Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - What makes a winning NFL team?

Episode Date: June 26, 2020

How do we decide what makes for an effective passing game? Would you rather be a downfield or short passing team? When are the right times to run the ball? If winning connects to QB play, what aspects of a QB's game most correlate in the W-L column?  Read Matthew's work at PurpleInsider.substack.com Fill out the Bluewire survey:  https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=BugBBZdAw0aNFUvtuGkgyhnTao1hdWxOjJwTA2fwHGJUN0hUNEhaSExWN0RRRFdCV1ZOTkdHR1IwOCQlQCN0PWcu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Folks, do you feel like everything these days is go, go, go? It's non-stop from work to friends to family and a million pressing issues. Sometimes you just need to take a playoff and hit the reset button. That's when you reach for a Coors Light. It's made to chill. Hey, it's that time of year in Minnesota again to get out on the lake, go to the cabin, sit back, watch some baseball. Coors Light is the perfect refreshment to chill during these summer months. There's only one beer out there that's made to chill. The mountains on the bottles and cans turn blue when your beer is cold,

and that way you know it's time to chill. Hit that reset button with some mountain cold refreshment. Coors Light is cold lager, cold filtered, and cold packaged. It's literally made to chill. It's crisp and refreshing as the Colorado Rockies. Coors Light is the one you should choose when you need to unwind, when you want to hit the reset button, reach for the beer that is made to chill.

Get Coors Light in the new look delivered straight to your door with Drizly or Instacart, Coors Brewing Company, Golden, Colorado, and as always, celebrate. Hey there. Because you're listening to this podcast, we at Blue Wire want you to know this. Golden, Colorado, and a pair of AirPods. We appreciate you, hope you're staying safe, and want you to enjoy this podcast. All right, welcome into another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar here, and joining me from Pro Football Focus is Kevin Cole, someone that I've wanted to have on a show of some kind for a long time. I very much appreciate his work. What's up, Kevin?

What's up, Matt? Yeah, I'm glad to be here. As I was joking about with you a little bit before we got on, it's good to not have Eric Eager on here. First of all, because it's too much, too much Eric. Second, he's trying to pretend like he's a Kansas City Chiefs fan now. And even though we know he's truly a Vikings fan, so he's cheating on you guys also. So we can't have that. He must be punished. That's right. Eric Eager, who makes routine appearances here on the podcast to talk Vikings, knows his Denny Green era like no other person. But, you know, it's just weird that he became a Kansas City fan with Patrick Mahomes there.

I don't know. Maybe there's some sort of coincidence. The stars align somehow. I don't know. sort of far the line. Right. Well, Kevin, I you do really expansive work on topics that the internet is yelling at each other about. So I love that you're able to kind of deep dive into what helps football teams win games is kind of the bigger premise of everything that we're always diving into, whether it's are you spending your salary cap money on the correct positions, what positions are most valuable, what kind of schemes work, all those different types of things that you love to dive into. So I want to start from a broad spectrum on this with the

question, what makes a team good at football? Like, let's start with that and then whittle our way down to figure out how that matters to the Minnesota Vikings. And I think Patrick Mahomes is a great place to start, Kevin, because the thing that we always find, the deeper we dive into the success of football teams, is that your passing makes you win and stopping the pass makes you win. But I wanted to get into that because I want to know how we kind of quantify someone's success as a passing team. Last year, Tampa Bay leads the league in passing yards. Congratulations. You also threw 30 picks and you didn't win anything, right? And Dallas, same thing. They had huge passing yards, but they

didn't win anything. So when you're evaluating a team's passing success, where do you begin with that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's good that you mentioned yards because that probably is the biggest factor where, you know, analytics does something very simple when looking at these things, no matter what the sport is, and that is let's look at it on a rate basis. So on a per play basis, on a per pass, on a per run basis, instead of looking at these aggregate totals. I think it's easier to conceptualize the big yards that we're talking about here. But, you know, it's not about how many yards you gain. It's about how many points you're going to put up. And when you're seeing what is linked to scoring, what is linked to holding your opponent from scoring, and you

