Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - What do the analytics predict about the Vikings' 2023 season? Expert Tej Seth examines

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

Matthew Coller gets together with Tej Seth of SumerSports to talk about things that nerds are predicting for 2023. How do we factor the regression from one-score games? Is defense too unpredictable to say if the Vikings will turn it around? How about other teams set to fall back. What about Justin Fields as a passer? And much more Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar here and joining me on Predictions Week to analyze the most nerdy of all nerdy analytics predictions. Tej Seth, Sumer Sports, formerly a PFF intern, has participated in the Big Data Bowl. One of the smartest people I know. What is going on, Tej? How are you? I'm doing well, yeah. Thanks for the kind words and really glad to be back here. Always enjoy

talking to you on Twitter, talking to you on this show. So I'm very pumped for what we're going to talk about today. Well, what we're going to talk about is I wrote down a bunch of things that I think analytics people think about the 2023 season. So I don't know this for sure. These are not analytics articles that I've read or anything else. This is my intuitive feel for having been, I guess, immersed in the analytics football world enough to have an idea of what regressions I think that analytics people might think and what predictions, what type of predictions the numbers would point us toward in 2023 as it regards to both the Vikings and around the NFL.

So I made an entire list and I sent it to you. And I love that you didn't tell me. So I don't know if you think these are right or if you think that these are wrong. And analytics people would think I'm a complete dope. So why don't we start out with the vikings and what the analytics say about them and i just got a message from a listener this morning that was asking about uh the one score games and and i think that's a really good place to start because when you win all of your one score games i think that football fans intuitively understand what happened last year and how rare that is because they've never

seen it before in their entire lives watching the Vikings. But how can we use the numbers as a guidepost to figure out exactly what that predicts about two different seasons last year and then this year? So, yeah, I mean, something that I think you do really well for someone who covers like a team and has to hone in so specifically on the Vikings is really get like a good understanding of the league and also the analytical things that people are working on. And so, you know, I'm sure Vikings fans are tired of hearing about this by now, but point differential was like something that's really big in our analytical metrics that we look at when projecting future performance of a team.

And like the Vikings point differential last year was about league average when you look at it. And you can even turn that into this formula that we have called Pythagorean win percentage that was really popular in baseball to project future performance that now we can use to project future performance in football. And so what that kind of does is it takes points scored and points against, and it has an exponent that it uses to put this projection together. So the Vikings had about a 50% Pythagorean win percentage last year, meaning that they were around a 500 team when looking at their points scored and points against. They ended up winning, you know, 70, 78, 79% of their games. So we can definitely

expect some regression there as well. And we know that Pythagorean win percentage predicts future performance better than actual win performance by a little bit better. And then when you look at their win total on top of that, the betting markets aren't seeing the Vikings having the same record as last year as well. They have them as an eight and a half win total juice to the over. So about nine wins is what the betting market is expecting from the Vikings. So you can see the regression from both standpoints there. I think this is kind of a situation where everybody is looking at the same thing. But let me throw this out there to you.

When you have Kirk Cousins as your quarterback, you will play in one score games nonstop all the time. And I remember reading about something that really changed the way I view stuff is there was a study, I don't know, a long time ago about flipping coins and uh the the the people had someone pretend to flip a coin in their mind just say heads tails and whatever and then they had someone actually do it and the difference between the two because of course we all know it will come out to 50 is that the person who was doing it in their mind would go heads heads tails, like that. But there were times when the person who was doing it for real got heads like 40 times in a row, which seems impossible. But for the Vikings, and they had the poor year by the one-score games in 2021, it's such a small sample that I'm not saying that you're,

and the analytics people are wrong, expecting regression with these one-score games. But it is a small sample. I don't think it's something like oh well they did it last year so it's absolutely impossible that with justin jefferson and the offense they have and the quarterback that they have that they could continue to do that i don't think that it guarantees that they will just automatically like the forces of nature swoop in from the heavens and say no the analytics demand that you don't win those

one score games anymore. I don't know if it's exactly like a thing that we could say for sure year to year will change just because of what happened last season. Yes, I'm with you. I don't think it's a certainty that they will regress in one score games or their record in general. I think a good example of this is the Pittsburgh Steelers from 2020 to 2021. They started off 8-0 in 2020. They won a lot of their one-score games throughout that whole season. And a lot of people wanted to fade them, especially at the beginning of the season in 2021 because of that. But week one, they come out and they upset the Bills and put together a pretty good season where they end up making the playoffs. So usually in football, things are in the middle of the two extreme sides of them. So the one extreme is that the Vikings lose all their one-score games this year,

