The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - The strongest analytic and schematic trends of 2025, with Sam Schwartzstein

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

Every NFL season brings us some sort of advance in analytics and schematics, and spending some time every December looking back at this season's developments is one of our favorite things to do before we turn the page to the playoffs. Sam Schwartzstein, Amazon Prime's analytics expert, joins Robert Mays on this episode of The Athletic Football Show to dive deep on this season's analytic and schematic trends, and preview the monster Week 16 TNF game between the Rams and Seahawks.Connect with The Athletic Football ShowYT: https://www.youtube.com/@TAFootballShowPodcasts: https://podfollow.com/the-athletic-football-show/viewX: https://x.com/TA_FootballShowIG: https://www.instagram.com/tafootballshowTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tafootballshowDiscord: http://discord.gg/theathleticfootballshowCall us: 847-448-0701Email us: [e-mail]: Robert MaysCo-Hosts: Derrik Klassen and Dave HelmanExecutive Producer: Michael BellerVideo Producer: Katy DuffyAudio Producer: Michael BellerSocial Producer: Scott KrinchFollow Robert on Bluesky: @robertmays.bsky.socialFollow Derrik on Bluesky: @qbklass.bsky.socialFollow Dave on Bluesky: @davehelman.bsky.socialFollow Robert on X: @robertmaysFollow Derrik on X: @QBKlassFollow Dave on X: @davehelman_Theme song: HauntedWritten by Dylan Slocum, Trevor Dietrich, Ruben Duarte, Kyle McAulay, and Meredith VanWoert / Performed by Spanish Love SongsCourtesy of Pure Noise / By arrangement with Bank Robber Music, LLC Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. Really good one on tap for you guys today. Our old buddy Sam Schwartzstein from Prime Vision, their analytics expert, is here to just talk about the year in like analytic and schematic trends, essentially. Sam does a phenomenal job prepping for these games. We actually got into a little bit of his process and how he preps for some of these games. But they've done 15. This is going to be the 16th Prime Vision game that they've done this year. and so I just wanted to kind of mine him for what he has learned going through those 16 games. And so we dug into some of the large-scale schematic trends in the NFL this season, some of the large-scale analytics trends in the NFL this season, before talking about some of the work specifically like pocket health that they are doing

on those Prime Vision broadcast this year. And then we finish things off with a quick preview of the best Thursday night football game of the year and a reprise of maybe the best football game of the year with the Rams in the Seahawks. So really enjoyed this conversation with Sam. Thank you guys will as well. Let's get to it right now. Joining us now, it is one of our favorite friends of the show. The analytics expert for Thursday Night Football on Prime Video, our old buddy Sam Schwartzstein. Sam, how you doing, man? What's up, Rob? We're going to be back. Excited to have you here. What we're doing today, I wanted to just kind of mine you for information, if that's okay with you. That's what we're going to do today. Always is. Always is. It's December 17th. And so you guys have done what?

15-ish games on Prime so far this year. We have the biggest Thursday night game of the year coming up today, which we will talk about a little bit. We never really preview the Thursday night games on this feed. I think just because of the way the schedule works, if we didn't preview this Thursday night game, considering you're on and the Falcon or the Seahawks are playing the Rams tomorrow, I think I'd be like shirking my professional duty. So we are going to dig into that. So that'll be game 16. So you've had almost an entire season to just dive headfirst into every single aspect of who

these teams are, how they approach things, the analytical side of it, the schematic side of it. And I wanted to just try to figure out like five or six lessons, themes, takeaways you've had from doing that work about the 2025 NFL season. So we're really just going to have you try to download your brain today on the athletic football show and see how far that gets us. Yeah, I think, you know, you guys are seeing a lot of the same things that we're seeing, especially listening each week. So I think probably the biggest thing for me is how we spend a lot of time in Alex Camille, isolating and analyzing singular scenarios. But so much of this game, especially in 22-5, is connected.

You see teams going under center more. And because not even to run the ball well, like we have the Seahawks, they don't even run the ball well. they just want to present everything to be similar. I think probably four years ago, the first time I was on this podcast, we talked about what analytics means to me. The number one thing it is, do the thing your opponent is not expecting,

disguising coverages, which is all over the place now. We have these conversations about pure progression reads versus concept area reads, and it's because there's too many disguised coverages. Team defenses are doing things that you're not expecting them to do.

We see that with defensive alert. We've had to update defensive alert every single year since we launched it. That's our blitz, identification model that we use that you'll see on Thursday night main broadcast as well as Prime Vision to be able to update for what teams are doing, including coverage, including a bunch of different aspects of the game as it's changing from where we started four years ago. But for me, I go back to, and it's what we're going to see a ton of on Thursday night this

week is sometimes to go forward, you need to go backwards. And we're seeing under center, we're seeing play action, we're seeing all the buzzwords, which went away. And I was joking with a friend of mine about, you know, why did we ever start going away from under center on third down? Well, it was these double mug fronts. You could not block it up effectively. You were going to put a running back on a D-end or a D-tackle every time in double mug on third down.

So that led to teams running gun. And then gun just took over everywhere. Teams are running in college. Now we're seeing teams with veteran quarterbacks. Hey, you can run a little bit of that old school stuff and make the defense play a little off kilter just from where you align. the quarterback. And it's, it's, it's, it's funny to see that that's the innovation this year that I'm seeing the most of. Maybe it's going to so deep in this Thursday. But seeing that teams are like looking back in time to get better has been interesting. So we're going to try to hit a couple

different buckets. I want to do some schematic stuff and some analytical stuff. Obviously, those are going to blend in some of the conversations that we're having. It doesn't go as cleanly as you wanted to. But I think this is kind of a schematic thought to be had about the 2025 season. And I'm curious about your thoughts on this. Because the way that I've come to understand this. And I've talked to Sean about this many times over the last 10 years. It's to me, it's like, it's been at the crux of several football conversations I've had with Sean McVeigh since he became the Rams head coach about what the arc of the Rams' offenses looked like specifically because I think if you look at the Rams, they are often a canary in

the coal mine or whatever other metaphor you want to use about where the league is going. And so when they moved away from that under center play action stuff when Matthew got there in 2021, My understanding of that is because a lot of the defensive structures had started to change to take away a lot of the routes and the concepts that were best exploited coming off of under center play action. So when you're living in a single high world and you have all this single high post safety, if you're going to be running all these big crossing routes back across the middle of the field against cover three teams, which was the meta at the time, you can keep

finding all of these explosives. Well, if we're going to now be in an umbrella coverage world where you're sitting in a too high shell and you're rotating one of those safeties down. And that rotating safety is essentially dropping right down into the window where you're going to run all those crossing routes. That's one deterrent. The other deterrent is the quarterback, the picture is going to change by the time he gets his head back around because all of these teams are playing disguised coverages. What's so interesting to me about this, that meta has not changed. that is still the same, but teams are now tapping back into the undercenter play action world. And my sense is that the reason that that has been worth it in the kind of the calculation and the gambit they're running is that even if the coverages may not necessarily be best exploited by us being able to be under center and use play action in the way that they would have been in 2017, 2018.