only have a certain number of possessions. So that's also true. You know, each possession you have, the other team has another possession. So, you know, running a ton of plays doesn't really make you better than the other team because the other team is probably also going to run a ton of plays and have a lot of possessions. So you want to be looking at everything on a per play, per possession type of basis. And that's when you can start to figure out what matters or not. And when you do that, that's when you get into things like, yes, you know, Adrian Peterson puts up so many yards or another running back puts up so many yards. But if you're looking at how many plays it took them to get those yards,

that's where the big differentiation comes in between running the ball and between passing the ball. And then that's what really points to the passing as being the differentiator, how teams really separate from each other, is in that metric. And how do we separate the passing offenses that have more explosive plays but fewer attempts versus ones that gain, say, eight yards an attempt but have to kind of go down the field more methodically? Because I'm thinking in terms of Gary Kubiak here, that Kubiak is known for his running offenses. He loves to run the football, but he also loves to run play action off that and heave the ball down the field with Kirk Cousins to Stephon Diggs or Matt Schaub to Andre Johnson or whoever, or even back with Elway.

A lot of the passes were short. There was a lot of running, but then you would go deep down the field to Rod Smith or Shannon Sharp and so forth. And I think that that's always been his philosophy in particular. But when you looked at John DiFilippo when he was here, I think his philosophy was more, let's throw a lot of short and quick passes that can get six to eight to 10 yards at a time. Stephon Diggs only averaged 10 yards per reception in 2018 and almost 20 yards per reception in 2019. So how do we kind of separate those two and look at which approach works better when it comes to having a successful passing game? I mean, I think the answer is there's not one approach that works better than

the other. I think generally you want to be most efficient on a per play basis. But as you mentioned, there's a lot of variation in that. And there are other statistics you can look at, like success rate, which is just trying to tell you on a particular play, did you gain more yards than you would have anticipated based upon down distance, all those sorts of things. So I think those are important. And if you're successful enough times, eventually there are going to be big plays. Now, certain players can give that to you more often. Certain play types will give that to you more often. But there is a key on just maintaining success. And again, we're talking about the pass versus the run. It's just where your upside is.

A successful pass play, let's say, which is gains, you know, let's say six yards on first down. Yeah, sometimes you're going to get 10. Sometimes you're going to get 15. Sometimes you're going to get 25 yards quite often on that. Whereas a run play, you're maybe going to get 10, sometimes you're going to get 15, sometimes you're going to get 25 yards, quite often on that. Whereas a run play, maybe you're going to get 6, 7, 8 sort of yards. So I think it's not only methodically going down the field, but it's giving you also the upside on that. And it's a balance between those two because those long plays are not something you can necessarily rely on also.

So I think that's how what we've seen with the passing game is it started to substitute in for the running game. It started to say, you know what, let's get the same success rate you would get on a running play, but then maybe one out of every five of those we can bust it for 20 yards, 25 yards, and that's where the game has really changed. Yeah, I was thinking about what you're saying with even like New Orleans and their efficiency of using Alvin Kamara on bubble screens and these running backs that even become more of like a move-the type possession receiver in a way. Christian McCaffrey averages like what,

8.2 yards per reception, but at least he's getting more per reception than he would per a handoff or per a target. He might be getting six and a half yards because it's high percentage. And even though those aren't as good as throwing down the field to somebody, you're still moving the chains more than you would for the running game. The one thing with the running game is that you need it to create some of these explosive plays, which is where I kind of think that the value still exists. And then there's other things with the passing game that I think sometimes old cliches are true, Kevin. I mean, when the whole three things can happen when you pass and two of them are bad, it is true. Because I was reading our buddy Josh Hermsmeyer's piece about sacks and how devastating sacks are to a drive. And I wonder what you find with this.

