This week's edition of The Weekly League features some brief notes about the Miami-Minnesota game and then some less-than-brief notes about the New York Jets-New England match-up.
The following games have been chosen as they'll be available to the greatest portion of the network-watching audience on Sunday, per the NFL maps at the506.com.
The Four Factors you see for each game represent each team's ability in four important categories (pass and rush efficiency, pass and rush efficiency against) relative to league average (where 100 is league average and anything above is good). They're also for Week One games only. In other words, they're to be taken with the giantest grain of salt ever.
Miami at Minnesota | Sunday, September 19 | 1:00pm ET
Four Factors
The Miami Defense
I suspect that last week's Buffalo-Miami game was painful to watch in its entirety. We in the Upper Midwest joined the game with a couple minutes left, and even that was probably too much. With the exception of a fourth quarter drive on which he went 7-for-7 with 82 yards (including lost yards from a sack), quarterback Trent Edwards looked absolutely lost, checking down almost instantly despite his team being down by five and deep in their own territory.
The Weekly League: Notes and Ideas for Week Two
Site News: Welcome Carson Cistulli
On other sites and message boards I often see Advanced NFL Stats referred to as “the Fangraphs of football.” That’s a pretty high compliment, and although I wouldn’t go nearly that far, I’ll certainly take it. There are a lot of similarities, and they were mostly accidental, at least at first. Both sites feature sound statistical analysis, and both feature live win probability graphs for their respective sports. After my own WP graph feature gained a following, I looked at Fangraphs for inspiration for how to further build a respectable sports analysis site. Gradually, Advanced NFL Stats became Fangraphs’ creepy stalker Jennifer Jason Leigh character from the movie Single White Female, and now the transformation is complete.
Carson Cistulli, a regular contributor at Fangraphs, has agreed to come on board to provide us with his brand of analysis, a slightly more entertaining look at football stats than what I can normally provide. He’s planning to start off doing some game previews, but may do some other things down the road.
Aside from his regular gig at Fangraphs, Carson is a writing instructor (maybe he can help me), a contributor at RotoWire, and a real-life poet. Yes poet. (Warning. Click at your own risk.)
So please welcome Carson, and you can look forward to his first post shortly.