Week 6 Pink breasts

[StefanAVFC]

HOLY CRAP YES PATS

 

Still getting that HF advantage <3

[leviramsey]

It's a flashback to his early career... when he was pretty much being carried by defense and special teams.

The 35 QBs who have thrown at least 50 passes this season (coming into this week), ranked by passing DYAR

1. Peyton

2. Rivers

3. Ryan

4. Brees

5. Romo

6. Rodgers

7. Luck

8. Stafford

9. Cutler

10. Locker

11. Wilson

12. Vick

13. Alex Smith

14. Kaepernick

15. Bradford

16. Roethlisberger

17. Pryor

18. Griffin

19. Brady

20. Manuel

21. Hoyer

22. Fitzpatrick

23. Tannehill

24. Dalton

=== Replacement level

25. Geno Smith

26. Freeman

27. Ponder

28. Flacco

29. Newton

30. Schaub

31. Henne

32. Palmer

33. Eli

34. Weeden

35. Gabbert

That TD at the death was also vintage-2001 Brady.

[rhyscartwright_avfc]

DYAR??

[Tegis]

And a half empty Foxboro

[tonyh29]

Arse

But that's one half of my prediction true so in your face BOF

[AVFCforever1991]

[AVFCforever1991]

[leviramsey]

DYAR??

DVOA and DYAR explained

One running back runs for three yards. Another running back runs for three yards. Which is the better run? This sounds like a stupid question, but it isn’t. In fact, this question is at the heart of nearly all of the analysis on Football Outsiders.

Several factors can differentiate one three-yard run from another. What is the down and distance? Is it third-and-2 or second-and-15? Where on the field is the ball? Does the player get only three yards because he hits the goal line and scores? Is the player’s team up by two touchdowns in the fourth quarter, and thus running out the clock; or down by two touchdowns, and thus facing a defense that is playing purely against the pass? Is the running back playing against the porous defense of the Raiders, or the stalwart defense of the Bears?

Conventional NFL statistics value plays based solely on their net yardage. The NFL determines the best players by adding up all their yards no matter what situations they came in or how many plays it took to get them. Now, why would they do that? Football has one objective -- to get to the end zone -- and two ways to achieve that -- by gaining yards and achieving first downs. These two goals need to be balanced to determine a player’s value or a team’s performance. All the yards in the world won’t help a team win if they all come in six-yard chunks on third-and-10.

The popularity of fantasy football only exacerbates the problem. Fans have gotten used to judging players based on how much they help fantasy teams win and lose, not how much they help real teams win and lose. Typical fantasy scoring further skews things by counting the yard between the one and the goal line as 61 times more important than all the other yards on the field (each yard worth 0.1 points, a touchdown worth 6). Let’s say Larry Fitzgerald catches a pass on third-and-15 and goes 50 yards but gets tackled two yards from the goal line, and then Beanie Wells takes the ball on first-and-goal from the two-yard line and plunges in for the score. Has Beanie Wells done something special? Not really. When an offense gets the ball on first-and-goal at the two-yard line, they're expected to score a touchdown five out of six times. Wells is getting credit for the work done by the passing game.

Doing a better job of distributing credit for scoring points and winning games is the goal of DVOA, or Defense-adjusted Value Over Average. DVOA breaks down every single play of the NFL season, assigning each play a value based on both total yards and yards towards a first down, based on work done by Pete Palmer, Bob Carroll, and John Thorn in their seminal book, The Hidden Game of Football. On first down, a play is considered a success if it gains 45 percent of needed yards; on second down, a play needs to gain 60 percent of needed yards; on third or fourth down, only gaining a new first down is considered success.