Because I look at that as kind of a hidden thing that people don't think a ton about. You go, oh, well, we got sacked. We're putting the ball away. But the more that you get sacked, the more drives you are just imploding. And this, I think, has been one of the reasons why Kirk Cousins doesn't win more is because he does get sacked a lot. And when he gets sacked, he gets sacked for a lot of yards. Like it's not Russell Wilson running for a one-yard loss and getting a sack. It's like an eight to ten-yard sack that blows up a drive. I wonder how you factor that in when you're evaluating a team's passing game. Yeah, I mean, so we don't want to get too much into the technical things here, but one of the measures, the biggest measure, I would say, in football analytics that's been

developed is this thing called expected points added. And I mean, just briefly, what it means is you're looking at point A down distance, you know, where you are in the field, how many points you're expecting to score, let's say on that drive, and then you calculate it again on the next play, and then you have a rough idea of how much that one particular play hurt you. So I do think that while analytics has pointed to passing over running, it's also given us much better measures for how detrimental sacks are i mean the big person you'd point to and i think people are kind of catching up on here is you know aaron rogers is a guy that he doesn't throw interceptions and he's lauded for

that but he takes a lot of sacks he holds the ball a very long time and people you know passer rating doesn't even factor in sacks. So that's something right there. So people don't factor in how you're losing a down, which is very important, and you're losing the yardage and putting you in those sort of situations. So I think that's really the keys. You just have to be able to quantify these things and get an accurate

measure so you can compare measure A to measure, you know, play A to play B no matter what it is. And that's what a measure like expected points at has done. And it does show us how devastating sacks are. Now, when it comes to someone like Kirk Cousins, I think there's a big play-action game that he's using there. So, again, that is a thing where you're holding the ball longer by design. You're normally taking more pressure by design on those sorts of plays,

but you're allowing the receivers to get further downfield, which allows you to throw the ball deeper and make more yards on that. So everything is a give and a take. So if a quarterback can't get the ball out of his hands on that first read a lot of the time and takes a sack, it's going to be truly devastating. But if you can and your receivers can get it open, you can really blow the things off. So, yeah, you have to pin all those against each other. But sacks are normally undervalued, think in general football analysis and discussion and I

wonder what you think Kevin about where a running game should fit into an NFL offense because if you never ran the ball then it wouldn't matter if you tried play action and I mean if you went to the full extreme we know that teams and linebackers are trained since they're little kids to dive at the running back and at their gaps that they're supposed to fill. So even if you only run 35% of the time, they'll still do that if you fake it. And a lot of times, no matter who your running back is, it could be you in the backfield or it could be Terrell Davis and the linebacker is still going to plug his hole because that's what he's taught to do from day one of OTAs and defensive install. But if you took it to the extreme and you never ran, then teams could just drop back on you. And also if you didn't use big personnel to run with, they can, you know, use

nickel corners and dime packages and things like that. So I wonder, because play action is so successful, where would you fit in a run game, an ideal offense? I mean, it's going to depend on, I think, first of all, how good the passing offense is. So, you know, you don't want to rely too heavily on a passing offense that isn't good. I mean, if you have someone like Patrick Mahomes, and I think we saw that a couple of times in the playoffs, in particular against the Texans, where they got down big and then they just stopped running the ball. And it didn't really matter. They just scored touchdown after touchdown. And it's similar to the NBA. I think over the NBA over time, we've seen the three, I would compare, I think the best analogy there is

the three-pointer is like the pass. You have to have a threat of taking that shot in the NBA. You can't just leave someone completely wide open from 15 feet all the time or else you'll take it. And the same thing when it comes to the NFL. You can't, you know, they have to still be, you know, their run fits still have to be there. They still have to have gap responsibilities. You still have to have them thinking about that.