The benefits, because it makes us so much less predictable, are worth it even if it's not necessarily as fit to the modern game as it would have been in the NFL 10 years ago. Do you think that is like a fair calculus in terms of how we've arrived at this point? Yes, I think you're a pretty smart guy and so is Sean McVeigh. So yes, of course. You know, like I absolutely think so. I think another part of the McVeigh innovations is they went to a lot of pistol. when Stafford first got there. And it is, it is.

That was their big thing in 23. In 23, they were like, we're going to be a pistol team. And then they were a pistol team. And, you know, what happens is, I want to give a little bit of a play call education to some people. When you're running a run play, we'll call it 96 zone, which was their big zone. They're outside zone. Six gap being an outside gap, nine being the position that's getting the football. That's the running back.

That's what they called it. Would you want to run play action off of that? It's called Pass 96. So you're just ready to the exact same thing as an offensive line, and it's mirroring back. But when the back's track is to a certain point, the quarterback exits, their ball handling skills, they exit at a different point. So those two are always married together. Now with the Rams being more of a duo team, and I don't know what number nomenclature they called it. We called it 92 duo.

So more inside, close to the center. That's where you would hit inside on that play. You read that three technique on the front side. Now with the past play is doing that, the quarterback can actually set up directly behind the center. What McVeigh first did that screwed me up because I'd never heard of it, we had inside zone, we had outside zone. There was no thing called mid zone.

So I would scream at people online as an uneducated person say, what the heck are you talking about midzone? We can't just rebrand inside zone. But that is what they call it. It's what they call. But that also is talking about a couple of coaches that have been. in there on similar systems, it lets you run similar landmarks up front for the offensive line, but from the past game off of it, the quarterback has a different landmarker when they end up.

And so when we talk about everything's connected, especially for these teams, even changing slight nomenclature and slight coaching points on run plays changes what you can do past play-wise. Because when you run a vertical play, safeties and linebackers fill differently than if you're running an outside play. And by that, it opens up different passing windows. So by marrying the two together, now being a more duo downhill team, that creates more open areas that would not have been there had they been that original golf. You know, team started standing up that D-end, which is like, you know, in Stanford,

it would be illegal to run outside zone to us. We're bootlegging to a stand-up end. That would just not possible. We're not running that play that week. So it's, it's how much can these teams marry and then adapt from if there's a run game innovation, like the duo run, which I'm not the biggest fan of, but the teams that do it well, it's amazing. And then you can run duo pass off of it, which I am a huge fan of.

So talking out of both sides of my mouth here. It's interesting. I think that makes total sense. And I also, I'm curious what you think about this, but just at first glance, it would seem that by doing some of that more vertical play action stuff where you're getting to set up behind the center. And the Lions are another great example of this, right? Like, it's kind of ironic that Jared started doing a ton of it after he left L.A.,

but that's pretty much what the Lions passing game looks. like off play action. And number one overall picks can do a lot of good things. You know, like that's my team draft them, you know? Like, when you do that, you're not cutting off half the field. And so you actually can access more of the passing game off play action than you would have been able to when we were in sort of an outside zone boot world. So it's almost like you're combining these two different things where the reason the Rams

went to such a specific dropback plays is because they had a quarterback who, you watch Matthew Stafford play. every blade of grass is on the table when Matthew Stafford is your quarterback, and that's what they wanted. And so now it feels like they're trying to get all of the benefits and the unpredictable, unpredictable nature of the combination of run game under center stuff while still wanting to access every blade of grass in the passing game. And part of the reason that you can do that is because you have a more vertical play action game instead of a boot play action game that's cutting off certain opportunities. Yeah, it's definitely fun to nerd. the way. Football rules.

And a team's going to figure this out, and the team's going to come up with a new personnel grouping. You know, I've seen teams to stop quick game recently, dropping players that have no idea what they're doing dropping. But, hey, if you're going to answer a blitz with quick game, I'm just going to get hands up. You know, we have the Andrew Vinkles of the world who are masters at it. We saw it last week.

Colby Parkinson had a 51% target rate entering the week in the red zone. So what is Aidan Hutchinson dude? Oh, he sees that he won too quickly. I'm getting hands up. You know, and like it's new things are going to come all the time. And it really is the coolest thing in the world because it's never going to be solved. Let's go from a schematic thing. I think we can talk about the personnel stuff as well because that kind of blends both worlds.

And I do want to hit that as well. Is there anything purely from a like strategic or math perspective that has really come up for you a lot this year that kind of goes beyond like offensive or defensive exes and knows? We can even talk about kicking here if you want to. but like a strategic or analytic trend. What we're talking about? It's the same. Kicking is the same this year in the NFL as it's been since I started covering the sport.

Yeah. I think what I've been fascinated with is that the fourth down execution by teams and it's different across the board. We're seeing a new meta. There's a lot of teams at the Institute of the Tush Push, fall starting or not. There are teams that are just doing it with tight ends. And that's more and more.

And what's great about it is years ago when they first introduced this, it was all about, hey, we need to actually practice it. I remember the Giants ran a tush push on national televised game. They never practiced it. They're just like, oh, we're just going to do it years ago. And now we're seeing teams do it. Could be the last year of it. But teams do that. And that's, and we're seeing not a lot of teams question whether they go for it.