and then the other side of it is similar to last year where they end up winning most of them. And you could probably see that coming to a middle standpoint there as well. But, I mean, if you look at like what the vikings have had it added on offense where you're you get a full off season of knowing that tj hawkinson is in your offense for kevin o'connell drop plays you draft jordan addison who we know was really good in college two years ago when he won the blintikoff award and so like you can see that there are ways that the vikings are trying to kind of make sure that they don't have that regression of what we usually see from teams when they just run back the same roster from the year before when they had

a good record. I'd love you to sort of explain what numbers say about Cousins and what happened last year, because there's such a conflict there between when you look at his QBR, his PFF grade, his quarterback rating, his yards per attempt, none of them are impressive, even in comparison to his previous numbers. And you could say, well, he was winning and there was garbage time. But the funny thing about last year is he actually threw way more passes when they were losing than when they were winning, which is, which is totally unexpected for a team that had 13 wins. But I think it was over 300 passes when they were behind and

like 180 when they were ahead so he still was in these situations to rack up a lot of yards which he did uh now we have a joke that kirk cousins is in the in the middle of every chart uh which is funny because it's always like mahomes at the top and we'll get to justin fields at the bottom and then kirk cousins in the middle but what do you make of trying to use his last year's performance to predict what's going to happen with him this year? Like, would it be a more comfort in the system type of situation where he can get back to some of those numbers that he had before, that there won't be that adjustment period for him? Or is it somewhat of a sign? Because I think if we just looked at it on paper, didn't see the 13 wins, we would have said, oh, Kirky's getting old,

I think, because there are a lot of quarterbacks of his ilk in their mid 30s that start to drift off. So how do you view that? Yeah, I mean, you bring up a really interesting point with the garbage time. He ranked 19th in expected points added per play last year in all situations, including every single play. But then when you filter out garbage time, when you remove it, when it's below 10% win probability, above 90% win probability, he moves up to 14th, actually. So we can see that actually the garbage time argument that I think a lot of people were giving him last year wasn't true. And like, what I think is really interesting is his EPA per play rose after the TJ Hawkinson trade, because we saw how important Hawkinson was

on third downs for the Vikings last year and making sure that Justin Jefferson can run deeper routes because Hawkinson can take the intermediate area of the field. So I think throughout the season, Kirk Cousins actually did play better at the end of the season than in the beginning so i can see and now that they've added both hockinson and addison his production get better this year even though his quarterback performance might stay the same we can see his counting statistics have a slight uptick because of what they added on offense yeah and i tend to think that kirk is just always kirk no matter what and even in the netflix series about you know the quarterbacks with him and mahomes and marcus

mariotta he was talking about the prime time games or whatever and i remember looking into this a couple years ago about kirk in the prime time games and it just it really turned out that they had played a bunch of really good teams which they they lost to, which is sort of an excuse. But also the truth about Kirk Cousins, when they play really good teams, that's what usually happens is that they don't often win those games. So there's this constant conundrum with Cousins. But I wonder what you think about how different we can it might be when we try to factor things that we don't know. Like the running back situation is quite a bit different without Delvin Cook. That's something that we've been able to predict going into every year. And then Jordan Addison. We've had sort of a discussion

about whether KJ Osborne or Jordan Addison will have more catches. Rookie receivers have had a lot of success recently. I think that these teams that waited until the end of the first round or the teams that drafted running backs and passed on receivers early in the draft are probably going to regret it but as much as there is this like oh he's got the system he's got hawkinson there's also these questions about the offense that we haven't really had in the kirk cousins era yes and i'm with you and i think that there like, that's what makes it so tough is there's a lot of things that are hard to predict. Like Kirk Cousins will be 35 when the season starts. And that's usually getting towards the things, like how his health will be and how the offensive line holds up. Like there's a lot of unpredictable factors that I think like increases his range of outcomes this year and really widens it relative to what you usually expect from Kirk Cousins coming into the season.

And then I really like how you brought up Madison being the sole running back there right now instead of Cook, because even though Cook necessarily wasn't as effective last year as we usually saw him, he still had the name and the commitment to the running game, I thought, brought defenders into the box to make it easier for the Vikings to pass. And so when you kind of go away from having a big name running back and a running back that defensive coordinators respect, you might start to see one less box defender every couple plays because they know that they don't have to respect the run game as much. So I think that might be a factor there as well in Kirk's performance. What's interesting about that last year is we saw a midseason sea change when it came

to how defenses played against the vikings and kevin o'connell brought this up at the combine where in the first half of the season there was kind of the usual approach to teams bringing up people into the box to try to stop the run and stop delvin cook and then it just completely switched after justin jefferson had like six unbelievable games in a row and i think o'connell said that their in-house analytics had more teams playing sort of umbrella or you know deep too deep coverages against them in the second half which is kind of interesting because cook wasn't able to take advantage as much so i do wonder about that with madison if he will have a very advantageous situation knowing that justin

jefferson is going to to get all of that attention. But I think that there are some things. There's also the offensive line that is together, all five of them. And this is something that people have looked at, that continuity in the offensive line is tangible. We could say that it often does matter. But let me ask you about the defensive side. Because a lot of times with predicting defense, analytics people will be like, I don't know, because defense is it's so weird and has a lot to do with the schedule. And the Vikings play a bunch of difficult teams on the schedule.

