Roundup 12/24/10

Mike Nolan regrets not benching Alex Smith sooner. Alleluia. Coaches cling to these top draft pick QBs far too long. Sunk costs.

We have a Doug Drinen sighting. Bring back the mid-week play-in game! (Well, bring back the idea anyway.)

Where did game theory come from?

Do teams that play on Thursday have an advantage the following week? Good question. I wonder if teams that play on Monday are at any disadvantage the following week. There would be a larger sample than for Thursday games.

The cognitive-visual strategies of top athletes. Really interesting. Some good links there too.

In case you missed it earlier in the week, playoff projections.
How do return specialists do later in their careers?

Colts run defense saves the day? You don't hear that one too often.

Onside kick to start overtime??? That would be awesome!

How fluky is the NFC West, where a team with a losing record will win the division and make the playoffs? All four NFC West teams are in the bottom 6 of PFR's SRS rankings.

NFL-MLB comparisons.

Play-by-play data through week 12. Thanks to John Candido.

Atlanta's turnover margin may be due to skill after all.

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4 Responses to “Roundup 12/24/10”

  1. James Holzhauer says:

    Posting this here because TBL thread is all off topic:

    You cannot say a team coming off a Thursday night game has an advantage because they cover the spread over 50% of the time. The extra rest is priced into the line. Road teams cover half the time, but I would never use this as evidence that there is no such thing as home field advantage. Sloppy reasoning.

  2. Jim Glass says:

    It might be right to note that the father of statistical analysis of the NFL, Bud Goode, died recently. He was the first to identify average yards per pass attempt as football's "killer stat", and spot the often reverse causation in running-winning, back in the early 1970s when the NFL was its most run-oriented ever. He did it using a mainframe medical statistics package he converted to handle football data (no spreadsheets).

    Goode and his ideas got much more media coverage back then than Bill James and the early baseball stat analysts, but while the baseball analysis community grew and grew from their early small base nobody seemed interested in Goode's type of football analysis except fort point spreads. Football analysis flatlined for 20 years until a new generation arrived with PCs and spreadsheets and started figuring things out for themselves all over again, most never having heard of him. If James died the sabremetric sites would declare a national day of mourning, AFIK no football stat site even mentioned Goode's passing. On the entire PFR.com site, which pushes many variations of AYA, the search engine says the words "Bud Goode" don't exist.

    This SI profile of Goode and his strange new ideas shows the state of the art in 1974...

    One of his favorite computer revelations is that there is virtually no relationship between average yards per rush and average yards per pass. In other words, you don't need to "establish the running game" before you can go to the air. According to the computer, if you can pass, you can pass ... For scoring points one of the most important statistics is yards per pass attempt ... Discovering the importance of this statistic is one of Goode's proudest achievements.

    "When I die," he says, "my tombstone can say, 'Here Lies Goode. He Told The World About Average Yards Per Pass Attempt.' "

  3. DA Baracus says:

    "How fluky is the NFC West, where a team with a losing record will win the division and make the playoffs?"

    *Could* have a losing record. The Rams or Seahawks could be 8-8.

  4. Anonymous says:

    Alex Smith was on IR at the last year of Nolan's time with SF. I think he is talking about benching JTO, which Singletary did after he became the interim coach and hired as the full time coach because of that.

    On a related note I think all 49ers fans regret that 49ers did not "bench" Nolan a year or two earlier.

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