We then expand upon that basic idea with a more complicated system of “success points,” improved over the past few years with a lot of mathematics and a bit of trial and error. A successful play is worth one point; an unsuccessful play, zero points with fractional points in between (e.g., eight yards on third-and-10 is worth 0.54 “success points”). Extra points are awarded for big plays, gradually increasing to three points for 10 yards (assuming those yards result in a first down), four points for 20 yards, and five points for 40 yards or more. Losing three or more yards is -1 point. Interceptions occurring on fourth down during the last two minutes of a game incur no penalty whatsoever, but all others average -6 points, with an adjustment for the length of the pass and the location of the interception (since an interception tipped at the line is more likely to produce a long return than an interception on a 40-yard pass). A fumble is worth anywhere from -1.7 to -4.0 points depending on how often a fumble in that situation is lost to the defense -- no matter who actually recovers the fumble. Red zone plays get a bonus: 20 percent for team offense, five percent for team defense, and 10 percent for individual players. There is a bonus given for a touchdown, which acknowledges that the goal line is significantly more difficult to cross than the previous 99 yards (although this bonus is nowhere near as large as the one used in fantasy football).

(Our system is a bit more complex than the one in Hidden Game thanks to our subsequent research, which added larger penalties for turnovers, the fractional points, and a slightly higher baseline for success on first down. The reason why all fumbles are counted, no matter whether they are recovered by the offense or defense, is explained in FO Basics.)

Every single play run in the NFL gets a “success value” based on this system, and then that number gets compared to the average success values of plays in similar situations for all players, adjusted for a number of variables. These include down and distance, field location, time remaining in game, and the team’s lead or deficit in the game score. Teams are always compared to the overall offensive average, as the team made its own choice whether to pass or rush. When it comes to individual players, however, rushing plays are compared to other rushing plays, passing plays to other passing plays, tight ends to tight ends, wideouts to wideouts, and so on.

Going back to our example of the three-yard rush, if Player A gains three yards under a set of circumstances in which the average NFL running back gains only one yard, then Player A has a certain amount of value above others at his position. Likewise, if Player B gains three yards on a play on which, under similar circumstances, an average NFL back gains four yards, that Player B has negative value relative to others at his position. Once we make all our adjustments, we can evaluate the difference between this player’s rate of success and the expected success rate of an average running back in the same situation (or between the opposing defense and the average defense in the same situation, etc.). Add up every play by a certain team or player, divide by the total of the various baselines* for success in all those situations, and you get VOA, or Value Over Average.

The biggest variable in football is the fact that each team plays a different schedule against teams of disparate quality. By adjusting each play based on the opposing defense’s average success in stopping that type of play over the course of a season, we get DVOA, or Defense-adjusted Value Over Average. Rushing and passing plays are adjusted based on down and location on the field; passing plays are also adjusted based on how the defense performs against passes to running backs, tight ends, or wide receivers. Defenses are adjusted based on the average success of the offenses they are facing. (Yes, technically the defensive stats are actually “offense-adjusted.” If it seems weird, think of the “D” in “DVOA” as standing for “opponent-Dependent” or something.)

After using DVOA for a few months, we came across a strange phenomenon: well-regarded players, particularly those known for their durability, had DVOA ratings that came out around average. The reason is that DVOA, by virtue of being a percentage or rate statistic, doesn’t take into account the cumulative value of having a player producing at a league-average level over the course of an above-average number of plays. By definition, an average level of performance is better than that provided by half of the league and the ability to maintain that level of performance while carrying a heavy workload is very valuable indeed. In addition, a player who is involved in a high number of plays can draw the defense’s attention away from other parts of the offense, and, if that player is a running back, he can take time off the clock with repeated runs.

Let’s say you have a running back who carries the ball 300 times in a season. What would happen if you were to remove this player from his team’s offense? What would happen to those 300 plays? Those plays don’t disappear with the player, though some might be lost to the defense because of the associated loss of first downs. Rather those plays would have to be distributed among the remaining players in the offense, with the bulk of them being given to a replacement running back. This is where we arrive at the concept of replacement level, borrowed from our partners at Baseball Prospectus. When a player is removed from an offense, he is usually not replaced by a player of similar ability. Nearly every starting player in the NFL is a starter because he is better than the alternative. Those 300 plays will typically be given to a significantly worse player, someone who is the backup because he doesn’t have as much experience and/or talent. A player’s true value can then be measured by the level of performance he provides above that replacement level baseline, totaled over all of his run or pass attempts.