The question is how often do you have to run for them to be thinking about that? And it's my opinion, and I think it's most people's opinion who study this thing on the analytical side, is that it's just less often than we do. You know, you don't have to, it doesn't have to be 50-50. Even if you're doing it 20% of the time, the defense still has to pay attention to it and can't just let it go by the wayside. So I think it's really going to depend on how efficient the passing game is, how efficient the running game is.

And if you just look at them, you know, you'll say you're going to get four yards per carry. You're going to get more like six and a half net yards per pass attempt when you take out sacks. So even if you want to discount that down to six, it's still 50% more efficient than it is running the ball. So I think an equilibrium should probably come a little bit closer between those two also where the defense is paying attention to the run a little bit less and you can be more successful doing that. Before we get back to the conversation, I want to remind you to go to sodastick.com to get your original Minnesota sports-inspired goods. They just launched their partnership with Michelob Golden Light

for the Mick Golden Light Fishing Club merch line. The logo includes a walleye chugging a beer, and they have it on shirts, hoodies, windbreakers, and more. If you haven't seen it yet, you definitely have to check it out. And also we're going to hook you up with free shipping for your order. Just use the promo code purple insider for free shipping. That's soda stick S O T A S T I C K.com. Original Minnesota sports inspired goods code purple insider for free

shipping. Yeah, no, I think that's right and where you see it all the time and i think the vikings made some big mistakes last year with their play calling was second down and 10 if you get the second down and 10 and you decide to hand off and they stuff you for one yard you're looking at 39 and your percentage of getting 39 is even in a league where you complete 68 of your passes across the league or something like that, you're still looking at a pretty tough situation because defenses know how to keep you in front, and someone like Kirk Cousins routinely on third and nine

will gain five yards on a pass play. It's uncanny with him and Sam Bradford how they will both find a way to get five yards on a third and long. But I want to know about that from the quarterback perspective because there are so many different ways of evaluating whether a quarterback had a good season or not or whether he was really driving a successful offense because I think that's really what our focus should always be on

is this quarterback giving you a chance to win football games with a really efficient and successful offense. It's not like you mentioned about passing yards, but even to some extent, I would say that sometimes a guy will have a good PFF grade, and he did a lot of things that didn't help win games. I'll give you an example. When I was in Buffalo before I moved to Minnesota, Tyrod Taylor had a pretty good PFF grade one year, but he got sacked like crazy. He wouldn't throw it unless somebody was wide open, and they just didn't really have that good of an offense overall, even though he had some great throws and great plays.

So I wonder when you factor in everything, the EPA, the yards per attempt, the adjusted net yards, the PFF grade, like how should we look at what quarterbacks do to lead to success in the win-loss column which is what they're being paid for yeah i mean the the work that i've done on it has shown looking at something like expected points data which i think is the best analytical measure and then i also have used pff passing grade those two in conjunction with each other i found has been pretty successful now Now, you can get to a measure there. But I'm not going to throw out what, you know, a consensus opinion on someone,

you're not going to say, after a great season, you know, from Jared Goff, when he had a great season, but everyone's pointing out all of these reasons why he's a product of the system, a product of the coaching, things like that. I think you take that into account, but you don't ignore the other stuff either. You don't take it fully into account. So I think you have to bring those two things together. When it comes to someone like Kirk Cousins, I think in this last season, when you have a low volume passing attack, when you're running a lot on first and second down, then those pass attempts become much more important. There's kind of like very high leverage situations.

And you're throwing the ball down the field a lot. So, again, you're doing play action a lot. So these are plays that can swing in great measure in one direction or another. So I think Cousins had this amazing season, especially by these advanced statistical measures. But it was done in a way that, you know, it doesn't take that many plays, would have flipped one way or another, and it could have really turned the season

in a different direction. So I think that's also something to incorporate into your analysis when you look at quarterback, is what sort of confidence do we have in what we've seen? I'd be a lot more confident if it was a high-volume passing attack and it wasn't based on a lot of these play-action chunk plays, which ended up being successful.

