MLB Best Bets – Free (Wednesday 9/11)
Daniel Kelley
Bryan Knowles: Welcome back to our preseason series of division-by-division over/under reviews! After starting last week with the cutthroat NFC East and the potential-laden NFC North, we kick this week off by taking a trip to the NFC South. And this is an important one, because we are assured by those who are experts in such matters that one of these teams must, in fact, make the playoffs. No matter how much we protest.
Cale Clinton: I’d much rather protest covering this division altogether. The NFC South is the perfect example of why the NFL needs some kind of relegation system. Fighting for a No. 4 seed means that every one of these teams has landed in a no-man’s-land of contention. The New Orleans Saints have been working cap voodoo for years just to stay on the “In the Hunt” playoff graphic past November. The Atlanta Falcons are juggling two timelines: short-term mediocrity and long-term mediocrity. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers held onto their Brady-era Super Bowl roster talent, won one playoff game against an Eagles team in a tailspin, and all of a sudden think they can contend with the top of the conference. The Carolina Panthers … well, the Carolina Panthers are more worried about public perception and removing hats indoors than they are about winning games.
Bryan: The problem isn’t so much that the division doesn’t look very promising this year – the way the NFL ebbs and flows, as long as we’re going to arbitrarily group teams into four-team divisions, someone’s going to be weak more often than not. The problem is that this is now the second year in a row we could have written this exact intro, and the path out for any of these teams is difficult to see. Sometimes, bad teams are exciting because maybe, with the right combination of things going right, they’ll break out – that’s where the Bears and Caleb Williams find themselves. Anyone still feel that way about Bryce Young? Anyone jumping on the Derek Carr bandwagon in 2024? Is Kirk Cousins the answer to all your hopes and prayers? Well, maybe over Desmond Ridder, but I mean, we’re talking the lowest of low bars to clear
Cale: Yes, within the context of the division, these are teams that each have a couple intriguing pieces in the mix. Within the larger conversation of the conference, or a playoff race, there is no reason to see any of these teams crack the conference championship let alone vye for a Super Bowl. That’s the sick, twisted beauty of football, though. Somebody has to win this division. These teams will play six games apiece against each other, juicing those win totals into territory you might feel deeply uncomfortable betting over on. But somebody has to hit, right? One of these teams has to break through the mold of mediocrity to string together a 9-8, maybe even a 10-7 season. We’re here to determine just that.
Bryan: What fun and exciting times. Well, I suppose there’s no use putting it off any further; let’s drive right into the…
Atlanta Falcons (9.5)
Bryan: The Paris Olympics wrapped up yesterday – and as you’re reading this, I’m probably still sleeping to recover from watching about 250 hours of them over the past couple weeks. A lot of the sports involved are really more athletic exhibitions – your gymnastics, your diving, your breaking, subject to critique and evaluation by a team of judges. If the NFL was a judged sport, I could see the Atlanta Falcons doing quite well in an offensive exhibition. Adding Kirk Cousins gives them a reliable presence under center, one who can be counted on to keep an offense moving with accurate passes that allow playmakers to actually make plays. In theory, then, we’re going to finally see the potential we’ve been told about for Bijan Robinson, for Drake London, for Kyle Pitts, finally realized. And they could even bring in Michael Penix as their own Stephen Nedoroscik, the US men’s pommel horse specialist, for the occasional extreme arm strength showcase.
Back in the real world, however, Atlanta is rolling out a defense consisting of holes stitched together with question marks, and are going to get steamrolled on a weekly basis.
This is the worst group of edge rushers I have seen in a while. Bud Dupree and Calais Campbell are gone, and this was already a defense that had real trouble getting pressure off the edge. Who am I supposed to be concerned about here, as an opposing offensive coordinator? Lorenzo Carter? Arnold Ebiketie? James Smith-Williams? Third-round pick Bralen Trice (who just went on the IR list and is out for the year as this was being written)? Any pressure they’re going to get is going to come up the middle, but Grady Jarrett is coming off of a torn ACL. Opposing pass offenses are going to have all day to work.