You're seeing a lot of teams knowing on play call design, we have, again, two teams that run the ball the most coming up on, Thursday night this week with the Seahawks and the Rams on third and medium plus. So third and three plus is they're running the ball at the highest clip because they can go for it on fourth down. The Seahawks don't as much. They rely on their defense. But the Rams, they're historically not a big fourth down team, not a big decision-making team. They went for it twice last week on the first series where there was no recommendation to go for it. It was a wonky area of the field, yeah, but they went on fourth and four and a fourth and seven.

And what they do is they just go to Pug and Akua. I like how, you know, Matthew Stafford covers, looks at all blades of grass. but most of them have to involve Puka Nakura, Devante Adams in some capacity. And it's how can I find those guys in the right spots? And I think that's been a big thing. And, you know, I originally hired to help explain some of these decision-making processes,

and I still help on Prime Vision go for two down eight and go for two, down-nine-type scenarios. But I feel like more and more teams are just adapting to this updated meta of the game, of utilizing the analytics to help them. And I think most important people need to figure out is I'll never tell you exactly what a team should do because I'm not in their meeting rooms. I do not know what their two-point play is.

I do not know where they feel how good they are in fourth and four. So I wouldn't go and tell you that Sean McVeigh shouldn't go for it. It's not analytically sound to go for it. But if you feel confident, because that's really what conversion probability, a lot of this stuff is made up of what have teams or have you performed well in similar scenarios around the league in this place, this game state. But if you're not ready for it, don't overuse the analytics. in my opinion. So my, the McVeigh part of this is definitely something worth paying attention to because,

like you said, they were not historically a team that was going forward a lot on forked down. So watching what they've done all season, especially what they did last week, it's like, holy shit. We are now in a different world. To me, the, I cannot believe we've arrived in this place, the Pittsburgh Steelers went for it on fourth and one from their own 30-yard line in the first half of an NFL game last week. Like that, imagine if I told you three years ago, we're going to be watching a Mike

Tomlin team that's going to go for it on fourth and one from their own 30. Remember when Kevin Stefansky did that for like the first time and people lost their minds? Like it was just, it broke people's brains that a coach would even consider doing that. And now we have Mike Tomlin doing it on national television. And there's still some consternation about it. But for the most part, the response to it is kind of like, yeah, that's just kind of how we do things now, which just seems like a crazy place to have reached. The right place, but a wild place. That would have been your inception totem to wake up that you were in the dream because,

okay, this is not real. Sorry, this is not, this is a fantasy world we're living in. Yeah, I think what it comes down to is the play design. I think ultimately, that's what people don't really get about numbers and analytics is just teaching you play design and where you can be more creative. And then putting Cam Hayward in to do the Tush Push and Darnell Washington, who finally admitted his weight. That's why on our show we put 300 plus pounds because we were like, we're definitely not putting his list at 265. And so like, you know, him at 311 pushing Cam Hayward a tight end, like not Cam Hayward, but his brother. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, hey, that is, that is where this stuff comes in. Analytics

are exposing you to where you can be unique. And now with the dynamic kickoff, where teams now in the end of the season have been electing to do touchbacks and they're going to give you the starting field position at the 35 because they don't want to have the dynamic return. And so you're seeing a lot of teams even want to go for it more because if you're giving the ball back at the 35, every coach can do that cost analysis going, all right, I really need to go and score touchdowns. If you're going for it backed up, teams are now figuring out that two times three is less than seven because that's really the calculus on a lot of these fourth down decisions.

Oh, every time you kick a field goal, you cannot score a touchdown on that drive. and you have likely 12 drives per game. So you need to maximize your touchdown drives over field goal drives. That's ultimately what this is. So I think seeing teams do that and then seeing teams midseason trades have been big. I know that's something that you guys cover a lot of. Like we saw player for player trades. You know, we've seen teams trying to maximize in season.

So I think that's also teams trying to go all in has been cool to see. This year specifically on the all-in front, it just feels like this was the year to do it because I know I was guilty of this. We were guilty of this on our show where I think there was a lot of just benefit to the doubt of the mainstay teams with the mainstay quarterbacks. Those are going to be the teams that you have to worry about. Teams like the Broncos, the Patriots, the Niners. You know, I praise the Niners and the Patriots for not doing anything at the trade deadline

because I was like, good for you guys understanding like what you actually are. This probably isn't the season. And then you're sitting there last week and it's like, maybe the Patriots should have done more at the trade deadline. Like that's how quickly it happened. but you think about like the Jacobi Myers trade and the fact that the Jacobi Myers trade in the moment because we had higher profile trades that day

it kind of got lost in the shelf a little bit where it's like I know I like flippantly made the joke we already have a Jacobi Myers at home with Parker Washington. Jacobi Myers has been great and he has been transformative for the Jaguars offense and they got him for a fourth and a sixth round pick like in the moment that would seem like

what is this really going to do for us in the back half of the season but it clicked immediately and because all these teams feel so jumbled together, something as seemingly modest as a trade for Jacoby Myers midway through the season might be enough to make the Jaguars a dangerous team in the AFC playoffs. It's a weird season.

It's a incredibly weird season. Yeah, I mean, when I was doing the XFL, I would talk to all the sports books and the sports commissions to try and carry our games. And one sports book, when I offered to give them a bunch of preseason game data, they said, I don't need your data. This is at the line. I just need the two quarterbacks.

And I was like, what do you mean? It's like, just give me the two quarterbacks. They'll touch up to be worth around seven points. They'll feel those worth around three points, right? I was like, yeah, he goes, just give me the two quarterbacks. And I was like, so I've kind of lived by that motto when I look at team strength, you know, like, but this is not the year to do it. I think one of the cool things, too, is like, when you think about like rookie contract windows, everyone thinks quarterback. I think for us on Thursday, it's this defense.

The lowest paid defense in the NFL is Los Angeles Rams. And they're one of the best in the NFL. Like, they're in a lot of their rookie wins. window contracts for a lot of the guys on the team. And so I think you're seeing teams that are kind of going and weirdly all in. We had Jacoby Myers on the Raiders the week he got traded. And so I had a bunch of third down stuff, one of the highest third down target rates. And I was like, oh, well, I get to throw this in the garbage now.