But, you know, next year, Stephon Diggs is gone, something ends up happening, there's not a blown coverage, and then it's not as successful. So you've got to take all that into account. Yeah, I mean, one thing that came to mind is, first of all, a couple of games that they had in October where they played a mess of an Eagles secondary, a Giants team that had already given up on defense at that point, and a Washington team that threw in Dwayne Haskins halfway through the game because Case Keenum got hurt, and he immediately throws an interception, and you had lots of opportunities for Kirk to put

together a big game there. And even in Denver, they got down 20-0 and hit two huge plays to end up coming back in that game, which you don't take away from Cousins, but they were both wide-open throws down the field. One was to Kyle Rudolph, the other to Stephon Diggs, and you just don't really count on that happening every year. Gary Kubiak has always found ways to get guys open down the field, but you don't count on that the explosive plays that happened in those circumstances could happen again.

And that's what I was wondering is what we see for a projection or how we would go about statistically projecting someone forward. I looked at recently Kirk Cousins' average season for your box score stats, what his average season by PFF rankings is, even ESPN's QBR, which I know can be a really wonky stat. um in the big sample cousins averages being about the 11th best quarterback by espn qbr and about 13th by pff whereas last year he was borderline top five i think depending on how you search it he could be fifth or sixth if you include ryan tanhill's 270 passes or something but that small sample size element to a single season where you get hot or you have a couple of big games and you only threw 400 something passes, it can really make it look different than it might be. So how would you project Kirk Cousins going forward?

Yeah, I mean, it's funny that you mentioned that. I mean, we use some different, like I don't want to get into too much of the specifics here, but we use some different statistical measures, which it's going to weigh what happened most recently heavily, but it's not going to ignore what's happened before. I mean, I think if you want to just talk about a very easy way to think about quarterbacks, you know, like how did you feel about this quarterback a year ago versus how you feel about them today? Ryan Tannehill's a guy. Matthew Stafford is definitely a guy I've seen people putting him in the in the top five or six quarterbacks in the NFL this year uh Kirk Cousins is probably another guy although for some reason

people don't like him as much so maybe he hasn't jumped as much in people's standings but I think that's important where you want to say we want to we want to weigh what's happened most recently the most but we don't want to ignore what's happened in the past so we don't want to weigh what's happened most recently the most, but we don't want to ignore what's happened in the past. So we don't want to say this is where – Kirk Cousins has been this 10 to 15 sort of quarterback, and now he was maybe top five-ish last season. So I think what we want to expect from him is maybe to be in the top 10, but to expect him to be in the top five again is probably too much to ask just because we have so much more evidence of him being a 10 to 15

guy than we do of a top five guy well I can answer that for you on the frustration from Vikings fans about Kirk Cousins and some of the criticism I mean first of all now this doesn't really matter and I've looked into this and I know PFF has looked into this too but when you lose a lot of games on national TV that's what a lot of times people see. I remember the year that Sam Bradford played pretty well for Chip Kelly and the Philadelphia Eagles. I mean, he actually had a good season after about the first couple games, but his worst games were on national TV. So everyone thought when the Vikings traded for him that it was the worst trade of all time and Sam Bradford is awful. But when you went back and watched that season, a lot of it was

good. It was just that he had like a four-pick game against, I think, Arizona or whatever it was on national TV. So everyone remembers kind of what they saw. And Kirk, you always see those national TV numbers when he's playing at night. But there's also the other element of Cousins. And I wonder what you think about this, is that when he has a bad game, at least over the last two years in Minnesota, it has been a catastrophe. It has been a, you have no chance whatsoever to win when this guy

is not on his game. And I'll give you an example is the two games he played against Green Bay last year are games that I would have seen, I don't know, JP Lossman play when I was growing up in Buffalo there or late Drew Bledsoe, who was totally washed. And a lot of times he was great in games, and he had 300-plus yard games, quarterback ratings of 140, PFF grades of 90, but there were also games where he had one PFF grade of 25, which is in the extreme red. And I think that the Kirk coaster is what drives people crazy to go along with