It’s not entirely fair to say there’s no healthy talent here, to be perfectly fair. David Onyemata was very good in his first year in Atlanta; Jessie Bates is one of the league’s best safeties; you have AJ Terrell and Kaden Ellis holding down spots. But defense is really something where you’re only as strong as your weakest link, and the Falcons have gaping holes at corner, strong safety, off-ball linebacker, edge rusher. I think that’s getting lost in the shuffle behind the excitement of a new head coach and coordinator and quarterback. Raheem Morris has his work cut out for him shaping this defense into something respectable. If only they had a first-round edge rusher…
Cale: That’s the thing. I can’t speak for you, Bryan, but I would have a vastly different opinion of the Falcons if the Penix pick went to an edge rusher. Frankly, the pick could’ve just been any defensive player and I would think more highly of the 2024 Falcons. One player rarely revolutionizes a defense, but the Falcons’ current roster may make an exception this one time. This is an easy division. The Falcons have former top-10 picks lined up at wide receiver, tight end, and running back. Anything is an upgrade over the mess Atlanta trotted out at quarterback last year, and the Falcons just so happened to land one of the safest, high-floor quarterbacks in the NFL. If you contribute an ounce of talent to the other side of the ball, the Falcons’ win total ends up being a pretty easy over for me.
This was a draft chock-full of really solid defensive line talent. Maybe none of the players were strong enough to be a surefire top-10 draft pick, but any of them would instantly be the top edge rusher on Atlanta’s roster. Forget about the added value of trading down to land their preferred defensive pick and let’s just focus on pure player acquisition. Taking any of those players would make Atlanta a more respectable all-around defense. If they take a swing on a young corner, one could make the case for going all-in on secondary and manufacturing a pass rush by increasing time to throw. Hell, adding a skill position guy puts you all-in on an offense that already has a ton of pieces.
Bryan: As exciting as the potential of the top edge of the offense can be now that Zac Robinson has replaced Arthur Smith’s random bag of nonsense, I’ve got depth concerns here, too. Darnell Mooney and Ray-Ray McCloud are penciled in as starting receivers, for goodness sake! Maybe you can get a pretty good one of those Mount Rushmores Jeff Ratcliffe is doing on social media, but it’s not a complete offense by any stretch of the imagination.
Cale: No matter who the pick is, a sit-and-develop quarterback option isn’t doing anything for the Falcons, at least this year. It’s a shame, too, seeing as the Falcons are working with the third-easiest schedule in the league. Any piece puts them in a strong short-term window to vie for home games in January. Maybe there’s a certain self-awareness to knowing that this team isn’t good enough to really compete in the NFC yet. Then why sign Kirk Cousins? Why swing for Jessie Bates? This was a roster built in a way to capitalize on the short-term. Use that time to take some meaningful short-term swings, then! Aim for a mercenary edge like a Jadeveon Clowney, trade downfrom No. 8 and beef up on defense. Do SOMETHING. Having a roster with short-term aspirations, then making a long-term play on a risky guy like Penix is just making half measures. That gets you nowhere in the short term, and it certainly doesn’t translate to wins in 2024.
Give me the under on the Falcons’ win total. For 2024, this team purely exists as a team to make fantasy football managers’ heads spin. It’s the perfect roster for Madden players to take into a Franchise Mode – the kind where you just care about team-building and don’t actually play any of the games. This roster is a whole bunch of fun pieces on their own, but it remains to be seen how they make sense as a coherent football team.
Bryan: Under, in case you couldn’t tell. And not by a little. I’m not sure what’s gotten into people where they think the median outcome for the Falcons is above .500. I don’t think a 10-win season is even remotely reasonable.
New Orleans Saints (7.5)
Bryan: Mediocre. Ordinary. Passable. Middling. NFC South champions?
I get why people would be more excited about the Atlanta Falcons. The Saints somehow have one of the few quarterbacks in the league less exciting than Cousins is – and far, far below him in terms of efficiency and accuracy. We’ve also spent the last five years dunking on New Orleans for their cap management strategy, so there’s a general sense that the Saints are just an incompetently run, boring franchise with nothing going for it. I mean, this is a team that ignored it’s head coach in order to score from victory formation late last season. This is a team that has not added someone new and exciting for about 93 years – the Saints have seen bottom-third totals of snaps from each of their last six draft classes. This is a team that has Taysom Hill on a $10 million APY deal. Not getting excited about this team is a rational response to the world at large.
And yet…
The NFC South is not a good division, and it’s a division defined by glaring weaknesses more than its stunning successes. We’ve talked about the defense in Atlanta. We’re going to talk about the quarterback in Carolina. We’re going to talk about smoke and mirrors in Tampa Bay. The Saints? The Saints are…acceptable. Not across the board, not at every position – the offensive line terrifies me, the wide receiver depth is next to non-existent, and you should be able to run up the gut against them – but this team seems destined to win a bunch of hardly-watchable 17-13 games buried as the sixth-most-interesting game of the early window. And, in 2024, that wins you the NFC South.
