Fantasy Football Today - Advanced Stats 101 (05/28 Fantasy Football Podcast)

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

Need to get up to speed on air yards, yards per route run, aDOT or the other fancy stats that are becoming more relevant these days? We've got a Fantasy Football Advanced Statistics primer for you. W...e'll tell you our favorite stats to use and briefly talk QB strategy (8:00) before we get into the nitty gritty ... Let's start with some RB stats (10:43) as Ben tells you about High Value Touches (HVT). We cover Derrick Henry and Nick Chubb. What types of touches matter and lead to Fantasy production? WR stats are trendier (19:44) as we tell you why air yards and aDOT matter. You should know what types of routes WRs are running and which players are better fits for PPR leagues. And if a player has a lot of air yards but not a lot of actual receiving yards, what does that mean going forward? We discuss Curtis Samuel, Kenny Golladay, Michael Thomas and more ... As we get to the TE position (34:30), Ben details why a couple of stud TEs are so productive when they run routes, even if they don't run as many routes as you might think. We discuss Mark Andrews, Darren Waller and George Kittle. And we finish with some QB and team stats (51:40). Pay attention to pace statistics! ... Your emails at fantasyfootball@cbsi.com and tweet us with #AskFFT 'Fantasy Football Today' is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Castbox, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Follow the new FFT Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/FFToday Follow our FFT team on Twitter: @FFToday, @AdamAizer, @JameyEisenberg, @daverichard, @heathcummingssr, @YardsPerGretch, @BenSchragg Watch FFT on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCviK78rIWXhZdFzJ1Woi7Fg/videos Join our Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/FantasyFootballToday/ Sign up for the FFT newsletter https://www.cbssports.com/newsletters/ To hear more from the CBS Sports Podcast Network, visit https://www.cbssports.com/podcasts/ To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 This is Fantasy Football Today from CBS Sports. Here we go! Email us at fantasyfootballatcbsi.com. Here we go! It's time to dominate your fantasy league. Let's go! Now, here's some combination of Adam, Dave, Jamie, and Heath. Trap backs, air yards, the Environmental Protection Agency.
Starting point is 00:00:24 That's what I knew EPA to be. But there's other stuff. CPOE? What? Maybe we'll get a stat about Carlos Hyde. Anyway, welcome to the show. If you're confused, if you don't know what we're talking about, you will. Advanced Stats 101. Our favorite advanced stats, what they mean, how they're used,
Starting point is 00:00:41 who's good at these stats, who's bad, what does that mean for fantasy. Welcome, everybody. I'm Adam Azer. Dave Richard. Dave Richard. What's up, Adam? Not much. You all right?
Starting point is 00:00:53 Yeah, I'm hanging in there. Okay, good. Ben Gretch. How we doing? You must be excited. I'm excited. This is right up your alley. It's stats day. Yeah, this is an exciting day.
Starting point is 00:01:03 And Heath, the luckiest man in the world, Heath Cummings. You know, there's been a lot of talk on social media about how lucky I got to get a full house. I thought that Dave said it was like 65-35 when we went all in. I don't think a 35% shot hitting is luck. No, but you need a little bit of it if you're an underdog sure but like we're acting as if he's oh he's won because he got lucky right it's not like i had uh a pair of kings and you had a pair of aces and i hit a king on the flop and then you made an ace
Starting point is 00:01:38 it's not like we're talking about one hand here yeah we're not just talking about one hand every time anyone made a move against you you would hit something i know when i went out i i was confident you didn't have anything but i had to act before you on the river and you had hit an ace on the river and had nothing up to that point do you know you know it's interesting because the thing that i thought about and you guys are right i had great cards and i forgot how much fun it is um like poker can be a maddening game if you play for two, three, four hours and don't get any cards at all. I forgot how much fun it is when the cards
Starting point is 00:02:12 just keep coming to you. But isn't it interesting that we played for an hour and there was never a time where someone made a big move and someone else was there. What do you mean? There was never a, ooh, Adam and Ben are all in. Dave and Adam are up. Yeah, you knocked out every person.
Starting point is 00:02:33 Every single time that someone made a move, there was one guy standing there. Yeah, it was like, I went all in with three of a kind, and you got a flush on the river. You just did this to everyone. And congratulations is what I'm saying. saying we played poker last it's not really what i'm saying but i'll say it anyway um we played poker last night on twitch i hope you were there for that twitch.com slash ff today we will be doing that again and obviously uh well we taught fantasy
Starting point is 00:02:58 football we talked regular football we just hung out it was really fun it was the most fun thing i've done uh quarantine. That might actually be true. So enough about that. Let's move on to today's topic. I've got a couple of emails to read. We have a Dynasty slash regular mailbag, but a lot of Dynasty questions that we're going to read on our next show, which we're recording on Thursday late evening. You might hear it Thursday night. You might hear it Friday. But for now, let's talk about your favorite advanced stat, if you have one. Ben Gretch, what is numero uno, your favorite?
Starting point is 00:03:30 Absolute favorite one. It depends how you define advanced and we're obviously going to be looking at some of the not like extremely complex ones and I think Ariards fits there and that's probably my favorite and we'll get into why later. But I really like the way you can incorporate um air yards into your your thoughts of targets and volume for
Starting point is 00:03:51 receivers and tight ends okay heath you know it's interesting because i have kind of a love hate relationship with a lot of the uh stats we're going to talk about. What really frustrates me is numbers that tell us what happened but don't necessarily help us next week or next year. I'll say my favorite, and it's not necessarily advanced, but I'll say my favorite is market share, either of targets or air yards or carries inside a certain range. That's kind of where i start with building a lot of my projections um so that's where i'll go and dave ypc for life baby really i can't steal adam's
Starting point is 00:04:36 favorite advanced stat well i was just i was beating him to the punch and no that's it's not my favorite advanced stat and it's also not an advanced stat. I'm learning to love yards per route run. I think that's a good way to measure efficiency among pass catchers. You can use it for running backs as well, the ones that catch a lot of passes anyway. And I think that helps paint a good picture of how effective a player can be, regardless of what his target share is. And just for the record, I agree 100% with Heath. A lot of the data that we're going to talk about, it sounds great,
Starting point is 00:05:16 but making it applicable toward the future, there's just no surefire way to guarantee that it'll be that way. I just think it's a great way to illustrate how a player has been. And if you see that he's got a high yards per route run over his career, it probably means he's a very efficient player and you should expect him to be. It's just another reason to maybe it's a tiebreaker. You'll take a player that's got a good yards per route run average over one that maybe did it for one year or had a great year but didn't have a good average in that category heath how would you compare this discussion in baseball compared to football people rely
Starting point is 00:05:52 very heavily on advanced stats with fantasy baseball analysis um i guess i would say that baseball is like 20 years ahead of football in terms of coming up with and applying advanced stats but it is easier to find an edge in football because we're at the point to where everyone's already doing it in baseball gotcha by the way the top you know why it's 20 years ahead um well the fantasy baseball was probably 20 years before fantasy football started well sure there's there's that but also the there's more reliable data in baseball there's these guys are playing 10 times as many games as football players sure yes and and in baseball it's just sets up better you have a pitcher against a hitter right and there's there's a one-on-one matchup and i i call it multi-variability or
Starting point is 00:06:51 that's a word that i've used in writing before i don't even know if it's a real word but that you know the way that the offensive line impacts the quarterback's time to throw which impacts his accuracy which impacts the receiver's catch rate i mean all these things are all tied together the defense they were playing how good the pass rush was. That all is going to impact football stats. Hey, in non-PPR leagues, name the one running back that finished in the top 20 and averaged fewer than four yards per carry.