also the fact that he's just not dynamic. He can't go off schedule. He's not going to run. He's not faster than you or me when it comes to escaping the pocket. It's just not an element of his game. And unlike Matt Stafford, he doesn't have this monster arm where he can make these crazy big-time throws. So I wonder how you parse all of that out for someone who is so good,

as Kirk Cousins is, but also has these glaring weaknesses and kind of a roller coaster of PFF grades that when you put them all together, it looks exactly like a stock market or something going up and down. Yeah, I think most quarterbacks have more volatile performances than people think. But it ends up being that those that play with a good defense. So it's like if you have a team that's going to keep you in the game, I think it really shifts around our perception of the quarterback. But there is something to being able to win in different situations, situational football.

And I think that while i rely most heavily on the on the overall numbers because we just want to know as much as possible when you start splitting things up enough you can you can get so much noise that you you're not really learning that much from it while you so i think while you want to allow for the biggest the biggest number and the most and the biggest sample you also want to be cognizant of these things. And it's perception, but it can also be reality. I mean, for instance, guys like – how someone like Lamar Jackson is viewed versus someone like Deshaun Watson.

I mean, Lamar Jackson was, you know, five-fold better in some of these efficiency metrics than someone like Deshaun Watson. But you see Deshaun Watson come back from multiple touchdowns. You see Deshaun Watson just put a team on his back throwing the ball, whereas we just haven't seen that from someone like Lamar Jackson. Whether he's capable of it or not, we'll end up seeing down the road, but we haven't seen it. So I think there is something to being able to win in different circumstances and adjust your game to different circumstances. That's something that I've heard people say about Kirk Cousins, and I think there may be some reality in that reality in that perception it even goes on like you're saying on these long third down plays the

ability to say I'm going to change my game to convert this rather than to avoid an interception or make a completion and I think those are things that are lacking so I definitely want to incorporate that but again that's adjusting off of the larger numbers that we have to judge someone before we get back to the conversation I want to remind you that there is no shortage of action going on right now at our exclusive partners at betonline.ag. Sports are slowly making their way back, and BetOnline is leading the way with the best odds and lines for all UFC, NASCAR, boxing, and soccer matches.

And if you need more, they have simulated NFL, NBA, and UFC simulations all day, every day, live on their website. Looking for something else other than sports? BetOnline has hundreds of casino games, poker tournaments, and prop bets to check out. Visit BetOnline.ag. Use the promo code BLUEWIRE for a free welcome bonus. That's one word, BLUEWIRE. BetOnline, your online wagering

experts. And I would call it the Jim McMahon or for a more recent generation, a Teddy Bridgewater type of effect where these guys did not have impressive fantasy stats. If you took them at the top of your fantasy draft, you weren't thrilled that you got Jim McMahon's 93 season with the Vikings, or 92. But he certainly found a way to win a lot of games without necessarily having huge statistics, playing to the score, playing to the game situation. And when Bridgewater was good in 2015, he had one of the best numbers when it came to, like, third down and long, third down efficiency with his passing.

He could make plays with his legs at that point. Who knows what he'll do with Carolina now post-injury, but that's why people were so excited about him, is that he seemed to have this element of game situation mattered where Cousins, sometimes it felt like it doesn't, where you're down 20 points and he's getting six yards at a time or something like that. I want to ask you about the different factors that go into an offense being successful because we spend a lot of time on offense and what makes a winning team, but I think that offense does make a winning team. Every team that's gone to the Super Bowl

since Denver did their all-time great defense has had, I think, a top four offense that year in terms of scoring. So I look at that as the first thing for what's going to make it seem successful. But in terms of impacting your successful or not successful offense, I want you to tell me where you kind of factor these things. I mean, schedule is a part of it. The Vikings had one of the easiest schedules in the league last year. But also, group of weapons, offensive line, and even how it plays off of your defense. We saw Tampa Bay's defense be impacted by Jameis throwing picks all the time. So the reverse effect, like how do we factor all of these types of things? Yeah, I mean, again, I think it's sticking as much as we can to looking at these efficiency metrics on a per play basis. So for those reasons, things like field position are extracted a little