Cale: They can’t keep getting away with this. Every year, the Saints are tens of millions of dollars over the cap every year, and every year Mickey Loomis finds a way to get this team cap compliant while still retaining some really solid roster talent. Hell, they even managed to claim Chase Young off the bargain bin to beef up a pass rush that finished bottom-five in both pressure and adjusted sack rate. This team has staved off regression for so long. While they can’t kick the can down the road forever, they might have finally arrived at a spot where the stars have aligned. A middle-of-the-road team in the league’s worst division is pretty much the exact scenario New Orleans has been looking for since Drew Brees retired.
Bryan: Offensively, you have done the default move to improve, which is importing the latest Shanahan drone du jour, Klint Kubiak. Play-action! Offensive motion! Wide zone running! YAC shot after YAC shot after YAC shot! After years of running a Drew Brees offense without Drew Brees, the idea of a team that actually maximizes the talent available to the offense rather than relying on the nanometer-perfect accuracy Brees brought to the table is refreshing. No qualified Saints receiver had a positive YAC+ in 2023, and that’s not entirely due to lack of talent. If Jimmy Garoppolo and Nick Mullens can lead successful versions of this offense, surely Carr can find Alvin Kamara and Chris Olave and Rashid Shaheed and company to at least be competent, right? Even if the offensive line exists more theoretically than in practice. Fingers crossed for Taliese Fuaga.
Cale: Derek Carr has just been a quietly solid quarterback for the better part of his career. A lot of the memory of that has been sullied by the fact that his last two years have been spent working in a repeatedly-failed Josh McDaniels system and an ill-fitting late-stage Brees offense under Pete Carmichael. Even with the new team and lack of synergy with Carmichael’s offense, he still finished a tolerable 17th in passing DVOA and 14th in passing DYAR. Carr’s season-long adjusted net yards per attempt, total passing success rate, completion percentage, touchdown rate and interception rate all either hovered around or slightly outpaced his career average. Get him in a Kubiak offense that better tailored to Carr’s deep-passing affinity, and the Saints might see their best quarterback performance of the post-Brees era. Admittedly a low bar to clear, it at least offers a step in the right direction.
Bryan: Defensively, I think the Saints might actually be pretty good, even in non-NFC South terms. While they slipped back to 15th in DVOA last season, Dennis Allen has had them as a top-10 scoring defense in each of the last two years. You have Demario Davis as your central point in the middle, an aging-but-still effective Tyrann Mathieu in the box, solid corners in Paulson Adebo and Marshon Lattimore, Cam Jordan still producing as his career winds down – you can make worse defenses than that, for sure. I like the addition of Kool-Aid McKinstry as well. I don’t know, maybe I’m drinking the McKinstry too much, but this feels like it could be a top-10 defense once more with a little better injury luck.
Cale: This defense has great young pieces, too. Aside from McKinstry, Bryan Breese enters his second year after recording 4.5 sacks, a franchise record for rookie defensive tackles. Despite all the mileage under his belt, Young is only just entering his age 25 season. The Saints defense has surprisingly struck a balance between retaining signature veteran talent and building up a young core to supplement that.
Look, someone has to win the NFC South. You already know about how Bryan and I feel about the Falcons. New Orleans just looks the most like a complete football team in the NFC South. Derek Carr has some legitimate young receiving talent around him and a new offensive coordinator better catered to his talents. The defense has some really solid pieces, something you can’t say about any other team in this division. At this line, the Saints are the biggest no-brainer over in my eyes.
Bryan: Add in the second-easiest schedule by our projections, and you can see why we’ve been going around telling people that they are sleeping on the Saints. Sleeping through a Saints game might be best for your mental health, but they could sleepwalk their way through a weak division, pick up some wins over teams in rebuilding/not contending mode (Arizona! Minnesota! Chicago!), and wake up to find themselves 11-6. And then getting obliterated in the Wild Card round by Green Bay or something, but still. That’s an over.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers (7.5)
Cale: Feel free to call me crazy, but I am starting to become a little too confident in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ win total.
Bryan: OK, you’re crazy.