And so that trade surprised me too. And I think what these teams will do to try and make a huge playoff push. And it will come down to a lot of the high leverage plays to kind of cap off analytics. Like football is not poker, but there are certain hands in poker on your plane that are going to be the highest leverage plays that you can. And it's a very similar in football. The team that wins fourth down will often win the game because it's a turnover or keeping possession or keeping a touchdown drive alive. And I think that we've seen last year it was the commanders who way over leveraged fourth down conversions to get them into the playoffs and succeed in the playoffs. And we're seeing that again this year.

The teams that can really benefit from fourth down, and almost every Panthers game where they're winning is because they had some massive leverage swings on fourth downs. And I think we always talk about expected points and fractional points and things like that. At the end of the day, you either win or you don't. You score or you don't. The results do matter. Being results-oriented does matter. So I think teams are going to find, hey, let's go all in a few times per game. And that's where we'll have our success.

There are two things that you said that I want to just drill down on a little bit more. The kickoff part of this and the fact that the 35 feels like a dangerous place to allow teams to start. And I think that's why you had so many teams not willing to kick touchbacks early in the season. And maybe this is anecdotal, but I'm curious what your number say about this. Are we inching toward a place where making sure the opponent is starting on the 35 is less dangerous than them starting at midfield? because we've seen so many of those kickoffs this year. Think about the Bills game. Think about the Bills Patriots game.

If those kickoff returns don't happen, do the bills win that game? And so I know that coming into this season, that's the reason that the touchback got moved to the 35, is if you look at points per drive based on a starting field position of the 35-yard line, that was the tipping for it for teams where they were saying, you know what? No, we're going to abide by the rules here. We're going to embrace the spirit of this thing.

and we're going to allow kickoff returns to happen. Do you think we're getting to a place where teams are going to be risk-averse again because the downside of giving a team the ball on the plus 45 compared to the minus 35 is worth it in the calculus for some of these teams? Two things. I hope not. I clearly love the dynamic kickoff return. But last week we saw the Buccaneers kick a touchback every single time.

And that was outdoors. You know, the team's in the dome. I think the biggest thing is, like you said, I don't want the risk. but also I really want the practice time. I get limited time with these guys. I want to do my third down cards. I'm scared of third down blitz period. Or if you're Todd Bulls, I want to maximize my time

to make sure I have the exact looks I want on third down blitzes. And I think that's a big battle in offices right now. And, you know, if there's a guy like Rashid Shaheed, I would be surprised if they're given the ball to Rashid Shaheed to return it with one of the best kickoff return. But it's so funny. You talk about the positives. if you can do the dirty ball kick or the line drive kick

and you can have a team start inside the 20, that's just as massive as starting the plus 40. You starting inside your own 20 is a huge aspect. And you can dirty ball kick in the NFL and they could just have it bounce and hit the field of play. You're only kicking from the 35. There are some easy ways to get that thing rolling out the back of the end zone. You don't have to have them hit it.

I think if teams wanted to practice that, it would give them even more advantage or teaching their team to cover, you're also losing plays if the if the Buccaneers had kicked timed down. So what people don't understand is by having returns, you're actually shortening the game.

It's eight seconds per return, and it shortens the game because that's a timed down. When you kick a touchback, it's untimed down. I'm sure they would want to have had to limit some of the time the Falcons had to come back by kicking it in the field of play to have some more time or give the Falcons less time to come back.

It's funny to me because when you're talking, about you have 12 drives a game and if you are kicking field goes on those drives can't score touchdowns i've really gotten to a place and i i'm i'll be honest i'm one of the nerds online that's just like i want to go for it on fort down all the time because in my mind now the way that i think about the sport is that it is a sport of possessions you only have so many possessions over the course of a game and if you are it's it almost come and i'm not like an analytics expert but like from my like very novice brain it kind of reminds me a little bit of how baseball got to three true outcomes where it's like if I'm bunting,

I only have 27 outs over the course of a game. If I'm giving a team an out, that is an incredibly valuable thing to sacrifice. And so if we're punting or if we're kicking field goals on four down, we only have 12 possessions, it's a possession-centric sport and we should value the possessions more. At the same time, this year has been like a resounding example of how much field position also matters.

And so it's like this crazy kind of push pull of it being a possession-based sport, but also a very stark reminder that a 20-yard difference in field position goes a long, long way in the quality of those drives. And so I don't know where in the field position versus total possessions battle,

I sit and which side of the line because I think this year has been a confusing one on that front. I think I'm so with you, man. And like I send you a lot of my stuff I work on in the off-season get your advice. but one of the things we're working on a lot was the end-of-game suite, which is trying to give you that path to victory, when you're going to get the ball back,

and ultimately when can you go to victory formation on our show? And when you look at it, the average possession in the fourth quarter is 237. And so when you're on defense, you need to get a stop before that 237 to try and increase your chance to come back. But I also was like, why are teams not starting the four-minute offense at 10 minutes?

if you're up two possessions, do it. And then I go, well, because they're built for pass. So if you're a team that's built for the run like the Rams are, you can start closing out possessions. And one of the things we looked at is, oh, the bills actually are not, don't have that many possessions in the fourth quarter. And we thought originally, oh, you know,

they're going too fat or they're not going, their defense is letting teams move the ball on them. No, they're starting four minute earlier. And because they're committed to the ground game, they can close games out better. If you're committed to the past game and you're trying to pass all the time, we had another issue.

The Buccaneers decided to throw the ball in second and 14 last week. They throw an incompletion. That's 45 seconds that they're then going to lose on the expected time because that time running through the play added 40 seconds.

Now, David Sills catches the ball with 40 seconds left. The game would have been over on that third and 28, but it's not because of the team's not committed to try and run some clock because at the end of the game, limiting your game,

their opponent's possessions to come back is just as valuable because if a team's banking on 12 and they end up with 11, you may win. And so I'm like battling this and you're, there's the Chip Kelly's of the world run so much so you get their 14 and 16 possessions like old school college football. And then you have the teams, which is great for television, the Kansas City Chiefs that play so many one score games because they're too successful. They always run the clock. And so they were at like 10 possessions per game.

Last year they were like a little over nine possessions per game. and so it's like, oh, where are you going to balance how we're going to maximize this early game possessions and minimize your opponent's possessions later in the game? And again, like you're saying, I can talk out of both sides of my mouth on what's valuable. I truly don't know. And that's what's fun about this is that it's so far from being solved. But I do think the quality of a lot of the decision making has improved. And I think a perfect example of this.