I would I would guess that the numbers would point to considering all the talent the Vikings lost them having a bad defense this year. But I don't want to guarantee that because I think they have a better defensive coordinator. And actually, sometimes when younger players come in, they are faster than the older guys whose names that we know. And so it's like, oh, we thought that it was going to be really hard to replace this linebacker. But actually, he was just getting old and the younger guy is going to be more effective. That's not me debating that the Vikings will have a top five defense or something. I just think that this, this one has the potential to be better by, I don't want to say leaps and bounds, but like enough versus what they saw last year with that Donatello in charge. Yes. And I could definitely agree with that. I think the most interesting thing about the Vikings defense this year is how Brian Flores is going to use this personnel into the system that we saw him run in Miami so well, where it's a very different personnel to work with that ends up working out. And I think that's like the first thing that really gives the Vikings like a pretty high

variance of outcomes on defense is a defensive coordinator change and a system change. But the other thing is, we just don't know much about their secondary right now, like between Blackman and Lewis Seen and all these, Andrew Booth Jr. And like these new secondary pieces that are coming in that we weren't able to see much of last year or their rookies this year, if a lot of them hit, this could be a really good defense because they still have Daniil Hunter and Marcus Davenport on the front, and then they'll have a pretty good secondary to close things off the bottom.

But then if a lot of them don't end up playing well and maybe they don't do as well as their draft status or their projections were, then this defense is going to be really hard and it's going to take a lot of scheming from Flores to make them serviceable on that end. So I think those are really the two big things that are giving them a very wide range of outcomes. I think that Flores is going to have to get into his bag, as the youths say, and try to come up with every blitz that he's got to help them. But you're exactly right that sometimes we think we know like, oh, well, these unproven secondary guys. And then sometimes we don't. Like, I guess we would have thought that Kansas City last year was overhauling their defense and their secondary and they were going to struggle.

And then, you know, they got a really good performance from Trent McDuffie and it kind of swung the tides. So that can happen. Before we move on to some of the other, how was I phrasing this, predictions I think nerds are making, what do you think is like what Kweisi Adafo-Mensa has done here? It's a pretty consistent debate with Vikings fans of whether Kweisi knows what he's doing or not.

And I have been on the side that overall you can nitpick some things, but the direction is the right one that they had to take for this offseason. But as a, you know, he's an analytics-based GM is kind of what we call him. You're on the analytics side. How have you viewed what he's done this offseason? Yeah, you know that I do have bias when it came to Kweisi getting hired, but I'll try to be objective here when I talk about his moves. I think Kweisi was given a tough task because he had to win games while also retooling the roster,

which is like a thing that you don't often see from GMs. And so he's tried to do that well with some of the additions that they've made. And getting off to that 13-3 record last year where they ended up winning the division was pretty big, I think, for him and Kevin O'Connell's leash and the length of the leash that they were getting based on their 10 years with the Vikings so far. And so I think he's done that well. But I think Brad Spielberger put it really well on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, where he's saying that any player that Kweisi doesn't see contributing to the roster in 2024, he was really getting rid of at the end of the day. And that's why I think a lot of the moves that the Vikings made, like the Dalvin Cook

one or trading Zedaria Smith was based on that kind of progression. So I think like even he expects the roster to step back in 2023 and the results to be a little bit worse in 2023 than they were the year before. But he really wants to get ready for 2024 and making sure they're competitive then. The biggest pro football contest in Las Vegas is back again for its fifth year

with $14 million in guaranteed prizes only at Circa Sports. Enter in Vegas, play from anywhere with two ways to win and no rake. Play the Million Pro Football Contest with quarterly payouts and 100% payback. Pick a winner with the Survivor Contest. Select one team each week with no point spread. Get your share of 14 million in guaranteed prizes. Visit circasports.com today for details

yeah i mean i think that it's been a true competitive rebuild which is as you mentioned very hard to do uh not easy to kind of thread that needle because most teams are kind of rising and falling all the time and they uh last year kind of caught lightning in a bottle, which really does give him a lot of leeway, I think, from having his first season go so well with 13 wins. And you really think about it. I mean, if they got one more against the Giants, if there's just one more drive there against the Giants and then they win the game, they go to Philadelphia and lose.

