Sunday's Numbers Have Been Crunched

Sunday's numbers are now available, including advanced stat box scores, top players of the week, team stats, and season leader boards.

• Advanced stat box scores
• Top QBs of the week
• Top RBs of the week
• Top WRs of the week
• Top TEs of the week
• Top Defenders of the week
• Advanced team stats
• Offensive player season leaders
• Defender season leaders
• Team Viz
• QB Viz
• RB Viz

Washington Post: Just How Bad Is the Redskins Pass Defense?

This week's article at the Post quantifies how bad the Redskins defense has been so far this season and puts it in context.

The Redskins pass defense actually may be worse than it appears, for a couple reasons. First, the pass defense deficiencies have been obscured by their relatively high interception rate. You might think that that’s a good thing, and it is. Or I should say, it has been. Rarely do defensive interception rates persist throughout the season. The Redskins current interception rate is 3.5%, significantly higher than the league average of 2.7%, but it’s bound to regress. Interceptions are relatively rare and notoriously random, particularly from the defense’s perspective. They’re thrown by a quarterback more than they are taken by a defense.

Second, the Redskins’ opponents so far have been well below average when facing teams other than the Redskins...

Visualizations Up and Running

As you may have noticed by the chart at the top of the front page, the visualizations unveiled late last season are now up and running for 2012. As a refresher, there are four sets of visualizations. Each set can always be accessed through the Graphs|Visualizations menu. Each visualization is interactive. You can select seasons, players, teams, weeks, etc. Hovering over a team symbol or player will show enhanced details.

The team stat viz plots each team's performance on an x-y graph. Good defense is up, and good offense is to the right. So teams on the bottom left are your thoroughly bad teams. There are tabs to see Expected Points, Win Probability Added, and Success Rate. Plus, there's a tab that just looks at team offense and one that just looks at team defense. On those two plots, running is measured on the vertical axis and passing is measured on the horizontal axis. Like the other plots, up and right are good. Below each main plot you'll see a chart of week-to-week performance. You can choose any season since 2000 to look at. You can also narrow down the span of weeks to examine. For example, if you want to look at the 2011 Texans with only T.J. Yates starting at QB, you can move the left slider from week 1 to week 13. Or if you only want to see regular season performance move the right slider to week 17.

The next visualization is for franchise EPA since 2000. You can select a team and see how they've trended in offensive EPA and defensive EPA in the past 12 years. For example, you can see the Giants' best teams over the past several years were not their 2007 or 2011 championship squads.

Week 4 Game Probabilities

Game probabilities for week 4 are up at the New York Times' Fifth Down.

If you happen to be a new reader, it might be worth your while to go through my archive there. Most weeks feature a lead-in discussing or applying one of the many concepts written about in these spaces.

Game Changers: Dueling Kickers in Miami

The Situations

Jets at Dolphins, Week 3
Overtime

An Alternative View on the Officiating Debacle

Part of the problem has nothing to do with the replacement refs. It’s just the rules. The number of penalties is up so far this year--just over one additional penalty per game, or about 8%. It might not be just because the replacement refs suck (which they do), but because they are trying to interpret the rules to the letter. Sure they blow calls and miss a few calls, but the outrage is somewhat overblown. Regular refs are human and blew game-swaying calls too, but do it with supreme confidence and authority, so everyone buys it even when we don't like it.

In general, I don't like penalties at all. It breaks up the flow of the game, and most of them are so subjective that fans of the penalized teams always feel aggrieved. And even when penalties favor your team, there's something about it that feels cheap. Plus, with all the complex rules and reviews, the NFL seems like it's run by a bunch of lawyers. Wait, what?...Oh. It all makes sense now...)

Here's what I think the problem is. The NFL has a yardage inflation problem. Offenses fly up and down the field with ease in the modern NFL. A generation or two ago, a 10 or 15 yd penalty was a more severe blow. These days, not so much.

So the level of pain might need to be increased. For example, holding might need to be a 15 yd penalty now. Pass interference might need to include an extra 10 yds. Perhaps personal fouls should be 20 or 25 yds. Helmet-to-helmet violations might need to be 30 yds. Yes, those are stiff consequences, but we'd ultimately see far fewer flags, and the game would flow so much better. On net there might be fewer total penalty yards despite the stiffer yardage consequences, because players would be more reluctant to hold, interfere, etc...

Think of it this way: In the 1970s a speeding ticket might have cost about $30. If it were still just 30 bucks in 2012, people would be far more reckless on the road because of inflation. A $30 fine just isn't as painful in 2012 as it was in 1972. The NFL has a yard-inflation problem, so just as the states have to raise the price of a speeding ticket to maintain the same level of deterrence, the NFL needs to raise the pain of rule violations.

Just thinking out loud.

Game Changers: Bengals' Wildcat Opener

The Situation

Bengals at Redskins, Week 3
First quarter, 14:53 left to go
Bengals ball, 1st and 10 from their 27

Team Efficiency Rankings - Week 4

It's time to launch the first rankings of the season. The rankings and prediction model was redone prior to last season, but just like always, it's a team-efficiency logistic regression model. It's based on passing, running, turnover, and penalty efficiency. Since last season running is represented by Success Rate (SR) rather than Yards Per Carry (YPC). SR correlates far better than YPC with winning games. YPC is too susceptible to a handful of relatively rare break-away runs and wrongly penalizes successful plays in short yardage situations. I believe the revised model better reflects the true inner workings of the sport.

There are always new readers each year, so here is a quick and dirty refresher on how the model works. (Most of this write-up is taken from last season's first rankings post.) A logistic regression is fed net YPA, run SR, and interception rates on both offense and defense, plus offensive fumble rate. Team penalty rates (penalty yds per play) and home field advantage are also included. These particular aspects are selected because they are predictive of future outcomes, not because they explain past wins. This is a distinction overlooked by most experts and even other stats-oriented sites.