Starting point is 00:07:19 I thought this was an advanced stat show. And that answer is usually like Melvin Gordon. Fewer than 4.2 yards per carry. He didn't finish top 20. Leonard Fournette. No, wait. You said non-PPR. No, Fournette actually averaged 4.3 yards per carry. Le'Veon Bell, right? No, he was 21st.
Starting point is 00:07:37 No, he didn't finish top 20. He was 21st. It's Todd Gurley. Yeah, touchdowns. Yeah, Todd Gurley. Yeah, touchdowns. Yeah, Todd Gurley. All right. Before we get into some more stats, what they mean and how you can use them, let's read a few emails here on Fantasy
Starting point is 00:07:54 Football today. Your email is at fantasyfootball at cbsi.com. This comes from Dan in a small town south of Cincinnati and north of Knoxville. Louisville's probably too big. But that's what we're going with. He's from Louisville. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:08:08 Okay, he's in a small town in Louisville. A suburb, if you will. Langley, Frohike, and Byers. I've never heard of this. This is the lone gunman. The lone gunman. Never heard of it. I'm in an auction league where you start a quarterback,
Starting point is 00:08:24 a running back, a wide quarterback, a running back, a wide receiver, a running back slash wide receiver, a wide receiver slash tight end, a tight end, a defense and a kicker.
Starting point is 00:08:34 It's pretty, it's a little different. With quarterbacks so deep, do you think it would be wise to focus just about all of your resources on running backs and wide receivers
Starting point is 00:08:41 and wait on a quarterback even if you have to settle for the 15th ranked one or worse. This is the crux of the question here. How far down on the quarterback totem pole would you be willing to go for your starter? Gardner Minshew? Yeah, I was waiting for Heath. You know that.
Starting point is 00:08:59 Because the nice thing is, he is, in my opinion, right around 15th but he's being drafted as like the 26th quarterback off the board so it doesn't matter how many quarterbacks everyone takes gardner will still be there in the last round yeah i don't think people realize you can literally wait until the last round to take a quarterback i know that sounds aggressive but i mean and you don't have to and i don't typically wait till the very last round, but there are other options too. Tyrod Taylor, if he starts for the Chargers will be very good in fantasy while he's starting. He's a good guy to get you started in the year and you can use him as a bridge and find a new quarterback. If Herbert takes over, you can find guys at the very end of drafts. And that's, that's what you're basically doing. If you're waiting until the
Starting point is 00:09:41 end of your draft is you're taking a quarterback that means nothing to you. You're not going to feel bad about cutting him if he plays bad the first couple of weeks of the season. You'll say, oh, I took him with my 14th round pick. Who cares? And then you just move on to somebody else. There's also the idea of trying to find the next Lamar Jackson or the next Patrick Mahomes with your late round picks and drafting two of them. And you can use one as your starter and one as a guy to speculate on. And then you move on from there. Thank you for the email, Dan. By the way, if you haven't joined our Facebook group, please do so.
Starting point is 00:10:12 Search Fantasy Football Today on Facebook or click on the link in the description. Chat with the FFT team and other fantasy fans. You can ask us keeper questions. You can join a new dynasty league. You can discuss draft strategies, whatever. We've got plenty of discussions and just a good way to interact with other listeners. Our Facebook group, again,
Starting point is 00:10:30 Fantasy Football Today on Facebook. And we've got a mailbag later this week, so send your questions in via Apple Podcast Review. We'll answer every single one of those. We'll also answer your straight-up emails. FantasyFootball at CBSi.com. So let's get into advanced stats now and start with some running back stats.
Starting point is 00:10:47 Ben, what is our first running back stat? It's trap. I have trap and high value touches. Yes, I didn't send those to you. Our stat that I came up with last year, but essentially just broadly for running backs, it's an opportunity driven position. So snaps matter and certain types of weighted touches.
Starting point is 00:11:05 There's different ways to look at it. And this is one way to look at it, but there's a lot of ways you could quantify it. Okay. So do you want to just give a brief definition? What we'll do is we'll give a brief definition of every stat, and then we'll talk about the players that you need to know for the stat. Right. So when I say weighted weighted touches i'm talking about looking at the the specific touches because it is an opportunity driven position the specific touches that that lead to more fantasy points and the way that i define high value touches are receptions plus rush attempts inside the 10 yard line um so like close scoring range, because the vast majority of touchdowns are scored in that range. I think it's something like 75% of touchdowns and it's only like 25%
Starting point is 00:11:50 of rush attempts come in that range. Uh, so everything outside the 10 yard line, there are still obviously some long touchdown runs, but, um, it's a much higher proportion of the total rushes and a much lower proportion of the total touchdowns, and you get a lot lower yardage fantasy points because you can't get as many yards per carry as you can get per reception. Plus, in PPR leagues, you get the point for the reception. So you want guys who a lot of their touches are receptions and are in scoring range.
Starting point is 00:12:20 Those are what lead to fantasy upside at running back. Who's good in regard to this statistic, and who's bad and who's average? Christian McCaffrey was very good last year. Even considering that he had a ton of touches, a really high percentage of his touches were receptions and scoring range. Austin Eckler is a guy who's an example of one who didn't have as many raw total touches,
Starting point is 00:12:48 but had that really great combination of receptions and scoring opportunities. On the bad side, you have guys like Josh Jacobs, Derrick Henry, who just a very low percentage of their touches were either receptions or in scoring range. Both of those guys had a decent number of scoring opportunities, but just so few receptions that that's where we start to worry about their potential upside. Any follow-ups, guys? I wonder, when you're talking about this, you're weighing not weighting at all, correct? Like a reception is worth the same as a carry inside the 10-yard line? Right, yeah. And it's not, but that's like a simplified way of looking at it yes right right i i just not just kind of thinking in a different way like
Starting point is 00:13:32 the guy maybe two guys but i think we can mostly agree that mark ingram was flukier last year than derrick henry was yep um but like the guy that would have kind of uh wrecked that last year was derrick henry and we expect him to regress but he did that partially on the fact that he had a lot of touches inside the 10 yard line right not a ton he did have a lot um but he also had a lot of long touchdowns yeah and he just had a lot of raw carries and even though they're they're worth less like this is a way of looking at a player's total touches which is really what a lot of fantasy players are looking at so it's a way that you can break down their total touches and say okay maybe austin eckler's undervalued uh he's not really in 2020 but he certainly was in 2019
Starting point is 00:14:21 he's someone i highlighted in the trap article last year. Maybe he's undervalued because people are thinking he's only in a bit role and can't see a ton of touches. But even going into last year, he had a role that was high reception role and the chargers use their backs in scoring range at a high, at high rate. So he was somebody who looked like if he can get a few more touches, he could have a really high upside.