Okay, Philadelphia went to the Super Bowl. I think there even would have been more, I guess, attention to how well they handled all of that. And then still, but you have to give credit for not overreacting to that 13 wins and saying like, okay, I know that we did that, but we're not going to run it back, which is a thing you usually don't see in the NFL. So anyway, let's get into some of these other predictions that I think the analytics people are making. We talked about the Vikings and point differential and regression. How about the New York Giants, though? Brian Dable, strangely to me, got coach of the year last year.

Almost like, hey, wow, you got Daniel Jones to look like a decent quarterback? Coach of the year you must be. I thought they were a very average team, and that wild card game was between two kind of paper tigers, between the Vikings and Giants. And I think this year they're going to get hit in the face a little bit with regression. What do you think?

I'm with you as well. I do think that regression is coming for the Giants also. Again, going back to the Pythagorean win percentage we talked about earlier, they were at 48% Pythagorean win percentage last year, 55% actual win percentage. So some regression is definitely expected there as well. And then their win total, which we know is a really good predictor of success in the season is seven and a half. So considerably lower than what they ended up as last year but also showing that that the market does see improvement um from where they were at this point last year to

to now basically which is nice and i think adding darren waller paris campbell um you know john michael schmitz whose agent uh we we know is pretty good um and and adding to that offense i think can help them like make sure that they're not regressing super hard from a production standpoint. But again, the one-score luck and the easy schedule that they had last year, they're probably not going to get all of that going for them this year, which is going to make it a little tougher to get back into that wildcard spot. John Michael Schmidt's agent, by the way, Jeremiah jeremiah suros who is on the show uh all the time so that's that's who you're referring to uh we're not we're not in the bed with the agents

here on the show um page just just jeremiah and his offensive line bias but yeah you know i i guess the the weird thing is to try to project daniel jones because he really did not have an impressive group of weapons and he ran a lot which i think he can do and i think quarterback running year to year is pretty stable he could improve from the passing part of his game with better weapons and the offensive line being built up but you've also got the saquon drama that's going on that i think could hang over them i'm not impressed by anything that they have on the defensive side and another element is i think that that division is just going to be really hard. Philadelphia will be good again.

I've got Dallas being a really good team. I thought they made some good moves in the offseason. No one ever wants to talk about Dallas because everyone talks about Dallas on TV all the time. And Washington, if Sam Howell is not a disaster, will be the biggest upgrade at quarterback over the last, I don't know how many years they've had just totally disastrous quarterback play. So if there's even something there that I think that could play into the giants dropping back a little.

I definitely agree with that. I think like when you look at who the giants got to play last year and when they got to play the Cooper rush game against the Cowboys where they were able to, to win that one. And then they were able to play a Cooper Rush game against the Cowboys where they were able to win that one. And then they were able to play a weaker commanders team than I think they probably are this year because the commanders, you're going to get more snaps out of Chase Young this year than you did last year probably.

And then you added two corners with your first two picks in the draft to them. And then, yeah, like you said, in football, you never want to say uh it can't get worse because we know that it can um but like sam howell it's it would hard for it would be hard for him to be worse than it was for for the the commanders last year and then yeah if anything like the eagles stayed relatively the same or or maybe got a little bit worse but are still a very good team and we know match up well against the giants based on their three matchups

last year and the cowboys as well like you mentioned like very very good team this year added added a lot of the pieces that that were filling their holes this year so that division is going to be really tough it's it's definitely the toughest division in the nfc which kind of puts the giants at a disadvantage if if they were in the nfc north for example i could see them their win total being like eight and a half, because they should be able to take advantage of some weaker teams there. But all four of those teams in the division are playoff worthy, which I think is going to make it tough. All right, let's talk about one that former Purple Insider analytics intern Haley English was very, very into this take. Justin Fields is going to be bad I think the numbers point to that

or at least her interpretation and we know she knows what she's doing was that Justin Fields is not going to get better if you're in Chicago you're certainly arguing that the addition of a very good wide receiver is going to help improvement on the offensive line just a better team who's actually trying to win this year rather than mostly tanking and that he showed a lot of flashes in the second half of the season they also lost a lot of one score games chicago did uh which is worth bringing up as well they should be better but what about justin fields can we glean from the numbers that were produced under some very hideous circumstances last year yeah i mean yeah hay, yeah, Haley English, now at the Lions, had a lot of great data points on Justin Fields and his passing ability and really like was eye-opening to me as even

as someone who kind of was looking at Justin Fields' lack of passing production. But like once I saw how he performed against perfectly covered plays and not doing well against that versus non-perfectly covered plays where he also wasn't ranking very highly in those was interesting. And what I kind of looked at was he had basically the exact same EPA added from rushing as he lost from passing last year, which put him at about zero total EPA on the season, which was 22nd in the league. And so for me, it comes from, he had 10 rushes of 20 plus yards last year between six scrambles and four design carries. If he's able

