remission by a course of shoe leather forcefully kicked into the colon. Hell, it worked on the last guy to have the job, prior to Rodgers!  The bad news is that La Fluer may not be an expert practicioner of the procedure, and also, what the livin' eff, Rodgers!?

Nicely explained answer to a very good question.

Remember, team pass defense DVOA is measured by comparing that defense's performance against pass plays to the average defense's performance against ALL plays, not just pass plays. The average pass defense DVOA coming into the week was about 6.0% or 7.0%, not 0.0%. So yes, taking that into account, NE's pass defense has been roughly twice as good as KC's over the season, not four times.

"Twice as far above average" might be more accurate. But we knew what you meant. Well done.

 Every year, more and more readers are viewing the site on mobile devices. We need these to be readable on phones and tablets.

Incidentally, your comment threads always crash for me on Safari on my iphone. Every time.

Thanks for the Manning details.

This is a reasonable take. However, we don't really have a good measurement of just what kind of weather effects are harmful to offense/defense. For example, snow can actually be a hinderance to the defense due to footing, but rain/ wind can be harmful to the offense. And then when you add the home road split, it gets even more complicated. 

Still liking the WOE chart.

But the analysis used a linear regression to arrive at the estimated wins values. You'd really expect a logistic function, since win percentage is capped at 0% and 100%. For yucks, I tried a third order polynomial fit - which is closer in shape to a logistic curve, hitting 100% estimated wins at an ANY/A+ of 145.

The resulting numbers look closer to what common sense would tell us. Jim McMahon now heads the chart, as we would have expected, both due to the weather he and his opposing QBs faced, and due to the famously strong defenses that supported him. Brady drops down to 11th, as befits both the weather and the sometimes strong defenses he dealt with. Peyton Manning goes negative, again as we would expect from both his predominantly indoor play and generally so-so defense (until Denver, that is).

Even better would be to fit to a curve with end points at 0 and 100% wins. I expect the part of the curve where real QBs fall would be even steeper.

One moral to this story: naive linear fitting is not always your friend.

Try it again this week- maybe Mackenzie will bet you some of her shares!