Starting point is 00:14:42 And that's what we saw when Gordon was holding out. I love to know what you guys think of this. Another advanced stat. Not at all. But carries inside the five-yard line and efficiency there. Nick Chubb had 15 carries for negative 14 yards inside the five-yard line. That feels like a typo. But he did have 79% of his team's carries inside
Starting point is 00:15:07 the five which is awesome uh whereas mark ingram only had 53.6 of his team's carries inside the five because of lamar jackson you know largely um melvin gordon had 62 of his team's carries inside the five you'd have to break that down between the 12 games he played in the four games he missed with eckler and whatnot but i know like Kareem Hunt did not get any goal line work, but it doesn't seem like Nick Chubb was very good near the goal line. And what would it do to his fantasy production if 79% of the carries inside the five becomes 60% of the carries inside the five? Is that something?
Starting point is 00:15:41 It wouldn't be good. Do you look at that? It obviously wouldn't be good. It means somebody else would get them. You can't look at the yardage that a running back gets inside the five. There's nowhere for them to go. Well, that's like shockingly bad, though. It is.
Starting point is 00:15:53 It is, but Dave's point is accurate. Any carry inside the five, the absolute most you can get is five yards. So all it takes is a couple big losses, and you're going to have a cumulative negative point. Like you must be a god if you're averaging two yards per carry inside the five that would be ridiculous i think the number that stands out more is that he had 15 carries inside the five and he only had two touchdowns yeah that stands out to me yeah because that means he had 15 carries where he could have potentially scored he only did it twice compare that that with somebody like Dalvin Cook, who had 15 carries inside the five. He scored nine times.
Starting point is 00:16:28 Zeke had 12 carries inside the five. He scored nine times. That's something that might worry me about Chubb. It might make me want to go back and review those 15 carries to see how much of it was him. Was he dancing in the backfield a lot, or was his offensive line failing and he just got pulverized the second he got the football i'd also say like the problem for me with that is you are talking about like something that has happened less than once per game and so if he had a really weird play where it was fourth and goal and he bounced back and bounced
Starting point is 00:17:04 back and kept fighting and lost 11 yards on the play then that's going to just alter the entire season it's such a small sample size and it's i don't i like if you told me over a two or three year sample that this guy gets into the end zone at a rate half as low as the rest of the league, I might start to believe he was bad in short yardage, but 15 times over one season, the only way it would matter is if it mattered to the coach. I'm starting to doubt these numbers as I look at the game log here. I just feel like it might be an error,
Starting point is 00:17:39 but Christian McCaffrey had 17 carries. With Chubb, I see he had three carries, two carries inside the five, three carries inside the five where he lost at least four yards last year. Yeah, so there's your number. Getting back to actual advanced stats. I think this is an interesting one, Azar, that you brought up. But I think especially when you talk about percentage of team carries inside the five, my immediate thought is how many team carries did the team have inside the five?
Starting point is 00:18:11 Because that's going to be a better barometer than a percentage. Anytime we're going to get into percentage of team volume, we need to also consider the team volume. And this is specifically one where good teams are going to be inside the five way, way more often than bad teams. Well, Christian McCaffrey is your leader with carries inside the five yard line on a terrible team. Um, but yeah,
Starting point is 00:18:33 all the names I gave and all the percentages I gave were players who had a similar amount of carries in that range. Are there any other running backs you want to talk about here? Should we move on to wide receivers? I know it's a little more interesting with wide receivers and a dot and things like that. The only other thing i would offer just because we're doing advanced stats 101 is a lot of people like to talk about um you know force missed tackles and tackles evaded and a lot of these types of stats um i from what
Starting point is 00:18:58 i have learned and seen those don't have very strong predictive abilities similar to what he was saying at the top running back ultimately is an opportunity driven position so it's great to look at a descriptive stat like that and say this guy's really good at say forcing missed tackles but that might also be a way of saying that he doesn't evade tackles or this guy's really good at evading tackles but that might also be a way of saying that you know once they bring an extra guy in the box he's not going to be able to break tackles. And there's a reason that those stats don't necessarily correlate with fantasy scoring because it also works in conjunction with blocking and everything else.
Starting point is 00:19:32 So don't get too bogged down with running back advanced stats like that, that try to quantify running back skill. I'm not saying running backs don't matter, but it the opportunity side is way more predictive for fantasy success. All right. Ready for wide receivers? Yeah. All right. Wide receivers, ADOT. So what is ADOT? Lowercase A, capital dot. Yeah. So ADOT is the average depth of a target. And I think the simplest way to think about this is if you have a player who
Starting point is 00:20:05 caught a 40-yard pass, the yards after catch element to me is always pretty intuitive. So let's say he had 15 yards after the catch. The depth of the throw is just essentially yards before catch. So it's a 40-yard play and he had 15 yards after the catch, he caught it 25 yards down the field. That is the depth of the target. but when we talk about air yards and a dot which are the same thing it's just that air yards is a cumulative total and a dot is per target um what we're talking about is not just plays that were completed the yards before the catch but also plays that were incompleted so it's similar to targets in that sense where um you know receptions would be also plays that were incompleted. So it's similar to targets in that sense, where, you know, receptions would be just plays that are completed. Targets are all plays that are completed and not completed. And that gives us an opportunity, a measure of opportunity,
Starting point is 00:20:55 how many times the ball is thrown to a player. And so air yards is a measure of all of the times a ball was thrown to a guy, how far downfield it was all added together. And ADOT is the average depth of all of those throws. And so you can wind up with different profiles, higher ADOT, but lower targets could be the same amount of total air yards as a guy with a lower ADOT and more targets. And those stats interact with each other.