And I want to ask you about this specifically, watching what Mike McDonald did with the timeouts. And I loved him shouting out his game in. management guy after the game, he got a game ball. We just have more people in these roles that are optimizing decision-making in these situations for these teams. So when you look at timeout usage at the end of these games, do you think that what in your mind have been the hallmarks of the improvements in how teams and coaches are handling in the aggregate these situations in a better way than they would have been five, ten years

ago? I think teams are really good at not wasting them on offense because you have control and whether you can stop the clock on offense a lot of the time. So teams have gotten really good. Everyone knows call defensive timeouts, start calling them. We see teams calling them at five minutes, two-score game. It's 50-50 split across the league. And around three minutes, that's when teams really start committing to calling their timeouts.

I think what's really good is, like you said, implied outcomes. So when you get to your opponent at a certain point in the field, you'll start calling timeouts, assuming they're going to score. We saw it with the Cardinals. Seahawks game the first time around and they started calling timeouts because the Cardinals got inside the five-yard line or inside the 10-yard line.

There are your maximum amount of plays you can have. You can run 28 seconds off the clock because you have the seven seconds per play, four plays. They can't have more of that unless there's a penalty. And so you know, okay, I can start calling timeouts. Instead of letting them score, call the timeouts and hedge

on how much you need to time come back in the game. And they were able to win because of it. And then Brian Ayers, again, guy who I've talked to for you, years he was there with Pete Carroll. He's been at many different roles. And the way that Seattle has their analytics group set up is amazing. They're very forward thinking as well as current thinking. They're thinking 10 years in the future and also on current time, not just how do I solve today? And I think what they're able to do on making sure that they're getting, hey,

what's the most likely outcome for this drive for the offense to maximize my time to come back. I think we're not seeing a lot of people wasted or will take the delay a game now on third and seven to go to third. It's shocking when they don't. It's shocking when you see a team burn a time out on offense to save those five yards because I think we've so quickly realized that it's the wrong way to handle those situations. But again, imagine a team even five years ago, especially 10 years ago, taking a delay of game instead of calling a time out, they would get excoriated. Like, the criticism in the moment would be so resounding. And now it's the exact opposite where we know for a fact that's the wrong thing to do.

I feel like that happened much quicker than I was paying attention to in real time. Yes. And I think what's happening, we talked about this earlier in the year, but I think analytics is being demystified a lot of ways because of LLMs and people interacting with data in more unique and easier ways where it can be explained to you. and just like all things time. You know, we would have never thought we'd be spending so much time on cell phones. There's a famous AT&T McKinsey right up where McKinsey said, don't ever invest in cellular telephones. It's never going to be good enough.

There won't be widespread enough. So like, this is not anti-McKinsey, but I'm just saying they did write that report for AT&T. As I work through the crippling addiction I have to my telephone. Hey, look, we barely use it for actual phone calls now. still call the telephone. So it's like, I think, I think that just time has helped a lot of people, but also people's integration. I think like podcast, I give a lot of credit to Ben Baldwin being so crazy online about fourth downs

and making fourth downs accessible because guess what? Owners and coaches and players, they all have Twitter. They see these conversations and it gets into their brain over time. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then I want to come back and dig into a little bit more schematic nerdery with you. Let's do it. All right.

So we had the under center stuff. Okay. And the return to under center, which by the way, I just cannot love it more. Not only from like the proficiency of it and like the veracity of the choice, just stylistically, like this is what football is to me. Like, and so going back to this place has been so beautiful. Like I just love the fact that, oh yeah, the best, the smart good thing to do is to have an under center and play action game that are tied together. That's the best thing to do in the NFL. 2025. I love that we've arrived back here. That aside, anything else schematically that you think

has been like a drumbeat this year that's been particularly important and you feel has kind of been an indicator of what good football looks like in 2025. I do want to do one quick thing on the under center stuff is like I'm talking to Kirk Herb Street this week preparing for the game. And he was like 13 personnel under center. What is this? Stanford 2011. We had Levine 12 Lolo. So true. Zach Ertz and Kobe Fleener. Kobe Fleener played the Kobe Parkinson role who would split on it, wide receiver. And it's like, what, like this is, like you guys were doing this years ago.

Like, it's not like the craziest innovation. And I think to me, you hit it earlier on the year on the podcast, but like the guys like Jackson Hawes, where you're getting these hyper specialized players that can do things that make the other team go, what am I going to do here? And he's him from a blocking tight end perspective. but it's much better than reporting eligible Spencer Anderson type of guy. He's not actually going to get the football. Having a guy who can actually catch football,

he caught a football on TNF earlier in the year for a touchdown. And so the specialized players, whether it's Nick and I'm going to get his name wrong. Evan Wari, thank you. I'll be good tomorrow. He specialized. Over 220 pounds playing nickel. And they're like, oh, the, the,

Seahawks never got out of nickel defense against Rams 13 personnel in week 11. Yeah, you don't have to. This guy's massive. So he can move. And it's like, you know, old school Bill Belichick style, Swiss Army Knife players that you can play on offense. Defense, Kyle Hamilton is crazy to me because he's listed as a safety. And then he's playing Sam on linebacker like old school 25 fronts that we saw in college. And like if you told me, oh, a safety is playing the Sam on linebacker in an unlawful.

underfront, I'd have been like, oh, we're running out that guy all day. Well, guess what? Teams can't do it. You have a guy who's playing who's the defense changed when he played the deep half earlier in the year and now he's playing on the ball. I think finding these players that you can do anything with, this positionless football, for a center, I would freak out. Anytime I saw something wonky, I hated spinners where the defensive end would stand up as a linebacker because I don't have to explain to the guard, well, he's not actually. And then you love what the Rams do where, Eight and zero were the same number versus Byron Young. Like, come on. Then they're going to wear the midnights and I'm going to go, what, I can't see these numbers. Like, come on, I'm screaming with a mouth garden. I think those are different ways that teams have schematically changed the game by, what makes this all, again, this all goes back to making teams confused.

I'm not telling you, don't copy Patrick Mahomes. You'll never be Patrick Mahomes. What makes your team unique? What's the best version of your team? Is it going four and on fourth downs? If it's not, don't do it. but what makes your team unique and special and maximize those players that can do that? Yeah, it's what you look at it.

