Matt’s Musings | NFL Data Study, Week 10

Every Monday, I find myself in a bit of NFL data purgatory. We’re waiting for the week to come to a proper ending, and the data is still yet to be finalized. It’s a great time, however, to look at some historical trends and do some digging on some things we can leverage in the upcoming week. This piece will be out Tuesdays but won’t have the same format or topic each week. The formula will change as I poke around with the data we have access to here. It’ll just be my musings on something that caught my eye. If there’s something to it, I’ll give you some way to leverage the conclusions in fantasy for the upcoming week.

A Game of Inches

As NFL fans, we have such limited samples that every game seems so important throughout the course of the season. Some people make jokes about the swing in evaluations that happen throughout the year, but it’s important to update based on what you see on the field. Baseball has 10x as many games to figure out who’s the best. Basketball and hockey each have about 5x as many games. Every penalty, every turnover, every bounce in the right (or wrong) direction can impact a team’s chance at a win. Which, in turn, changes their chances to make the playoffs. 

Interceptions 

Interceptions are at least somewhat fluky. If you’ve watched football for a long time, you’ve seen your fair share of tipped balls that wound up as interceptions that shouldn’t have been intercepted. Or, you’ve seen defensive backs just flat out drop an INT that should’ve gone the other way. The thought is that it evens out over a long enough time frame. But when we’re only a little more than halfway through the season, it can feel like there are large extremes. Looking at how far teams are from the trend line in the viz below can help us get a clearer picture on which defenses are running hot and which units should have more interceptions than they’ve actually gotten. 

The Jets and 49ers have to get lucky at some point, right? 

 The Jets turning 13 INT-worthy throws into just 1 interception almost seems impossible. We have a few overlapping teams here, as well. The Bengals/Panthers, Bills/Chargers, Titans/Colts, and Packers/Bucs are all occupying the same space on the chart. 

There’s a pretty strong relationship between these two metrics with about one-third of interception variance being explained by the number of interception-worthy throws. Here is the list of teams that should see more turnovers in the coming weeks (assuming they continue to see a similar rate of INT-worthy throws):

• Jets
• 49ers
• Seahawks
• Falcons
• Browns

On the other side, here are the teams that are seriously outperforming their INT-worthy throws:

• Titans
• Colts
• Bills
• Rams
• Cowboys
• Patriots

The “Other Results”

Interceptions are a large part of the game, but that’s not the only momentum swinging way for an offense to get on the field. Any of the following can also start drives:

• Blocked Field Goal
• Blocked Punt
• Turnover on Downs
• Fumble Recovery
• Opponent Missed Field Goal

For the purposes of this exercise, I’m leaving out interceptions (which we just covered) as well as receiving kickoffs and punts. Both of those drive starters are linked to a team’s defense either doing or not doing their job successfully. I wanted to look more specifically at ways that an offense obtains possession in these less frequent ways. 

This has an incredibly strong relationship by football standards. Over two-thirds of the points scored are explained by the number of drives that start off in the aforementioned ways. 

Once again we see the Jets lagging behind. The Saints are also gaining possessions in these ways but haven’t converted many of those opportunities into points. The Cardinals are absolutely lapping the field here and aren’t doing so in a wholly unsustainable way. Overperforming in metrics like these is a sign of a very strong team. If Kyler Murray can stay healthy the rest of the way, they’ll be a team to keep an eye on. 

Key Takeaways

Quantifying luck and all of the different ways that parts of teams are interconnected is a difficult task. Looking at metrics like these can give us a better picture on who’s likely to continue their strong play and who might be crashing back to earth soon. The Browns, Cardinals, and Saints are all teams that I’ll be watching in the coming weeks to see how things adjust as we enter the third quarter of the season.