Starting point is 00:21:22 You're basically finding out how far down the field they're running their routes. Right. I mean, a simple way to translate it into fantasy success is this is the, the potential receiving yards a player could have. And you like,
Starting point is 00:21:34 whereas targets is the potential catches how many balls he could catch. How many times the balls been thrown to him? If he caught everyone, how many balls he could catch. This is the potential receiving yards. Okay. every one how many balls he could catch this is the potential receiving yards okay but is air yards a better stat than a dot for the potential for receiving yards it depends on what you're looking at so air yards yes but there are other elements to this the further a ball is thrown downfield the lower the catch probability is right so balls near the line of scrimmage
Starting point is 00:22:05 are going to be caught at a much higher rate. We've seen running backs have a lot higher catch rates than wide receivers, just to simplify that. And especially deep threat wide receivers are going to have low catch rates. So if you have two guys that have 1,000 air yards, that's notable. But targets are still more important than air yards.
Starting point is 00:22:21 They're about twice as important as air yards. And so if you have two guys that have 1 thousand air yards and one had a hundred targets at a 10 average depth of target, that's how we got to a thousand air yards. And another one had like 67 targets at a 15 average depth of target. You want the guy who had a hundred targets over the guy who had 67 targets, even though the 15 average depth of target is higher, if that makes sense. So all else being equal, we still want more targets. But when you start looking at guys who have the same number of targets, you definitely
Starting point is 00:22:51 want the guy who has more air yards at that point. I noticed something today, and I think that a lot of people still probably spend a lot of their football research time on pro football reference. And they have added some advanced stats to their quarterback, running back wide receiver pages. They actually have yards before completion. So they're not fact. It's not average depth of target. It's more like average depth of reception.
Starting point is 00:23:26 Adore. Like when people are looking at that bin it's still useful what yeah it's still useful but like what do they need to know in comparing those two numbers like what what's the i guess the downside of just using yards before completion or how would you view it differently than you would average depth of target i would so that um is useful the the average depth of target in air yards are volume stats like targets again they're they're a measure of what could have happened if the player had good efficiency and we just went over regression so it's a good time to be talking about this um it shows what the the available opportunity was for the player, right? The yards before completion doesn't show that because it's not showing any incompletions.
Starting point is 00:24:12 We don't have anything to regress it to. It's more just for reference. But I do think it's useful in the sense that particularly another element of this is yards after the catch is a pretty – it's not very sticky year to year it's not very stable it doesn't like yards after the catch is something that players can have a couple big yards after the catch plays a good example is hunter renfro a lot of people are really excited about hunter renfro i think hunter renfro could be a good player but he had multiple catch and run
Starting point is 00:24:40 slants that were like 60 yard touchdowns last year. And they accounted for a really high percentage of his total receiving yards. And it boosted every element of his, you know, efficiency and everything you look at. And it's mostly all just yards after the catch. If you go look at Hunter Renfro's yards before the catch, I'm sure it's very low. And, and then that gives us a pretty good indication. Okay. Hunter Renfro probably is not going to be a really high yards per target guy
Starting point is 00:25:03 because he's actually catching the ball at a pretty low depth, right? Okay. So before we get into the players that are good, bad, and average at ADOT air yards, two questions. One, does a high ADOT usually correlate to a player that's better in non-PPR than full PPR, like Kenny Galladay and Mike Evans and stuff like that, right? Yep. And then conversely, a guy, I'm assuming Julian Edelman has a pretty low A-dot and all those PPR stats. And two, why should I care?
Starting point is 00:25:42 Sum it up in one or two sentences. Why should I care about these stats for fantasy? I think the easiest way would be, as long as you care about targets, you should care about air yards because it adds more to the puzzle. So targets are predictive of future fantasy success, even more predictive than just receptions
Starting point is 00:26:02 because efficiency regresses. All right, let's get into the players then. Well, let me just add to that. Targets are more efficient or more predictive. Air yards aren't as predictive as targets, but targets and air yards together are more predictive than just targets. Okay.
Starting point is 00:26:19 So yeah, let's get into the players, the ones you want to talk about for fantasy purposes. Who's good? I don't even, like, it's not even good., the ones you want to talk about for fantasy purposes. Who's good? I don't even... Like, it's not even good. It's not like... Is it? I mean, that's not really the right terminology for this, I feel.
Starting point is 00:26:31 Yeah, especially when we're talking about these stats. It's more the different profiles and what they mean. Okay, so highlight some players for us. Yeah, so like low ADOT players, you mentioned Julian Edelmanelman michael thomas cooper cup are guys that qualify as low a dot guys i talked about the yards after the catch thing the one thing about yards after the catch that is pretty stable is throws closer to the line of scrimmage lead to more yards after the catch so bubble screens are going to be not a
Starting point is 00:27:00 lot of yards to completion that's that that heath was talking about but a lot of yards after completion uh or even shallow crosses or quick outs are going to typically lead to more yards after the catch uh than downfield plays like deep crosses a lot of times the players are just hit by a safety after they catch the ball so a lower a lower a dot player they're going to tend to have a couple of things they're going to have a higher catch rate naturally they're going to have typically some some higher yards after the catch. And that is something that we could expect to be more stable as far as yards after the catch goes, because most lower,
Starting point is 00:27:35 lower depth passes lead to more yards after the catch. And so that's Michael Thompson's Cooper cup. That's Julian Edelman. Then you have the higher ADOT guys. They're going to have lower catch rates. They're not going to catch as many passes and you're going to see big spikes in their efficiency. Even over the course of a season, we're talking about small sample sizes when they just had a better year in terms of catching a lot of deep targets. had really high efficiency except for one year where he um was much worse with jamis winston and uh he just comes to mind because i remember that year he only had i think two plays of more than 40 yards and almost every other year in his career he's had at least like eight in that season and that just tanked his overall efficiency just the rate of deep balls that he hit on over the course of 16 games has a has a big impact So those players are going to be more boom or bust. And those types are Galladay, Evans, Devontae Parker,
Starting point is 00:28:30 Odell Beckham last year when he went to Cleveland, he went up to a career high in average depth of target and was much more of a downfield threat. And he wasn't very efficient. We could see some of that bounce back. Right. And you could just remember the times in New York where he would take a slant
Starting point is 00:28:46 pattern it's the only thing eli manning knew how to throw and break a tackle and take it to the house um and it's interesting i mean is he better suited to be less of a downfield guy i i don't know that we know the answer to that yet last year was such a mess but that's kind of interesting for odell beckham uh dave what's your reaction to some of this i think it tells you who these players are you can use it before you draft like who these players are and the ones that get the high target like these are all opportunity data points right players who get a lot of targets and you see them getting a bunch of targets year after year maybe in in the second half of the season, and you buy into that. Devontae Parker, as an example.
Starting point is 00:29:27 Maybe there are going to be people that buy into Devontae Parker because he had such a high target share to end the season, and he had a lot of air yards. So you know that he was getting thrown the ball a lot, and many of the times he was thrown the ball, it was particularly downfield. Now, is that going to change because Preston Williams makes a speedy recovery back from the ACL surgery or, you know, Albert Wilson becomes a thing. Mike Kosicki becomes a thing. It's possible. But it measures opportunity. And I would say area arts can also measure explosive plays. And that's where you can pick up gobs of fantasy numbers. If you've got a receiver that's going to get, you know, two deep throws a game or they're going to play from behind and then they start getting two or three or four per game.