Cale: It was easy to talk yourself out of the Buccaneers in 2023. Tom Brady just retired. The offensive line re-shuffled. The Saints just landed Derek Carr, and the Panthers secured the top overall pick. Hindsight is 20/20, but the Buccaneers just looked to be descending as the rest of the division was beginning to make meaningful moves. It was so easy to look at all the headline changes and ignore the fact that this roster was largely the same as the one that won a Super Bowl two years ago. Moving from Tom Brady to Baker Mayfield was a big shift, but that gets softened by the presence of Mike Evans and Chris Godwin. The lack of churn on defense allowed the unit to finish top 10 in the league. New, shiny toys are always going to gain the most eyeballs, but consistency is what drives the market.
Now, this is a team not just with veteran talent but with some decent young prospects to boot. The last two years of Rachaad White work has yet to be promising, but fourth-round rookie Bucky Irving and veteran Chase Edmonds provide enough wrinkles to make for an interesting backfield. I’m intrigued by Jalen McMillan as a field stretcher, and I like the flier on Sterling Shepard. Defensively, I’m generally impressed by Calijah Kancey’s rookie debut and think that Tampa Bay could have a pretty devastating interior of the defense with him, Vita Vea, and Lavonte David. The secondary worries me a bit – it feels like a lot of pieces just cobbled together to see whether a decent secondary manifests – but I just can’t help but have some confidence in this group. Finishing with the fifth-lowest snap-weighted age in 2023, the team is striking the right balance in my eyes between refreshing stocks of young talent, retaining veteran team pillars, and slotting in veteran stopgaps.
Bryan: The problem I have is the distinct feeling that 2023’s offensive performance was an unsustainable mirage. It’s an accepted analytical mantra that third down production is inconsistent from year to year, at least compared to first- and second-down production. Well, Tampa Bay had the fourth-worst offense in the league on first- and second-downs at -15.5% DVOA. They were the very worst team in the league running the ball – when you said Rachaad White has yet to be promising, you were underselling it. The argument for last year’s offensive production continuing into 2024 is taking the deep passing that they saved almost solely for third downs and spread it over the rest of the game plan, but that’s a big if. You’re also dealing with an offensive line that got essentially zero push, ranking 29th in adjusted line yards up the middle. And that’s the side of the ball I’m more confident in!
Shaq Barrett, Devin White, Carton Davis and Ryan Neal are all gone – and the loss of Barrett will really hurt. The Buccaneers had serious issues getting pressure last season (27%, 27th in the league), and Barrett was their most effective pass rusher. Syre, YaYa Diaby had a decent rookie season, but his pressure rate of 10% doesn’t exactly scream “focal point of a pass rush” just yet; he’ll need to make a jump and have Joe Tryon-Shoyinka or the SackSEER-hated Chris Braswell leap behind him. And while you’re right in that Vita Vea and Lavonte David are very good players, they’re replacing both of their running mates, leading to potential holes and weak spots right up the middle. There are young players on all three levels of the defense, but sometimes unproven young players just become bad slightly older players. Tampa Bay needs to have quite a bit of luck just to tread water.
Cale: Look, it’s not a pretty over, but it’s an over I’m willing to push for. Somebody has to win games in the JV division. If anyone is going to take pressure off Mayfield and modernize this offense, it’s Liam Coen. The defense has enough going for it to hold its own. Plus, this is the NFC South. Somebody has to win games. If this division is anything like last year’s, the Bucs, Falcons, and Saints are all going to hover somewhere around .500 much longer than anyone expects them to. I just think Tampa Bay has the right mix of talent to get over the hump.
Bryan: I wouldn’t be stunned if I was wrong here, but that would require the young players to jump forward more than you’d necessarily expect and Mayfield to turn his third-down performances into an every-down threat. I’m happy taking the under until proven wrong.
Carolina Panthers (5.5)
Bryan: On paper, I like the idea of putting all your offseason efforts into assembling a team around Bryce Young. Your top priority for this season has to be to figure out if Young is your quarterback of the future, or if you need to dump him and start over. To that extent, hiring a noted quarterback-whisperer coordinator, putting all your resources into assembling an offense, and even trading away good defensive players to get more resources for that offense makes sense. Go all in on figuring this out! I appreciate the boldness. On paper.