And a lot of the teams who live in nickel and are proficient in nickel, like you just said, they're the teams that have those guys. Like it's Kyle Hamilton, it's Nick Emunwari, it's Cooper DeGine, it's these guys who are big and they can hold up in those situations. And, you know, we had this thought about positionless football. I remember talking about this a lot in like the 2015. 2016-ish range. And the guy I always go back to is

when the Cardinals drafted Daylon Buchanan, right? Where it was like, they had these players like Daylon Buchanan where it was like, Mark Barron was like this. Where you had these safeties who walked down his undersized linebackers.

And that part is cool, right? Where it's like, is he a safety? Is he a linebacker? But if he's like one of your two off-ball linebackers, you have gotten too small. Like we pushed it too far

the other way. And it seems like now we've reached like the correct happy place when it comes to how these undersized second level defenders should fit into your defensive plans. And teams have actually realized what that should look like. And there's several examples of it. I played Monty Kiffin was the defensive coordinator in 2011 at USC. And we had an argument in our room because they had their will linebacker who was listed at 185 pounds. I think something Bailey was his name. And then they would have T.J. McDonald, who was listed as their strong safety.

It was like 225. He looked, he felt like 240 when he hit you. And I was like, no, we're going to argue about who's actually who. But what happened was is that 185 pound guy played out of position. He didn't know really what to do because he was the actual safety listed wrong. But now you're having guys who are playing spots that they know what they're doing. You're not just taking D.O.Buchanan saying, hey, I want size weight speed at this spot in the field. No, but they're actually playing positions that they're comfortable and they know what they're doing. Like, I felt like sometimes Camp Chancellor, he actually was my, oh, this is why you don't play in the NFL, because he would take the wrong step off of the read and then still make a TFL.

I go, okay, I'm not athletic enough to handle that. It actually doesn't matter how right you are sometimes. But these guys now are right. They're fast. They're in place. And this is no, Camp Chancellor. Hey, he's a legend. Legion of Boom forever.

But they're getting guys that are going to comfortable in their spots, doing things that are unnatural, is a game changer right now. I also think that it's about player development. Like, this is a player development story. And I think what Mike McDonald has done a really smart job of, and I know this was the plan going in and it was a plan for this reason, is that too often with these guys, remember the Isaiah Simmons plan early on where he was doing everything? And they were doing this with Derwin James, too, where it was like, oh, he's going to play 10 positions. Right. And he was a little bit deeper into his career, so there's less danger to it. But I think early on specifically, when you have these guys who fall in between these positional designations, there's an inclination to move them around because it makes the difference defense harder to get a beat on.

And actuality, what you should do is, especially early in their careers, have them learn one thing. Have them do this one thing well. And then maybe you can start to expand that when you need to solve problems on your defense, similar to the Kyle Hamilton thing. But I feel like limiting the scope of what Eminwar has been asked to do as a rookie has been one of the reasons that he's been able to acclimate to this faster than some of these other positionless guys who were brought along with the wrong plan at the wrong tempo five years ago.

100%. I think, and there are going to be, there's many times, struggles against tight ends one-on-one sometimes. We'll see if that comes to fruition this week. But like getting guys to be comfortable early, building confidence, providing problems to the offense or to the defense is huge. I think as we get, you know, relative athletic score and all these data points to identify how good players are, we're going to have to try and figure out how do we put them in

the right spot once we have. We actually did a modified combine at the XFL. We had a regular combine because historical data is so valuable. We did a combine with Dave Anderson, and he was able to put tracking chips on pads, on players, and we can identify which position you should be based off your tracking data. Even if you were listed, remember this is XFL minor league players that we need to find anything we can find. We were able to move guys from an athletic profile to different positions because of that tracking data. And I think you'll see some of this moving players around to different spots on the field because of the access to tracking data.

And now teams are requesting it of colleges when they're scouting players. Hey, can we get your tracking data from practice to be able to evaluate players more effectively? I want to talk about pocket health because this is something that, I don't know, how long we've been talking about this? We've been talking about a long time, Big Dog. A long time. And it's been, it's been a really fun back and forth to have it start as like a kernel of an idea because, you know, it's just when we think about pressures and how we tally pressures

and how we think about the way quarterbacks are affected in the NFL, the data just, and this isn't to criticize the people who do it this way, it's crass, right? Like, there's just, it's not super specific in terms of, like, how quarterback play is affected by those pressures. I think NextGen has done a very good job of being able to bucket the difference between pressures and quick pressures, right? So if you have a pressure that's three and a half seconds into a play, it's hard to know whether that's on the quarterback, whether that's a product of play design. With quick pressures, it's like, all right, if this guy had eight quick pressures that he saw over the course of a game, then the deep, the, the,

defense and the pass rush plan clearly was able to affect the game and morph the game for the quarterback. We have, we have that. But even those are like pretty broad buckets. By going to what you guys have done with pocket health, it changes our understanding of what pressure is because it's talking about the space overall, not just one player who might get an initial pressure, but the rest of the pocket is completely clean. Like that was part of the problem when we, we've been talking about over the years is that like you'd have these teams with one good pass rusher and that guy would have a pressure quote unquote because he would bull rush the left tackle into the quarterback then the quarterback would just be able to step up in the pocket and so the pocket health wasn't affected overall in the same way that we would we'd want to

know so we could come to an understanding of like how much the quarterback was actually being bothered and so as you guys have sat with pocket health that as an idea and as it's been folded into the broadcast this year I want to ask you just about a couple of realizations or just numbers associated with that that you have found particularly interesting as you guys have started to dive into it. Yeah, and I give a lot of credit to Alex Strander, coordinating producer and Scott Carpin, who's a producer on Prime Vision, as well as Dan Polowski, who's our product lead on this project. The whole team in Israel are paved team of scientists working on this because this was like a very big dream that we had originally when we started doing this.

and all the tools that we learned from defensive alert, from defensive vulnerability last year to coverage ID all helped us be able to build this thing that was kind of like a pipe dream that we loved. Built it with Andrew Whitworth too. I think what was a big thing is like, let's build with a big time expert. Yes, I know O-Line play and analytics,

but I'm not a Hall of Fame alignment. That's not why you have me on your show. And so being able to build with somebody like that was really, really cool. and what we were able to learn a lot about is also how good quarterbacks are at knowing their internal clock when it lines out about to be beat. And we saw a lot of times where quarterbacks were getting the ball right away at the right time. And how they beat pressure and how they beat collapsing pockets is so important. Again, why pressures are not a perfect metric, like no metric is.