Starting point is 00:30:08 Those are points that can rack up pretty quickly. All right, Heath, I'm going to throw it to you. Well, I have a follow-up question, but if you want to just give your overall thoughts on this discussion, some players that come to mind that you think that you've looked at ADOT or air yards and made some fantasy decisions
Starting point is 00:30:24 based on. Well, I think like you, Mitt, asked, are these high ADOT guys better for non-PPR? I might go even another step. Like if you are somebody that likes to play best ball, those high ADOT guys can be very boom or bust on a week-to-week basis. Ben mentioned to Sean Jackson, like we had a stretch with brandon cooks where for three or four years he was consistently a top
Starting point is 00:30:53 12 guy every year but on a week-to-week basis you had no idea what he was going to be so those guys can be a little bit more frustrating in your lineup um one of the things that i think is interesting is like looking at their average depth of target in combination with their yak and like player like i was just looking today actually i didn't even know how rare this was and the reason i brought up the yards before catch is because i was on darren waller somebody i've struggled with uh projecting just every time i look at the raiders projections page i changed darren waller's projection in one direction or another and last year he was like at 6.4 or something yards before the catch and 6.3 yards after the catch and i didn't really know what that meant for tight
Starting point is 00:31:46 ends so i went and looked at evan ingram who i think of as like one of the more athletic tight ends that is used more downfield evan ingram has been below five yards before before the catch each of the past two years he had one year where he was like eight yards after the catch last year he was like four and a half and so i think you're probably like if you're wanting to bank on one of these year over year a player unless your name's stefan diggs a player's role and where they're targeted is less likely to change than what they do after the catch especially if what they do after the catch, especially if what they do after the catch looks spectacular or really terrible. Okay.
Starting point is 00:32:28 Can we use... I don't know if Dan agrees with all that. I agree with all that. Can we use this data to identify sleepers, breakouts, or busts? Yeah. I mean, so that's like one of the most applicable ways. And unfortunately, the example that's coming to my mind right now is not going to be as applicable but curtis samuel was the only player last year that had at least a thousand
Starting point is 00:32:49 air yards and didn't have um or excuse me not not at least a thousand air yards he was the only player that was in the top 15 in air yards for the season total air yards that didn't have at least a thousand receiving yards and he only had 623 so that's an example of a guy who i just used the the one season for deshaun jackson where he didn't hit on a lot of a lot of deep throws he was running a lot of deep routes he was seeing a lot of deep targets but kyle allen was very poor throwing the ball down the field that's the type of guy but now that they've added robbie anderson they've changed their offense it maybe isn't as applicable but that's a guy that early in the offseason i was looking at as he is going to regress positively and catch more downfield passes you don't have
Starting point is 00:33:29 this type of downfield volume uh year over year and be as um as inefficient as he was he was so far from the rest of the players that were similar to him in air yards so that's kind of how you use it when there's these big outliers and big examples of guys that are either extremely efficient or extremely inefficient. But that didn't really work, though, with Curtis Samuel. concussions or someone that we already knew had established themselves as a good NFL wide receiver, you could feel a lot more comfortable that they're going to get the same opportunity next year. The problem is if someone's extremely inefficient, even if maybe if it's not their fault, that could lead to a role change or just not getting those types of targets anymore because it didn't work out last year. Yep. That's a great point. And we can transition over to tight ends here too,
Starting point is 00:34:26 because a better example would be Mike Gusecki, who we just kind of touched on. Mike Gusecki had a really high average depth of target. He had a ton of air yards. He was fourth among all tight ends last year. He led tight ends from week four on. So the first couple of games he wasn't as involved, but he was used way down the field.
Starting point is 00:34:42 He lined up in the slot. And part of the reason this worked out this way field he lined up in the slot and part of the reason this worked out this way is he lined up in the slot about three times as much as he lined up as a traditional tight end so this is a one stat for us to look at the types of tight ends that are used actually out in routes and down the field which is what we want to target in fantasy right like we want to know which tight ends are more receivers because it can go either way they can be blockers or they can be receivers but he makes a good point. With a player like Kosicki who's not established,
Starting point is 00:35:08 it could impact his volume. I think Kosicki's numbers across the board in terms of his opportunity are so strong that he's probably my favorite late round tight end almost exclusively because of this, because of how he's used, because he's used down the field more like a receiver than a tight end.
Starting point is 00:35:24 And because you're in a ton of routes, he was also um i believe he was third in the league in in routes run last year among all tight ends if a player has more receiving yards than air yards how should that be interpreted does that happen it does when they're low ADOT guys. That would be an example. It has to be interpreted in relation to their ADOT. A guy who has an average up to target of five yards per throw is not catching a lot of balls on the field.
Starting point is 00:35:56 He probably is racking up a lot of yards after the catch. At that point, you can end up with a lot more receiving yards than air yards. Is it possible that Michael Thomas did that last year? He probably did. I'm looking at Darren Waller. I'm yards than air yards. Is it possible that Michael Thomas did that last year? I think he probably did. Well, I'm looking at Darren Waller. I'm just on airyards.com. 1,145 receiving yards, 856 air yards.
Starting point is 00:36:14 That's a huge difference. Yeah. So you do have to control for where his throws were, the depth of his throws, which Waller's ADOT was pretty low. But I agree with the point you're making. I think his yards after the catch, that's an example of a guy that probably won't be as high next year. I have no idea what I'm saying. So thank you for making it for me. I appreciate that.
Starting point is 00:36:38 Do you like to look at the correlation between the quarterback and the receivers, tight ends and air yards? Like for example, Dak Prescott, second in the NFL and air yards behind Jameis Winston, Michael Gallup and Amari Cooper were basically the same air yards, a dot very, very similar. Um, does that mean that they had the same role, you know? Uh, and I know like for Ben, you love Matthew Stafford cause he threw the ball so the air so much his air yards went way up. If he had played 16 games at his pace,
Starting point is 00:37:09 he would have been second in the NFL in air yards ahead of Dak Prescott. And then Kenny Galladay is obviously one of the leaders there. So, I mean, does that make Galladay a great fit? I think of Darius Slayton and Daniel Jones being a good fit because Slayton blew everyone on the Giants away in, I probably could have said that better in air yards. Um, but yeah,
Starting point is 00:37:27 like is the quarterback receiver correlation is Dave. I'll throw to you. Is that important? Well, of course it's important. I don't know if, I guess you could probably find the proper data to make that correlation come true.