to replicate that, then at least he gets the base of having that rushing EPA put him out to about a pretty high level relative to most quarterbacks that can't rush like he can. So all his passing would have to do is increase by enough where it's not completely offsetting his rushing. And the addition of DJ Moore could help that. But then again, we know a lot about a quarterback's passing ability. Once they've played at least two seasons in the league, Josh Allen is really the main exception to this rule. But for every Josh Allen, there's a Sam Darnold. And there's so many other examples of quarterbacks passing ability staying stable after two seasons in the NFL. And so I would expect that to stay stable

for Justin Fields while his rushing might regress a little bit because it's hard to chain together an explosive rush almost every week. And when you when you kind of put that all together i could see a situation where his passing doesn't come up to the level that he wants it to and then his his rushing is stays at the same level or even regresses a little bit and we don't see his production rise as much as as the bears fans are expecting it to i remember looking at this uh actually years, if you remember CJ Spiller, and he had this crazy run with the Buffalo Bills where he was just, I don't know, averaging like six yards a carry or something. And I went and looked and it was a ton of explosive plays.

And then I looked at explosive plays year to year. They're very hard to predict. That's why sometimes we see a running back average five and a half yards a carry or four and a half yards a carry might be the difference between does he get a 75 yard touchdown or not or a couple of those where they're defensive breakdowns or maybe it's just some ungodly play that he makes that's really hard to repeat time after time i mean if justin fields is going to be good he's got to throw the football uh we have so many metrics for quarterbacks like exactly 100 100,000 different metrics. What do you like? Like what would tell me if you're if you're doing this problem trying to decide if Justin Fields is

going to go forth and be a good player? What's your what's your quarterback metric that you think is kind of predictive? Yeah, I mean, I really always use expected points added first when when looking at this kind of stuff. And so for Justin Fields' standpoint, I looked at recently each quarterback that makes a leap. So quarterbacks that were either negative in total EPA the season before or barely positive, that ended up playing at an MVP level. And so an MVP level of total EPA from a quarterback is like anything 100 and above basically and so like Jalen Hurts last year went from 58 the season before to 110 so he was last

year's lead quarterback Joe Burrow the year before going from 44 to 107 and so if Justin Fields is able to hit that like 100 total EPA mark you, me and Haley and others will definitely eat crow and admit that we didn't see it coming for him. But like I think the interesting thing is, so Jalen Hurts, you know, obviously improved last year as a passer, but also the addition of A.J. Brown helped. Joe Burrow obviously improved between those two seasons. The addition of Jamar Chase helped. D.J. Moore is a good receiver.

I don't know if he's at the level of Jamar Chase and A.J. Brown. So I think that addition will definitely help Justin Fields' passing, but maybe not to the level that it did for the other leap quarterbacks. Well, since we mentioned Haley, the next one on my list, I'll just tell her to turn off the podcast if she's listening. Aaron Rodgers won't be all that good in New York. I think that the analytics people would look at the aaron rogers in new york thing and go ah you know i don't know i don't know if it's going to be as great as they think it's going to be based on

what rogers did last season based on his age and sometimes when a team hits its peak if you have a quarterback injury or your quarterback is bad that doesn't necessarily mean you could just drop anybody in the next season because so much changes we know all about that here from 2017 to 2018 uh but i don't know that for sure because aaron rogers certainly has a great history of being a quarterback so what do you feel like the numbers say about that situation yeah i this is the probably the one that i don't feel the strongest about out of the ones we talked about so far because of a couple reasons so one i think we've seen aaron rogers do this before where he played at an above average but not elite level in 2018 2019 and then 2020 2021 mvp levels And then he kind of regressed again in 2022 back to an

above average level, but not an elite level that we're used to seeing from him. So that bounce back potential is there for him. Obviously, there's less of a chance to do it since he's older in age and changing situations. But I think the other thing about aaron rogers and this is more of a non analytical reason is i think there is something to leaving the organization that you feel like didn't support you to one where they they traded draft picks and they made sure that your contract carried over and he will probably just feel like he's more included in the jets organization this season and will probably play better there There was a pretty clear disconnect between Rodgers and either the Packers organization or Matt LaFleur or even both last year that he gets Nathaniel Hackett as his offense coordinator who he's really tight with and we knew had success in Green Bay together, as well as

just an overall ability with Garrett with garrett wilson and everything else the jets have to offer him that i think could be able to help him this season yeah i mean the garrett wilson factor just cannot be understated uh what we saw from him last year in person seeing him dominate the vikings and i know it's a vikings defense that wasn't that great but he had an amazing game with mike White as his quarterback who he somehow made competitive and I mean I think that he could be you know 100 catch 1200 1300 yard type of wide receiver with Aaron Rodgers who has generally picked one guy he loves and then thrown him the ball all the time which is a pretty good strategy actually and it worked really well for Jordyy nelson and for davante adams so i could see that perspective but i could also look at it and