Of course, the real replacement player is different for each team in the NFL. In 2011, the second-string running back in Washington (Roy Helu) had a higher DVOA than the original starter (Tim Hightower), and the third-string running back (Evan Royster) had a higher DVOA than either of them. Sometimes a player like Ryan Grant or Danny Woodhead will be cut by one team and turn into a star for another. On other teams, the drop from the starter to the backup can be even greater than the general drop to replacement level. The 2011 Indianapolis Colts will now be the hallmark example of this until the end of time. The choice to start an inferior player or to employ a sub-replacement level backup, however, falls to the team, not the starter being evaluated. Thus, we generalize replacement level for the league as a whole, as the ultimate goal is to evaluate players independent of the quality of their teammates.

Our estimates of replacement level were re-done during the 2008 season and are computed differently for each position. For quarterbacks, we analyzed situations where two or more quarterbacks had played meaningful snaps for a team in the same season, then compared the overall DVOA of the original starters to the overall DVOA of the replacements. We did not include situations where the backup was actually a top prospect waiting his turn on the bench, since a first-round pick is by no means a "replacement-level" player.

At other positions, there is no easy way to separate players into "starters" and "replacements," since unlike at quarterback, being the starter doesn't make you the only guy who gets in the game. Instead, we used a simpler method, ranking players at each position in each season by attempts. The players who made up the final 10 percent of passes or runs were split out as "replacement players" and then compared to the players making up the other 90 percent of plays at that position. This took care of the fact that not every non-starter at running back or wide receiver is a freely available talent. (Think of Jonathan Stewart or Randall Cobb, for example.)

As noted earlier, the challenge of any new stat is to present it on a scale that’s meaningful to those attempting to use it. Saying that Tony Romo's passes were worth 131 success value points over replacement in 2011 has very little value without a context to tell us if 131 is good total or a bad one. Therefore, we translate these success values into a number called "Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement, or DYAR. Thus, Romo was fourth among quarterbacks with 1,344 passing DYAR. It is our estimate that a generic replacement-level quarterback, throwing in the same situations as Romo, would have been worth 1,344 fewer yards. Note that this doesn’t mean the replacement level quarterback would have gained exactly 1,344 fewer yards. First downs, touchdowns, and turnovers all have an estimated yardage value in this system, so what we are saying is that a generic replacement-level quarterback would have fewer yards and touchdowns (and more turnovers) that would total up to be equivalent to the value of 1,344 yards.

[leviramsey]

Cowboys -5.5: risk 7 units to win 6.36

Cowboys -10.5 +185: 7 units

[NHL] Jets -115: risk 14 units to win 12.17

[NHL] Ducks -140: risk 6 units to win 4.28

[Milfner]

 

[leviramsey]

So there's a "sky mirror" now at the Cowboys stadium

I myself think that it's going to turn out to be Jerry's Death Ray.

[leviramsey]

At this writing, the teams the Eagles have beaten have a combined record of... 1-14.

[KennyPowers]

There's a good line in Moneyball, I think it was a Bill James quote, that the balance of strategies always favours the team that is losing. Obviously he wrote it in relation to baseball but there isn't a better sport to illustrate it than American football. 

 

The Saints, the one team in the league that are more likely to throw it than run it when they have first and goal on the opponents 1 yard line (probably not strictly true but indulge me). Yet they have at least 4 plays where a first down will ice the game and they let Drew Brees throw once. Play calling in the NFL never ceases to amaze me. I mean that's Tom Brady on the other team, are you really surprised he can go 70 yards in a minute when he gets 4 downs to do it? Especially when you give him two drives to do it. 