Starting point is 00:37:43 But I mean, you could also just say a good pass catcher needs a good quarterback not that it has to be that way because we've seen it before where you know brandon lloyd's catching passes from what kyle orton was that the same year am i not making that up so there are definitely times where receivers can overcome iffy quarterback play but most of the time that there's a connection between good capable quarterback who can get the ball there's receiver receiver who gets a lot of volume and a lot of air yards and can put together good numbers
Starting point is 00:38:14 okay fair enough let's talk about more players um that could be you know we had some good discussions about certain players but in terms of tight ends, Mike, a sticky for Ben Heath, is there a, a, a tight end that there's a stat that you particularly like or dislike about a player? Or did you already go through that? Like,
Starting point is 00:38:36 no, like I would have said, I would have said Waller because I don't think like, yeah, he averaged six yards after the catch 6.4 yards before reception. I don't think is actually that bad for a tight end. Like it's not good, but it's not particularly bad. And I do think like his, the way he performed on a per target basis is part of the reason that I struggle with taking away a bunch of targets from him just because he was
Starting point is 00:39:05 really good with the opportunity that he was given. Doesn't that data also tell you how the Raiders kind of operate? Not kind of, it's really how they operate. They don't let Derek Carr throw downfield very often. So he's going to get a lot of short targets that are inside of 10 yards. Yeah. I don't know if it's the only one because they keep saying they want him to, I think it's that they don't. Derek he's not the only one because they keep saying they want him to i think it's that but they don't ours brain doesn't let him yeah maybe so these things obviously work in conjunction with each other how far downfield the quarterback throws and
Starting point is 00:39:33 and the receivers the one side of it that is more predictive is the receiver side so josh hermsmeyer is the guy who did a lot of the groundbreaking work on air yards. And he likes to say that the receiver owns their own average depth of target. And the quarterback kind of adjusts. And that's one of the reasons, for instance, you brought up Stafford that I like Stafford, because for several years after Calvin Johnson retired, his top targets were Golden Tate and Theo Riddick, who were underneath guys.
Starting point is 00:40:00 And those are the guys that were getting open. He was throwing to you and that's how their offense was run. Now they're Kenny Galladay and Marvin Jones, and those are high a dot guys. Those are guys that get down the field and their offense is running a little bit differently. They have a different coordinator now. Um, so I actually think that Stafford's changed to more of a downfield passer will stick this year. Let's talk about routes run Ben for tight ends specifically. How important is this stat and who are the players that stand out good and bad yeah so routes run when you talk about you know what to look at for
Starting point is 00:40:32 different stats and people who maybe read my stealing signals column last year i would look at snaps a lot and snaps a matter a ton for running backs and receivers especially for running backs you just want guys that are on the field a lot um you know christian mccaffrey had the highest snapshot of any running back last year that's helpful. It's not the only reason he was good, but it's very, very helpful. And receivers don't typically block a lot. So snaps matter for them too, just because most receivers, their routes and their snaps tend to be very correlated. For tight ends, it's not the same case. For tight ends, snaps aren't very great because there are plenty of tight ends who are in and blocking on passing downs.
Starting point is 00:41:06 And so you really want to focus more on the route side of the equation. And there's, so like Dave mentioned, the stat yards per route run. I really like yards per route run as well. It's a very good stat. But the difference between yards per route run and yards per target is simply how many targets a player gets for every route they run which is actually an opportunity metric right it's so and i'll give you some some great examples of different profiles so first let's start with george kittle kittle plays a lot of
Starting point is 00:41:35 snaps but he blocks a lot so he doesn't actually run as many routes as some of the league leaders mark andrews doesn't play a lot of, but he runs a ton of routes when he plays, and Kittle and Andrews are very similar from the route point on. They both run similar numbers of routes, and they're very efficient on those routes. They see a lot of targets per route, and they have really high yards per outrun. They were the top two tight ends in the league last year in yards per outrun. They're also the top two tight ends in the league in targets per route run. Then you look at a guy like OJ Howard, who isn't as relevant to 2020 now that Robert Gronkowski is there, but he's a really good example of a player that was very efficient per target and has been very efficient.
Starting point is 00:42:16 And I mentioned this on Twitter a couple, maybe a month or so ago, and kind of got hammered because people are like, you're looking at yards per target still, you're crazy. And there are plenty of people who are aware that yards per target isn't necessarily telling the whole story. But as far as OJ Howard's concerned, his yards per route run are not good, but that's because he's not seeing a lot of targets per route run for whatever reason. And I think targets are a measure of skill. And for guys like Kittle and Andrews, they're seeing a lot of targets per route run in part because they're very good at getting open. Also in part because their offenses rely on deception and scheme them open. And that helps them maintain also high yards per route run because whenever they're out there, they're getting a lot of balls thrown their way too. with it but there's there's different profiles for different players right and there's different things but like the oj howard example the reason to like him and the reason i still like him in dynasty as a guy who might have a later career breakout maybe like an eric ebron maybe it'll take till he gets to a second team but he's a guy that when the ball is thrown his way and whatever
Starting point is 00:43:17 the reason he's never had a lot of targets per outrun but when it's thrown his way he's very good with the pass when it comes to him that doesn't mean yards per target is better than yards per out run but it does mean that there's an element to his profile that shows that he's got great ball skills he's tough to tackle and he can be successful if for some reason in a different situation he can get more targets uh you know per route run or or while he's out there right but maybe he thinks of getting open. And that very well might be, right? But there's a difference, I think, between OJ Howard's yards per route run
Starting point is 00:43:52 and another player who might be in that range who has a pretty normal rate of targets per route run but isn't very efficient with the targets he gets, right? So we can see some upside there because OJ Howard has the ability to be very efficient on the targets that he does see it's just a matter of we have to parse whether he's just not good at getting open and this isn't you know maybe an example we could go back to today's point where you go back and you look at the film and you're trying to figure it out
Starting point is 00:44:20 maybe he's just not good at getting open or maybe Tampa Bay is just not really using their tight end. We don't know. Okay. So when you say that Kittle and Andrews are really good per route run, should I interpret that as, Hey, if those teams start throwing more, I mean, they could just have huge years or do you suspect that they are so efficient because the teams were, you know, the fewer, the less you know, the fewer, the less you throw, the easier it is to have kind of outlier numbers, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:44:49 What efficiency go down, but okay. So let me get my first question. I think it's more relevant. The, what you said about Kittle and Andrews being so efficient per route run. Should I interpret that as, well,
Starting point is 00:44:58 Lamar Jackson's going to have to throw the ball more this year and we expect them to, that means Mark Andrew might blow up. Yeah, I think he could but i also think in that scenario like part of why they have such high yards per out run again goes back to them getting a really high rate of targets per routes run if andrews is out there every play running routes on every play i'm not sure that that rate would be as high that he would continue
Starting point is 00:45:20 to see as many targets and it's it really is just that opportunity side that he would continue to see as many targets. And it really is just that opportunity side that he's seeing more targets per route, which is helping him get more yards per route, right? I don't think he can maintain that without the really high targets per route. And I think it's also like any type of efficiency statistic, the more opportunities you get,
Starting point is 00:45:42 the closer it's, like it's not going to become average at some point, but the closer it's going to get to normal or average. So if somebody does something on 100 targets and we think he's going to get 140 next year, we should expect he's going to be less efficient on 140 targets than he was on 100. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:46:00 Unless he's Michael Thomas. Right? And he gets 190 targets. Right. Okay. So let me be a jerk. I guess I do that sometimes. Do I really need all this?