Pocket health isn't even exactly perfect is because we can only measure result. If you hold on to the football, it gets a pressure. If you never had the football, there's no pressure. So what we can do now is see how quarterbacks react to those collapsing pockets. And for me, I kind of was hard on Caleb Williams. My wife is a USC football fan or my father-in-law went to USC. So I watched a lot of Caleb Williams when he was in school. And so I'm a fan of his.

And then I saw last year how many sacks he took, 68 sacks. Again, I went on Prime Vision and said he could throw seven more interceptions. and be league and have league average sacks and he'd be better off. Like, I was really getting after him. I said it all last year. I said all last year, I wish he threw more interceptions. Look, people listen to this podcast and we're admitting how wrong we are most of the time. And I think, because I really didn't think that he could fix how we handle the pocket.

And I was sharing with you this earlier, you know, he was getting sacked 38% of the time when the pocket collapsed last year. So when we look at collapsing pockets, we have a metric that we do from 100 to 0, on the health of the pocket. When it gets below around 25%, we say that's collapsed. That means someone's beat on the O line, depending on where they are. Because if you get beat closer

to the quarterback, it's a little bit different. And we see, hey, when Nate got below 25%, he was getting sack 30% of the time. That was by far the highest. Now he's top six at 12%. Talk about he's three times better at avoiding sacks on the pocket collapse. And we got to show a really cool video

and our visualization's awesome. You got to witness the growth of the visualizations from a Yankee little tetherline that I was obsessed with. I go on to maternity or paternity leave for a week. And my boss, we had this idea of putting one orb or like 36 orbs on the ground that we had of, hey, here's where the safe spots and our healthy spots were. And not a lot of people liked it. It was like, no, he should go to this spot.

And then I come back from breaking. My boss is like, here's 652 dots. What do you think? And it's like, I'm out. You guys do it. This is pretty sweet. And so, like, Caleb Williams, being able to find those healthy spots you should go to. And that's what's beautiful.

Last week we had Kirk Cousins, who doesn't move in the pocket. But he still beats collapsing pockets with his arm. I'm just going to get the ball out now. That's what Matthew Stafford does. And then you have guys like Caleb Williams, like Baker Mayfield, that want to use their legs and find those healthy spots. And another cool thing about Caleb is when you look at an unhealthy pocket, we start categorizing that at 50% pocket health. how long does it take you go from 50% to 25% is the longest so when things are unhealthy he's finding the healthy spots in the pocket without throwing the ball or or then ultimately getting to the

spot to then get let the play develop and throw the ball because you don't want to always throw it quickly the guys aren't as further down the field but his ability to manipulate the pocket itself has been an unbelievable adjustment from last year and i am i you know couldn't be more excited to watch him play football, especially when he's on our broadcast, because we can now evaluate and show that little magicianry that he has. I remember last year, I can't remember what show it was. It might have even been this off season. Me and Derek were talking about Caleb Williams and about the sack taking.

And I was sitting there like my brain was breaking because when you look at guys that just take a disgusting amount of sacks, like the example that always comes to mind for me is the last Carson Went season in Philadelphia was like one of the most. most unwatchable versions of NFL offense, I can remember. I think he took 60 sacks that year, and you just watched him during that season. And there is a complete lack of awareness about how to navigate that space. And for the most part, guys who took a lot of sacks, that's the problem, is that they just aren't, they don't have a sense for what that space is supposed to look like.

But you watch Caleb USC, and you even watched him last year, and it's like, that's not his problem. So part of me, I'm looking at the actual results and I'm like, guys do not get better if they're this bad at this. Like this is potentially a fatal flaw. But then watching him stylistically, like he doesn't fit in the bucket with a lot of the other guys who've struggled with this. So I do have faith that this can get better.

And so to watch what has happened this year has been so soothing because it lets me know that I'm not losing my mind. That's my favorite part about. what this has looked like other than the fact that it has made the bears a much better football team. Yeah, and I think what we found going in is like, okay, are we going to make this an O-line metric or is we going to make this a quarterback metric? How are we going to evaluate this really? And again, like all things in football, it is 11 on 11 football. And it is a team metric. But we can see how long it takes for O-lines to get to 50% pocket health. We can see for how long it takes for quarterbacks. And one of the things that's interesting is if you do a cover zero,

Blitz, that pocket is collapsing quickly. That doesn't mean the quarterback's in danger. It means that if they don't do something right now, they're in big danger. They need to scramble, throw, or they're going to take a sack. That's what we've seen with pocket held zero. It's either you get hit or you get sacked or you have to get out of there right now. And I think that is so enlightening to see because when I were viewing for this upcoming week, seeing Matthew Stafford, when they played the Vikings in the last wildcard game,

last year. Pockets were collapsing really fast, but he was actually dominant in collapsing pockets because he knew what to do with the ball. Versus Sam Darnold, the pockets were collapsing later. But what it was was twists. And when a twist gets home,

it's unencumbered and it's a delinement. They know what they're doing back there. And so the timing in which a pocket collapse, how it collapses is all valuable information to know whose fault should we attribute this to? Hey, it's a unit. Quarterback can have, things that they're great at. O-Line could have things that they're great at. Ultimately,

the whole group needs to work together. As you've dug more into like the data holistically and looked at who succeeds, who has strengths in this area, any other guys or teams that come to mind that you think have been particularly surprising or illuminating as you've looked at all of the numbers from this season? Look, I wanted to do a lot of, oh man, Bo Nix is evading healthy pockets too much and things like that. But he's actually gotten even better this year and knowing when to hold on to the football and not. I mean, he's not my favorite quarterback to watch, but I have to give the guy as props.