bit from that because it's more just you have to make that much. You have to be that much better on a per-play basis in order to score points depending upon where the field position is. I mean, I would say from the offensive basis, we see the quarterback obviously as being by far the most important thing. We also, according to our metric and how we've looked at valuing players based upon their grades and kind of running these simulations with them in and out of the game, we that wide receiver is the the second most important position uh across

even on offense and defense now it's very difficult to separate receivers from quarterbacks um so we know that that's that's part of it that makes it tough but that's what we end up seeing and then if you're looking at the rest of the offense when it comes to the offensive line for us we don't place as much value on that but it's not that it's it's unimportant it's just it's a position where baseline performance is very important so it's important to have baseline performance but to have perfect reps or to pancake block someone or and these sorts of things just aren't as important as filling your function. And Belichick, just do your job, basically. A guy who does his job most often is the most valuable person on that line, not someone who's making a spectacular play and then whiffing on a block the next time around.

So for that reason, we don't put as much importance there. And that's kind of how we're looking at that. Of course, the pass game is first. The run game definitely matters. But the pass game, we're probably going to say, is at least twice as predictive on what's going to end up happening as the run game. Now, on the defensive side, this is where things get really hairy

because I just did my rudimentary look at this, where teams ranked who were in the top five the following season, and it's always, almost always, a big drop. So maybe Baltimore, I think, carried over, but we even saw this with the Vikings in 2017. They're the number one defense in the NFL. They bring every player back on the defense, and then they drop to ninth, which doesn't sound like that much, but in terms of points, that might be 50 or 60 points over a season that you change. So how do we deal with this when we're trying to predict what a team is going to be, and

especially a team like the Vikings that have so much turnover on the defensive side this year, but a head coach who has consistently kept his defenses in the top 10 for a long time. Yeah, I mean, we talked about schedule before. Now, schedule is going to play a much, much bigger impact on defense than it is on offense. I mean, so offense, the performance year over year is about twice as stable as it is for defense. And if you think about the big plays that really drive defensive performance, turnovers are huge, huge in how they drive defensive performance. Fumble, it's going to be mostly luck, whether or not the other team fumbles

or not and who ends up recovering it. Interceptions, now, you know, if you want to just think about how much we can predict that. I mean, how confident are you predicting, you know, how many interceptions Aaron Rodgers is going to throw next year versus how many interceptions the Chicago Bears defense is going to get next year? Obviously, you know the first thing so much better than you know the second. So that's when it's really going to come into who are you playing, who are the quarterbacks, who are the passing offenses that you're playing there. So I think that's extremely important. Now, another factor in stability that's been studied that people probably don't think about enough is there isn't a quarterback of the defense.

There isn't one player where you can point to them year over year and say, hey, if this person is still there, we're going to have a good defense. But the defensive coordinator, we've actually found a lot of stability from that. And when a defensive coordinator leaves, you're really changing the system so much and how those pieces fit together really depends on what they're asked to do in a system more than it does on offense, where you can really isolate player performance.

So I think that's an important thing. And probably the stability that Zimmer's given them, while it doesn't ensure that you're gonna have a top five defense every year, it does give you a better chance of having a really high floor defense yeah and it's a heck of a starting point to have is knowing that you are at very least going to give yourself a chance to make the playoffs and that's why even when things have gone catastrophe for the vikings during the zimmer era they've won seven games in 2014 where they took a huge step forward they won eight games two other times