Starting point is 00:46:16 I mean, can I just kind of figure all this out just looking at conventional stats, yards per catch, fantasy finish, fantasy points? Can I just kind of guess how many targets the guy's gonna get based on who's on his team how much they're gonna throw and you know i mean i feel like i can evaluate mark andrews so you know he's really good and he's as they throw more he led the team in targets he led the team in red zone targets he led the team in targets inside the 10 yard line
Starting point is 00:46:39 um i could see brown eating into that but they are gonna throw more and i assume jackson will throw for more yards. Yeah, Mark Andrews is going to be awesome. You know, Kittle, I don't need advanced stats to know George Kittle's awesome. But, you know, I'm just being devil's advocate here. Why do I need this stuff? I'm going to surprise you here and say absolutely yes.
Starting point is 00:46:57 Like, a big reason I want to talk about these things, I reference them with some players, but a big reason I just wanted to break down the difference between yards per outrun and yards per target is when I did mention OJ Howard on Twitter, I got hammered. And most everybody was saying, you got to look at yards per outrun. He's way worse at yards per outrun. But the only difference is that opportunity metric that's built into yards per outrun, which is targets per route run. And ultimately the point I'm trying to make with this OJ Howard example, and to answer your question better is there are so many football stats and
Starting point is 00:47:33 none of them is perfect. And there we're in a, there's a lot of fantasy football advice out there. We're in an atmosphere now where people will throw out any kind of set you want. I go back to the running backs the tackles evaded or elusiveness that stuff is not predictive of fantasy production and similarly there are so many ways to misuse uh things like yards per outrun even which is a very good stat if you understand it at uh identifying what the player. But I was using these different examples of guys who play higher snap share or lower snap share and higher routes per snap or targets per route. All these
Starting point is 00:48:14 guys have different profiles. You can cut up these stats a million different ways and people do. We're in an industry where there is so much proliferation of these stats as if they are more meaningful than they are. And I actually think that's one of the biggest reasons that we should be discussing this stuff more is to debunk why certain stats don't matter as much as people are kind of saying they do. But yeah, fundamentally, I think in a lot of ways they can do more harm than good. Interesting.
Starting point is 00:48:42 Can I say one way where I think these stats could help people in season? If you see a player getting a lot of air yards and not coming through, that would suggest inefficiency, correct? Yes. So the coaching staff would see something like that and they might say, all right, let's try to get somebody else in here. Now, like the Panthers and Curtis Samuel might be the perfect example of that because last year he just wasn't very good. They might not have had somebody that could even compare to Curtis Samuel on their roster, so they might have been forced to just keep playing him and just dealing with it. is if you've got a guy on your team and they're sporting inefficient numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if you saw their snap share go down,
Starting point is 00:49:29 their target share go down, their playing time shrink, and then they're not good for fantasy anymore. And it could be a blaring red signal telling you to trade them for whatever you can get. The best example of that this year year everything you just said for me is Leonard Fournette Leonard Fournette averaged I think something like 50 targets on a 16 game pace for his first two years and then last year he had 100 targets he was wildly inefficient on those targets he averaged I think like five yards per target I don't know he might have those
Starting point is 00:50:02 numbers in front of him but they went out and they got LaVisca Chenault, who we talked about a lot, I really like, who can do a lot near the line of scrimmage, both as a receiver and he can line up in the backfield and did at Colorado. They also went and got Chris Thompson. There is no way Leonard Fournette, like the team is telling us right there
Starting point is 00:50:19 that they have identified those 100 targets they gave to Leonard Fournette as a problem, not as a good thing. That was not helpful for their team to win football games. There's no way his volume is going to be the same this year. All right, let's take a quick break, actually. We have more thoughts here, but we'll take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about quarterbacks,
Starting point is 00:50:38 wrap up this discussion here, different set of ADOT implications for quarterbacks, CPOE, we'll explain that to you. Yeah, some fun stuff and some team level stuff as well that could be very useful for fantasy. We'll be right back. Kick off an exciting football season with BetMGM, an official sportsbook partner of the National Football League.
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Starting point is 00:52:25 starbucks cpoe for quarterbacks ben what is it so it's completion percentage over expectation which um the nfl.com actually has some uh their next gen stats they have this and some guys that have been really good at it in recent years ryan tannehill was amazing at it last year kirk cousins is this is one of the stats that gets people talking about kirk cousins being a little bit underrated essentially it takes into account the depth that we are talking about and those other factors that will impact um completion percentage i believe the nfl is also takes into account pressure on the play and i think where the throw was so like a throw to the sideline is more difficult to complete than over the middle of the field which is a shorter throw for the quarterback
Starting point is 00:53:09 and then looks at their expected complete derives an expected completion percentage based on where they're throwing their passes and then their actual completion percentage and then you're looking at whether they were more accurate or less accurate than they should have been based on the types of throws that they make. Okay. Do you, is there anyone you want to talk about in regards to this? Does it matter? I think we sort of Tannehill and cousins are guys that did well last year. And it's maybe a positive note. You know,
Starting point is 00:53:37 Josh Allen is somebody that you might expect didn't do great. Even knowing that he throws downfield a lot, he's not a very accurate passer. So it's's it's one that's interesting to dive into i don't know how useful it is uh for predicting fantasy success but it's helpful all right screw it screw quarterbacks whatever we want to talk about team level advanced stats epa what on earth is epa So that's one I put on our list because I feel like we're getting, it's being used a lot in the football world,
Starting point is 00:54:10 even outside, more generally outside of fantasy football, but it's expected points added. On any play, there's an expected points metric. Think actual football, NFL points. Where the down in distances and where the ball is on the field, how far away they are from scoring, how likely they are to score a touchdown or a field goal essentially on that drive based on tons and tons of historical data. And so every play that gets adjusted, they were first and 10, now they're second and 15. Now their EPA on that drive went way down or their ep their expected points on that drive went down and so that play itself the expected points that were added was negative because they lost a bunch of yards and now they're in a worse down and distance situation
Starting point is 00:54:52 and it it um it's used a lot to discuss like the efficiency of the passing game the efficiency of the running game it doesn't have as much of a fancy implication but i do think it's important to understand what it is and really i part of the reason i put on the list i saw a really interesting thread from um man i wish i knew i could credit the correct account but i'm pretty sure it's the cowboy's stats and information account um i can't remember his name but he basically he said for quarterbacks they're the epa uh um correlates really strongly with first down rate and turnovers. Because turnovers, your expected points obviously go way down. And first downs are always going to be good for your expected points on a particular drive.