look at his age look at the number of weird stuff he's put in his body and he just i mean he does not look like he has the same is it like flexibility or quickness or you know there's a lot of throw the ball out of bounds if he doesn't like what he sees as opposed to creating plays like he used to back in the day and then he's still really good i mean he throttled the vikings when they went down uh to lambo at the end of the season so i'm not saying that aaron doesn't have anything left but i also think that there have been situations where you know a team trades for a guy at the end of his career or thinks that they're going to kind of you know get that last squeeze of whatever's left and it's not it's just not really there so i i guess i don't know i think that's a really hard

thing to factor because we just don't have a big sample size of dudes who are in their 40s going to different teams outside of tom brady and peyton manning winning with their teams in denver and tampa bay yeah and that's the really tough part right like you can look at the success success of Tom Brady and Peyton Manning winning with their teams in Denver and Tampa Bay. Yeah. And that's the really tough part, right? Like you can look at the success stories of Tom Brady and Peyton Manning, but then there's also these kind of Russell Wilson type stories where he's not, he wasn't as old, but it was still like kind of my argument about moving organizations to one that you feel like supports you. Like Russell Wilson definitely would have fit that mold last year, but it didn't end up working out for a variety of reasons. Right.

So, and when I looked at the numbers today, we have projections at Sumer sports here for a lot of counting statistics. And it factors in age and what they did last year and what their career has been. And, and a lot of stuff like that. And we have Aaron Rogers projected with the ninth most passing yards, the 11th most passing touchdowns. And for the fantasy players out there, he is our QB 14. And I know he's going about QB 17 and in those fancy drafts. So I think that's like a kind of good gauge for what to expect from him this year, where he's going to be like a fringe top 10

quarterback when it comes to a lot of these metrics, which, which is what I think I would expect. Let me run through a couple of hot ones in a second but just how would you project right now how the nfc north ends up playing out like what's what's your order because i'm still laughing about a question i got a couple of weeks ago where someone asked if all the teams could go eight nine or nine and eight and i was like no that couldn't well you know maybe maybe it actually could how do you think that will play out yeah no i i really like that question i've i've had that line of thinking as well and like even like when you look at the quarterbacks like i could see like by the end

of the season if you gave me a list of the quarterbacks in the division in any order from one to four one through four i wouldn't be shocked. Like if Jordan Love was number one, just since we know nothing about him, I wouldn't necessarily be shocked at that or maybe Fields makes the leap as well. So I think there's just so many different scenarios for how the NFC North will unfold. But if I had to kind of just pick how I think it'll go, I do think the Lions have the best roster and the best play caller in Ben Johnson. So I would put them number one. I would put the Vikings number two because I think that their mean outcome is going to be higher than the Packers mean outcome, even though the Packers have probably a wider range of outcomes because we still know nothing about Jordan Love.

So Vikings two, Packers three. And then I just don't trust the Bears defense enough, even if their offense makes a big jump. The both of us could be second string Bears defensive lineman this year I think if they called upon us so I would I would put them fourth in the division yeah they had several guys that the Vikings had cut on their defense that were playing for them last year like if the Vikings cut you on their defense that's probably not a good sign so let's let's just rapid fire through some of these other ones that I think that this is,

is this weird to think that the Cowboys will be very good, but also miss Kellen Moore. Well, I guess this is more of the, what I think the analytics people think, as opposed to my opinion, I think the Cowboys are still going to be really, really good.

But I think that analytics people think that they're going to miss Kellen Moore a ton and that the chargers're going to miss Kellen Moore a ton and that the Chargers are going to love Kellen Moore. Is that true? Yeah, no, I'm with you as well. We're like, every time I get really excited about the Cowboys roster and like all the holes that they filled this off season, what they had last year, like someone needs to remind me that Mike McCarthy is calling the plays for them and not Kellen Moore anymore, because I think Kellen Moore is a really good play caller. Last season, the Cowboys had a 0.06 EPA per play with Dak Prescott and a negative 0.2 with Cooper Rush.

So they were the seventh best offense in the league with Dak Prescott, which is very, very fair and what you'd expect with a quarterback of his level. But then they were the 21st best offense with a backup quarterback. So even though that a lot of other teams got to have their starting quarterback for more of the season than the Cowboys did, Kellen Moore still made it work with a backup quarterback like Cooper Rush, which I think is the really exciting thing for Chargers fans and why I think he'll do well there.