and those seasons have felt like the whole world was falling apart, and yet they were still right there in the hunt each season in large part because of their defense. Now, before I let you go, Kevin, and this has been about the biggest brain football talk we've had on the show, but I want you to tell me across the league, when you look at some of the numbers, is there somebody on either side of this coin that might surprise people that you would look at and say, you know what, they're probably going to drift back or not be as good as you think, or as good as they're being hyped up this offseason for whatever factors. And then on the other side, somebody who's not being talked about at all, that could actually take a big step forward. I mean, I've been saying this for a couple of years now,

and that the Seattle Seahawks are going to take a step back. But it hasn't happened. So that's why they get to make good meme videos every single year, because everyone trashes them at the beginning of the season, because they're just not that talented, quite honestly, on defense and outside of Russell Wilson. And they've had this combination of, I think the respect for Russell Wilson, the level that it's at right now, is an all-time high. Deservedly so, but maybe that wasn't there before.

So now I think he is probably properly rated at this point. I mean, people have listed him as being maybe the only truly elite quarterback other than Patrick Mahomes. I think he's properly rated. And that defense, I mean, they've held it together, but I don't know if they really have that much talent. It's really been a situation where they've run this retrograde offensive system and they've allowed, and we talk about small samples, we talk about the big plays. Russell Wilson can give that consistently, but you're asking to do that year over year over year. So I think that would be one team where I'd be a little concerned about them, especially because the division is so difficult with the Arizona Cardinals on the rise,

in addition to the Rams and the 49ers. So I think that would be one team I'm probably down on more than others. As far as the team that I'm a little bit higher on than others, I mean, I think the Cleveland Browns, although it's just going to be an interesting year to end up seeing. I mean, I think the Cleveland Browns, although it's just going to be an interesting year to end up seeing. I mean, I'm more confident in their coaching. Obviously, you're very familiar with Kevin Stefanski and what's going on there.

So I'm more confident as far as that's concerned. And maybe I believe in Baker Mayfield a little bit more than others, not only because of his rookie year, but just because he was so good in college. So again, we have that long history. And he's another guy in the flip side. You say, what did you think about this guy in the flip side, you say,

what did you think about this guy a year ago versus what you think about him now? And the drop has been so precipitous that I think it's fair to say he's somewhere between those two perceptions. Yeah, the Freddy Kitchens experiment was a disaster. But with Kevin Stefanski, he's a guy that's been through so much with so many different offensive systems and head coaches that he's worked with, and has the great respect of everyone in the Vikings organization. I think he's one of those guys that is across the board appreciated for his intelligence and his modern way of thinking, his belief in analytics and also his ability to connect with players. And I think he could take a much more professional approach probably than

Freddie Kitchens, who was way in over his head. And the way that Stefanski worked with Gary Kubiak in an unorthodox situation, I think said a lot last year about Kevin Stefanski. And we talk about the play actions, the bootlegs, and for quarterbacks who might be younger or struggle a little bit on the quick processing and quick getting the ball out, well, those bootlegs are perfect, and Kirk Cousins showed that last year. So I'm with you on Cleveland. They're just Cleveland, so you always kind of have to hesitate, and I will be sure to send this clip to Seattle Seahawks Twitter, which is always one of the most, you know, volatile maybe, Seahawks Twitter,

or at very least funniest for sure. So Kevin Cole, this has been awesome, an incredible breakdown of how to figure out if your football team is good. I don't know. Are you at PFFKevin on Twitter or underscore or something? What is the Kevin Cole Twitter? Yeah, there was another Kevin, so I'm actually at KevinColePFF all together. So I've broken the tradition, I know there.

But then the boss man, Chris Collinsworth, I believe is just Collinsworth PFF. So I'm okay there. Yeah. Well, he gets to do what he wants. And luckily, I mean,

most people, you have a short, easy last name, but if George sure hurry put his last name on Twitter, no one would ever find him. So that's true. Kevin, this has been great.

I, it was exactly what I hoped for when I was saying, I want to catch up with Kevin Cole and your breakdown is terrific. People can read your work at pff.com and I appreciate everybody listening to this episode of Purple Insider.