Starting point is 00:55:40 It's always going to improve things. You're moving the ball down the field. So I think that's an interesting stat in that it has its limitations, but it's also one that's getting referenced a lot in regular football world. Heath, let's talk about pace stats and teams that stand out in pace. I think it's interesting because when you say pace, we're technically talking about how fast a team is getting plays in and how quickly
Starting point is 00:56:05 they go from the last play to the next snap and that's important it doesn't necessarily always correlate with the total number of offensive plays that a team runs in a game or in a season and a lot of that has to do because even if you're running plays really quickly if you're not consistently moving the ball down the field then you're going to have to punt and if your defense can't get off the field then you're going to get destroyed in time of possession and it won't matter that you're running a lot of plays um the patriots now they lost tom brady so that probably won't be the case anymore but they still have a good defense so it might be the Patriots have always been way up there in terms of total number of plays run the Ravens have always I think I said in our email thread they've run over a thousand fifty plays
Starting point is 00:56:53 each of the last five seasons in comparison and Adam Gase offense is generally right around 900 plays his offenses are always towards the bottom of the league in terms of the number of plays that they run in a given season the eagles doug peterson generally way up there in terms of the number of plays they run and it matters because like we're looking at these efficiencies and we know they're going to fall within a certain range like yeah somebody might be a lot more efficient than another but your team running a hundred more plays than another team over a given season is going to be universally good for everyone on that team that has a chunk of the action so like this is the place where i start my projections just to and then go from splitting out the market
Starting point is 00:57:41 share from there i think the one of the things that i've found in the past two years that is kind of new to me and i don't like we don't have enough data on this that i've seen that it's definitely 100 true but it has seemed very very true inexperienced play callers are generally very very slow paced and i like it seems that it's as simple as these guys not being used to getting the play off their sheet and into the quarterback's head and getting the play run as quickly i mean we saw it um with stefanski they they were and and they may just be a slow paced team generally speaking a lot of teams with good defenses like to just kind of milk the clock. And the Ravens aren't like that at all. They aren't particularly quick, but they still always run a ton of plays.
Starting point is 00:58:32 But I do think like if you're looking at teams this year that have inexperienced play callers, guys that haven't done it very much, even if they're talking about wanting to play fast or run a lot of plays, I'd be very skeptical of that. And that takes me in my mind to two places. One is last year in Arizona with Cliff Kingsbury taking charge, and his offense is known for running a ton of plays. And by the second half of the season, I don't think they were quite doing what they wanted to, both in terms of personnel on the field and the amount of plays that they were running per game. And the second one for this year is in Carolina, where Joe Brady, I don't think he's got a lot of experience calling plays, period. He wasn't the full-time coordinator at LSU last year.
Starting point is 00:59:12 He was just working on passing plays. And now he's got to be responsible for getting the plays into Teddy Bridgewater and to running plays quickly. How quick can they possibly do it? And they've got a team with a young and potentially trained recce defense. Yeah, because Arizona last year, I think they were something like 21st in plays run. Right, and that was a team that I was expecting to run a lot of plays.
Starting point is 00:59:36 I think Ben has something on that too. Yeah, so this is one of the ones that's most useful for when we're talking about how can we use it predictably and for the future. So typically the teams that are trying to run quick, essentially their time to snap is lower or higher. Like this is measured. It's measured over at Football Outsiders. Teams that are trying to play quickly and their time to snap is lower. They tend to run more plays, but as Heath noted, if you're not a very good offense, you're not going to sustain drives.
Starting point is 01:00:11 You're not going to run a lot of plays. And this gets into another great team staff team team stat, which is game script. But when you, you talk about teams that are winning game script is, is basically saying who throughout a game, basically the average score of the game throughout each snap of the game, each minute, each second. It depends on how you define it. But teams that are playing from ahead are going to do things a little bit differently than teams that are playing from behind. They're going to run more teams that are playing from behind are going to throw more and teams are playing from ahead are going to play slower and teams are playing from behind. They're going to run more. Teams that are playing from behind are going to throw more. And teams that are playing from ahead are going to play slower. And teams that are playing from behind are going to play faster.
Starting point is 01:00:48 But when we look at pace, mostly we want to look at these neutral situations. Earlier in the game when the score is not out of hand, the Cardinals last year were fourth quickest in the league, even though they ran the 22nd most plays. What that says in terms of predictiveness is if they are able to sustain more drives, if they aren't playing from behind quite as much they have a lot of play volume upside because they were still in like they're the 25th percentile essentially in in overall plays
Starting point is 01:01:16 but and we all expected hey Kingsbury's going to come in and run a fast-paced offense he did he did run a fast-paced offense they just did. He did run a fast-paced offense. They just weren't successful enough. And that doesn't mean that they're going to be below average in play volume in 2020. And, in fact, I think I would argue that means that we should expect them to be above average in play volume in 2020. The Ravens is a really interesting one. Heath mentioned they were top six in time to snap.
Starting point is 01:01:42 Every year from 2016, 2017, 2018. I just looked, and it might be even true earlier than that. They were a team that worked pretty fast when Joe Flacco was their quarterback. They tended to throw more. Last year, they still ran a ton of plays, but they were among the slower teams in time to snap in the league. They were 27th in time to snap because they're more of a run heavy team and they and that's in situation neutral situation uh situations in in overall plays they were dead
Starting point is 01:02:11 last in time to snap because they also led and then they were even slower when they were leading but this is a team that was still still ran a ton of plays largely because of their efficiency if you think baltimore's offense is going to be less efficient this year, I would argue there's a pretty strong possibility based on the fact that their time to snap was a lot slower last year than it was in prior years, but their total plays could come down. Interesting. Total plays is something I've certainly looked at more.
Starting point is 01:02:39 I love the fact that the Eagles have a fast-paced offense. They led the league, I think, in plays last year. I think they've been top eight all three years with Peterson, something like that. The Rams are up there. I mean, it's good. It's important. Very valuable stuff.
Starting point is 01:02:53 And, you know, I hope this was helpful. We have to wrap this up. Again, the emails and the Apple Podcast questions on our Friday mailbag, which you might hear Thursday night, but most of you will hear it on Friday. So yeah, send them in fantasyfootballatcbsi.com. Advanced stats 101. Really, thank you so much to all three of you guys for educating me and the listeners and hope it was useful. I think it will be very useful as we move forward. A new era of fantasy analysis for Heath Cummings, Dave Richard, Ben Gretsch, I'm Adam Azer. We'll talk to you with the mailbag at the end of this week.

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