And the big complaint about the Chargers offense last year was there was a very low average depth of target offense with Justin Herbert, who is supposed to be airing the ball down the field. And Patrick Mahomes also had a low average at the target. The 49ers quarterbacks also had that. So the best passing offense can still be built off low average at the target. They just need to have routes with yak opportunities built in them

and the chargers routes and have that it was a lot of stop and sit routes at the first down marker where i think kellen moore will do a better job of making sure that court that receivers are catching the ball in the middle of the field with space to turn up field to do that and so that's why i think that kellen moore will will do pretty well with the chargers and what they have to offer at receiver with adding quentin johnson to already pretty good group yeah there's part of that too that is circumstance for everything uh i don't know that they had a really good offensive strategy there but their offensive line got really banged up last year and they probably wanted to throw a lot of the quicker passes because of that and i'm i'm not sure that they had guys who run after catch like mike williams isn't really a run after catch guy quentin johnston is specifically

like that is his thing um so i i think that we could get to the end of the year and go see it was kellen moore all along uh when it might have just been circumstance and they blocked better or there might be an element of justin herber that just likes to check down and that is a thing. And I won't talk about what that means for the Vikings or their quarterback's reputation in comparison. But I did make the Justin Kirkbert joke about him checking down all the time last year. How about this? The 49ers defense will not carry them the way that it did last year.

I think that analytics people would like that take. They lost their defensive coordinator. They had the MVP last year. Hard to repeat MVP performances. Do folks in the analytics community think there is regression on the way for the 49ers defense? I definitely think that can be expected. Adding Hargrave is going to help offset some of that, I think, which was a good move from their standpoint. But defense is just so much less stable year to year than offense,

which makes intuitive sense. You have the quarterback on offense that can control a lot of your production, but there's no quarterback of the defense that can do that on that side of the ball. And so, yeah, I see it as a tougher path for the 49ers to have the number one defense again this year, just because of circumstance. Like you mentioned, like you're going to play maybe a harder schedule this year. You're not going to have as good of injury luck as you had the year before. And then we'll have to, D'Amico Ryans, I thought was a fantastic defensive coordinator last year, what he was able to do with the personnel provided to him and designing that defense. And so moving on from him is always going to make things tougher and give it more last year what he was able to do with with uh the personnel provided to him and designing that

defense and so moving on from him is always going to make things tougher and give it more uncertainty yeah that 49ers team is one that we just sort of assume is going to be really good because they usually are and i just i don't know man i like brock purdy he's coming off the injury he's also still brock purdy and i think there's a higher bar when you're drafted where he was to prove that it's not just small sample size case keenum style uh you know good situation and a little bit of randomness and a pop-up quarterback that we've seen many times they've got a very messy situation there and uh you know i also think that you know some teams in their division are really bad like arizona but but Seattle is pretty good and they could be coming for them there. So that one might be where they do drift back a little bit.

The last one I wrote down is that teams that didn't draft these wide receivers are going to regret it. I think that's a take that analytics people would say. And I also just looking at the draft the other day when I was making these predictions for this year I was making 50 predictions I was like I just can't believe that some of the positions that these teams took and left these talented wide receivers sitting there on the table I think that teams still have in their minds like well I mean Jordan Addison's just not a top 10 overall prospect as opposed to in this draft considering his positional value he's probably worth taking there and it doesn't have to apply to him it can apply to any of these guys jackson smith the jigbo is a really good prospect and if he hits he's fantastic and he's super worth it

if bijan robinson hits he has to be adrian peterson in order for it to be worth it i think that that formula is going to show itself pretty quickly this season. Yeah, it's everything we talked about at the Combine before the draft, where it's the surplus value of the draft. And that's like the outcome or the goal outcome for these teams is maximizing the surplus value you can get in. Yeah, so for the Falcons specifically, taking B. John Robinson at number eight overall, I'm sure he's going to, I mean, he's a great, fantastic prospect. He's going to add value to their offense this year, and he's going to perform well, i'm sure he's gonna i mean he's a great fantastic prospect he's gonna add value to their offense this year and he's gonna perform well i'm sure but it's the opportunity cost of what you gave up where you're now going into the season with drake london as your wide receiver one but mac hollins and scotty miller as your as your second and third wide receivers so maybe you just you throw out a lot of, of 20 personnel, 21 personnel

with B. John Robinson and Tyler Algier or Cordell Patterson out there to try to overcome that. But just not having that true third receiving option behind London and Pitts is going to make it tougher for the Falcons this year. And then from the Lions perspective, your first six games are without Jameson Williams. You don't have TJ Hawkinson anymore. And you have either Brock Wright or rookie tight end and Sam Laporta as your second receiving option behind Amon Ross St. Brown. better off taking a Jack Smith, the Jigba or a wide receiver of that type to add, add the value from that perspective. Because I do think that eventually the Lions might have to realize that, that the third receiving option is a hole that that could be in their roster eventually. Yeah. And if St. Brown gets hurt for any amount of time, I mean, you're kind of in trouble there and we don't even know if Jamison Williams can actually play can actually play or not i mean uh i i was in the