The more I researched for the Almanac, however, the more depressed I got. And, strangely, it was not from watching Panthers tape – it was from doing prep for the Buccaneers chapter. Dave Canales gets praise from pretty much everyone he’s worked with at every level, bringing a Pete Carroll-like enthusiasm and energy which the Panthers desperately need. Both Geno Smith and Baker Mayfield have given him a lot of credit for reviving their careers, and the Panthers are hoping that he can have a similar impact on Young. From all the testimonials backing him up, I think he’ll probably be a solid coach from Monday-Saturday – or at least, as sure as you can be for someone who’s a first-time coach. But we have one season of him calling plays on record in Tampa Bay, and it was some of the most predictable, plodding, unimaginative work I can remember seeing. Run into the line on first down, run into the line on second down, throw a prayer to Mike Evans and hope it works, repeat. Over and over, from Week 1 through the playoffs. For an offense hoping to have some life jolted into it, this was not the most inspiring trend.
Cale: Now you get why I’m high on the Bucs! Imagine making the playoffs the year before AND moving on from that guy!
In all seriousness, this Carolina Panthers team somehow feels directionless just over one year into their hard commitment to one direction. After drafting Bryce Young last year, the Panthers hired a veteran, offensive-minded quarterback whisperer in Frank Reich to help develop him. The result? Reich was thrown under the bus 11 games into the season, Young posted the third-worst DYAR season of any quarterback since 1981 and Carolina posted the second-worst offensive DVOA in franchise history. Now, the Panthers are opting for … a first-time offensive-minded quarterback whisperer in Canales. At least the weapons situation will be better, right? It has to be. Thielen is coming off a career year (by virtue of the complete lack of receiving talent in 2023), and now Diontae Johnson and Xavier Leggette have the chance to push him down the depth chart. Even that group is pretty miserable when you compare it to league-wide standards, though. Canales has had the luxury of translating his vanilla offense to some of the best receiver tandems in the league. Thielen and Johnson are in a whole other tier compared to Mike Evans and Chris Godwin, or D.K. Metcalf and Tyler Lockett.
Bryan: And when I said trading away good defensive players to get more resources, well, you’d hope for better returns than a second and a fifth for Brian Burns, considering it was less than 18 months ago you were reportedly offered multiple first-round picks for him. Losing Frankie Luvu, Jeremy Chinn, and a half-dozen other defenders also hurts. They took the money they would have used to resign those players and instead assembled the most expensive offensive line in the history of football – and if money was a 1-to-1 correlation with success, I’d be very confident in them. As it is, signing Damien Lewis to a huge deal does not make me believe he is suddenly going to become the bedrock of a functioning offensive line.
Cale: Who’s even left on this defense? Derrick Brown is a quality player. Xavier Woods is a threat at safety. Shaq Thompson returns from injury, as is Jaycee Horn. After them, who? What portion of Jadeveon Clowney’s career season was manufactured by the Ravens loaded defense? Is Dane Jackson going to make the leap to a full-time starting corner? The Panthers have over 5,000 meaningful snaps to replace on this defense from 2023. This was already a bad unit – bottom 10 in the league by DVOA – but it was absolutely gutted this offseason.
Bryan: All that being said, the Panthers have to be better than last year, right? Adding Diontae Johnson, and Robert Hunt and yes, even Lewis should provide the basis for pass protection and targets that aren’t just ten thousand give up screens. Even Canales’ predictable playcalling is bound to be better than the large variety of give-up plays Carolina was running last season. And Young can’t, and I mean just can’t, be as bad in 2024 as he was in 2023. The only quarterback to ever have two qualified seasons below a -40% DVOA is Dwayne Haskins. Even if Young is just regular bad instead of historic-bad, with the easiest schedule in the league, certainly they can find six wins. That is such a low bar to clear that I would have a hard time sliding anyone below it. I’m going for the Over, if only just. It’d certainly be a splash of cold water to the face if they failed to clear that disappointing bar.
Cale: I don’t see it. This team took one step forward offensively and two steps back defensively. There is no way this is a competitive football team in 2024. Even with the improved receiving corps, this success pretty much exclusively rides on Bryce Young’s development. That’s a pass from me. Six rookie quarterbacks have finished their first seasons with DYAR at -850 or lower. Only one of those players – Jared Goff – ranked higher than 25th in passing DYAR in his sophomore season. Sorry, Panthers fans. Sean McVay isn’t walking through that door. The defensive holes are glaring. The offensive personnel is still lacking. Any injury exposes the lack of depth inherent in a roster this bad. Frankly, I don’t think the league’s easiest schedule is going to save this team. Under.