 

Be aggressive be-e agressive. 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApcC8Hieu7Q

[leviramsey]

There's a lot of legitimate criticism that NFL offenses are too conservative; it's only within the past 5-10 years that coaches have figured out that the 1978 rule changes meant that the old rules on run/pass balance were outmoded (which was only, you know, the freaking aim of those changes!). On the other hand, I can't really fault Payton. The Patriots had done a pretty good job slowing down the Saints' passing game thus far and hadn't shown a great likelihood of being able to move quickly downfield. I can definitely see the case for deciding that the chance of incomplete passes stopping the clock allowing the Patriots to mount a slower attack which they seemed to have a greater ability for was too great; meanwhile if runs got stuffed, at least you were forcing the Patriots to burn timeouts or let the clock run.

I do think that most/all NFL coaches still haven't really grasped the implications of the rules favoring big gains by passing and the higher-scoring environment with regard to (as in basketball) playing to score in the last 15 seconds (which is close enough, barring kickoff returns, to a buzzer-beater), though.

Edited October 14, 2013 by leviramsey

[KennyPowers]

When a team has to score a touchdown with 2 minutes to go I usually expect them to get it. When they have four downs to play with and are playing ultra-aggressive combined with the defence backing off into a soft shell to avoid giving up a huge play it so often just looks inevitable. 

 

I remember a few years ago when I was gambling a lot, there was a bad team (I'm pretty sure it was the Chiefs) playing a good team and they got the ball back with about a minute left down a touchdown. I bet on them to win in-play at something like 20-1 just because I remember thinking, I don't care if they're a bad team, when only a touchdown will do and they're completely focused on that they usually get it. 

 

Funny story is they got the touchdown, celebrated wildly and I went out the room to get a drink in preparation for overtime. When I came back the game was over. They had gone for 2 points instead of kicking the extra point and failed. I was gob-smacked. 

 

To quote a line from Rounders:" Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career."

 

I'll try and dig out the box score to prove this game didn't exist merely in my head. I'm sure you can understand the point though and although I don't have the statistics to back it up that Bill James quote is so incredibly true. 

Edited October 14, 2013 by KennyPowers

[KennyPowers]

Found it, a lot of the details are different to how I remember.

 

http://scores.espn.go.com/nfl/playbyplay?gameId=281109024&period=4

 

The Chiefs did go 2-14 that season though. 

[KennyPowers]

In that Saints game when they were driving down by 6 I was sat there thinking their best chance of winning the game was kicking a field goal. Because the Patriots would get the ball back up by 3, play very conservative and then the Saints would likely get the ball back down by 3 with the chance to tie with a field goal and win with a touchdown. 

 

I was sat there thinking if they score a touchdown here Brady will just drive the length of the field for the winning field goal. I was very wrong but I had the right idea. 

[leviramsey]

When a team has to score a touchdown with 2 minutes to go I usually expect them to get it. When they have four downs to play with and are playing ultra-aggressive combined with the defence backing off into a soft shell to avoid giving up a huge play it so often just looks inevitable. 

To quote a line from Rounders:" Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career."

The stats don't bear it out, for more or less the reason you cite. We remember the times that the soft shell fails and forget the times it holds (partly because when it holds, it's a boring finish).

The average pass attempt (including sacks as pass attempts) over all downs yields about 6.5 to 7 yards. The average pass attempt against prevent-type defenses yields 5.6 yards (and since prevent type defenses don't try to get sacks) that implies that there's less variance.

Edited October 14, 2013 by leviramsey

[Dante_Lockhart]

[BOF]

NY Giants at Chicago ✓

Cincinnati at Buffalo ✓

Detroit at Cleveland ✓

Oakland at Kansas City ✓

Carolina at Minnesota x

Pittsburgh at NY Jets x

Philadelphia at Tampa Bay x

Green Bay at Baltimore ✓

St. Louis at Houston x

Jacksonville at Denver ✓

Tennessee at Seattle ✓

Arizona at San Francisco ✓

New Orleans at New England x

Washington at Dallas ✓

Indianapolis at San Diego -

Not sure where the hell the Rams pulled that out of, but fair play to them. Saints I knew was always risky. Panthers must be a frustrating team to follow and the less said about Philly the better.

9-5 with a tricky one to come.