camp that the vikings probably should have picked him but it's no guarantee that he's just going to come in after that six game suspension for whatever level of gambling that he did uh and not knowing the rules uh but it's not a sure thing that he just comes in and is great right away and takes him the next level and you mentioned the rookie tight. There's a lot of history that says those guys struggle, no matter where you pick them. If it's a top-five pick or if it's whatever, there's not a lot of rookie tight ends who have made impacts right away. So I think that those teams will very quickly regret

not taking the wide receivers as they look elsewhere and see a Smith the Jigbar or a Quinn Johnston or a Jordan Addison or Zay Flowers stepping up. If even one of them is really, really good, those teams should look at themselves and go, that was probably a mistake. Okay, let's end on this, Tej. I want you to give me the analytics take that the football world at large would not like for this year so the you know nfl lives or nfl networks of the world where you got four former players and they're talking about ball in a very footbally way

if the if the analytics person came up and said well actually gentlemen it's like this this year uh what would that be so are you saying saying what's a thing that could happen that would make analytics people kind of regret saying a lot of these things over the summer? Well, I guess I was thinking the most anti-mainstream, but it's analytically defendable. You know what I mean? So just for that 2020 Steelers team,

that was Eric Eager andorge talking every week about how that steelers team was kind of fraudulent and everything else and the outside world the players the analysts they were all like no they're winning all these games they're a great team you guys don't want to be talking about and eventually it came to fruition that they were kind of fraudulent so i guess i was thinking like a an analytics take that kind of conflicts with the mainstream. Okay. Yeah, I see what you're saying. and this has happened a lot of times, is a lot of people are starting to put Joe Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals as the clear second-best team in the AFC, and then Joe Burrow is the clear second-best quarterback in the NFL. I think a lot of analytical people will tell you,

like this time last year, the Buffalo Bills were preseason favorites to win the Super Bowl. Josh Allen was preseason favorite to win the MVP. Allen went out, was having a really good year until his elbow got hurt. And then they played the Bengals in the playoff game and were five and a half point favorites. So the betting market showed them a lot of respect, but ended up really getting blown out in that game. And the recency bias on the Bengals right now over the Bills is really strong. I don't think you can say for certain which team is better than,

than which, but I think like based on most rankings I've seen from NFL network and from ESPN, like have the bangles ahead of the bills. But I think that the bills could be very, very good this year. I don't think that takes nearly hot enough. I mean, that's like a,

that's like a four out of 10, I would say for like analytical hot take. Although I, I picked the bangles as the Superbowl winner for this year. So maybe you're, you're going against that a little bit, but it is funny though, Sage,

because in our world now we have so much access to the numbers. You guys put out such great work. PFF puts out such great work that it sort of permeates everyone's opinion, right? If it permeates the, the, the betting markets, the NFL live shows

like you know they have analysts on there who know the numbers and things like that so it's harder than it used to be like maybe even five seven years ago to come up with an obvious oh the analytics are telling us this but the mainstream is saying that yeah and okay so i'll do one hotter than um that i've gotten pushed back on on Twitter before for saying that this is not, I don't think, a representation of all analytics people, but me and a couple other people I know are really big believers in this, is the Cleveland Browns, I think, are not being talked about at all as I think they're even possible Super Bowl contenders.

They were two and six in one score games last year. If you get, you already have this really good roster, top offensive line, you traded for Elijah Moore, you added him to a pretty decent group of receiving options. Nick Chubb, I think is still the best running back in the NFL. And their defense just keeps getting better every year. They obviously made the trade with the Vikings for Rosario Smith, and they really added Dalvin Tomlinson and into their defensive line and, and they, they should expect that. So really all you need is Deshaun Watson to be 80% of what he was two, two years ago. And you're looking at a very, very good team. They, they

play in a really tough conference and a tough division, which I think will hold them back a little bit. But like, I think from a pure team standpoint, the Browns are a top 10 team in the nfl right now um and it it might not work out because of of the the schedule and stuff but i think like if you were to put them in the nfc they they would they would be super bowl contenders okay that's much hotter that is definitely much hotter and also goes against my 50 bold predictions which i predicted kevin stefanski will be fired at the end of the year. Because I think that you're absolutely right about their roster and that their expectations are super high and that Deshaun Watson's not going to be good

and it will fall on the shoulders of Stefanski because that's how football works. So anyway, well, Tej, you are one of my favorites. Sumer Sports, you're on the Sumer Sports show regularly. I'm sure everyone already follows you, Tej Seth, on Twitter. Or was it tage analytics on twitter yeah it's it's tage fb analytics okay tage fb analytics on twitter make sure you go follow you are a tremendous follow uh as many people know so thanks again for your time man really uh enjoyed getting together with you and we will definitely do it again yeah thanks again for having me this is this is always a lot of fun and looking forward

to the next one