Last year, he didn't have much to work with from past catchers, and he's able to manipulate the pocket really well this year. He does have a great old line, but he does have great pocket presence. When he does evade early, it's, you know, he is collapsing pockets himself, and so we have that. But I think from a standpoint of a guy who's, hey, I went into this going on when I evaluate him and it's not. going to look good. He still looks good. And it is a very big strong point of what he's able to

bring this team. I love you pointing him out because I was just thinking about this with him like a couple days ago trying to figure out like, okay, where is he kind of transcended some of the weaknesses he had as a rookie? And one of my issues with him is that he just wasn't a very creative player from the pocket as a rookie. And he wasn't really a creative player very much overall. He had a lot of production outside the pocket. But I think that fell into like two buckets that are kind of hard to get excited about. One, they did as a lot of designed rollouts with him, right? I mean, that was a huge part of their offense with the Broncos last year, and so that's

going to juice the numbers a little bit. And I think a lot of the outside of the numbers throws he had last seasoner because he was bailing from pockets a little bit too early. This year, I think when you look at some of his production and some of the explosives he's finding outside of the pocket, he's actually creating that time and space when he should, and you're seeing some of the physical traits really start to shine through. He can change arm angles. He has a good arm.

He is a good athlete. You're seeing that flexibility kind of on display a little bit. And the other thing that was always frustrating with me with him is he wasn't a very creative player from that space when he did stay in it. You very rarely saw him climb the pocket for the first like 20 games of his career. Go back and watch that Troy Franklin touchdown from last week. It's exactly what he's doing. And it wasn't something that he was doing at his most frustrating over the first season and a half.

And so I think he's a great guy to shot. out in that regard because I think there have been, there has been growth. And I think that there has been him pushing back against the perception of him a little bit when it comes to those moments specifically. Yeah, I got to give the guy credit too. And to see what he was working with too, I think that's what makes this so exciting. We're not done yet. We have a ton of new ideas to be able to make this an even better tool and what we can

do evaluate. But we hear coverage sack. How do we even measure coverage sack? When we hear it, everyone can see it. We know it when we see it, but how do we actually measure it? Oh, is it time this act? Well, that might not be it because we might have long developing routes that didn't get open, right? We were really excited to see what ways we can make the quarterback evaluation even better.

I think fans of Prime Vision might remember QBDI from years ago. Fans of current Prime Vision don't hear about QBDI quite a bit. And that's one of the things that we pride ourselves on is we don't have to stick to anyone metric. But we're still trying to evaluate how difficult it is for a quarterback. to play so that we can highlight that. I work on NASCAR and one of the things I never loved NASCAR before I used to go to races as a kid with my dad, but now knowing how difficult it is that these guys are struggling, you might watch and you see them turn left, but man, they are frightened and they are working hard. And that is how it is for a quarterback. I'll give one story

real quick. I'm watching this and I'm seeing a pocket health, there's a hold on a play, and I'm evaluating the quarterback, and they know there's a hold down field, but they have to continue the play. So I, you know, I'll name drop. I called Andrew Luck and I was like, what do you, what are you thinking when you see downfield that there's a hold and you can't go to your number one, but they haven't thrown the flag yet, but you, you don't know what to do yet. Like, how do you, and he's like, yeah, it's really, really scary. Yeah, it's really hard. It's really hard because you don't know if they're going to throw it. So it's like, wow, this is difficult. And that's all what we want to show is, how do we show you the fan at home on Prime Vision, how difficult this game is and how hard

it is for the quarterback. We're going to take one more break and then come back and very quickly hit a banger of a Thursday night football game. All right. Rams Seahawks tonight on Prime Vision. It does not get any better than this from a football perspective, let alone what we're getting on Thursday night football. Walk me through this. The two things, two or three things that you have at front of mind that you studied this week that you think are going to go the furthest in determining how this Ram Seahawks game goes tonight. So I want to talk about sequencing plays for Sean McVeigh. You're going to hear a lot about 13 personnel if we see it tomorrow.

You're going to hear a lot about Pukunakua, but how he sequences plays. So what he does is when they're in 13 personnel, there's a 64% chance that the next play is 13 personnel. And why is that important? Teams typically put on a lot of tight ends to then run the ball. Hey, we have a couple of plays out of this package. We carried three this week, a run right, a run left, a run strong week and a pass off of it. They build full packages and sequences out of it knowing I'm going to run this on first down, second down, third down, fourth down. They have multiple instances where they've run eight plus 13 personnel plays in a row.

They ran two, they had two such instances last week. Now, why is this important? Because they do very similar thing on offense and 11 personnel. When they're in 11, there's an 80% chance. The next play is also 11. So they're sequencing. They're not like Sean Payton cycling in or Joe Brady, cycling in personnel agreements, every other play. They have their packages, a series that we know we're going to get on each individual look.

First play, I'm looking to see how they're going to play it. Watch for the strong safety. This is what happened in week 11 where they only was four passing yards for the Rams in 13 personnel. Watch for the strong safety. he's going to start in too high Okada and in the moment Matthew Stafford turns his back he's going to sprint downhill and on Prime Vision you're going to see this. He's going to sprint downhill

and we might see a play action first play in that hole that he's vacated because they're playing cover three behind it and that's how they're able to play it's a nickel. So watch for the play sequencing and maybe the first play's not perfect but know that McVeigh is watching to see the read and react from Seattle. On the other side it's how do we get JSN on a linebacker?

How do we formation and make them get base. He's almost twice as good yards per route run against base defense than he is all other defenses. He's around, I think around five yards per route run against base. He's at the NGS high in 2016 at 4.0. But for them, it's all about can we manipulate you into running base defense, whether it's formationally, personnel-wise, we're going to put 21, 12 on the field to then get under center, make you stop the run to then find JSN. Because if he's, lined up on a linebacker, my goodness. And if it's, it's base, that means there's easier coverages that Sam Donald's going to see. And when there's not a disguise, that boy good.

Boy can play. The more it's disguised, the more there's, I hate that I'm doing this, but the more he's seeing ghosts, that is where it gets the little tricky for Sam Donald. That has not changed. I'm curious because I was looking this up, and I know that you were paying attention to this week, but I was looking it up after the Seahawks game because anecdotally for me, Seattle struggled a lot on third down last week. And when they can dictate the game on early downs because they can use play action, that's when they're at their scariest.

But if you look at the numbers, Seattle on like third and medium to long is only like 17th or 18th. I can't remember what the number is, but it's in the teens, an EPA per dropback. The Rams are worse. What do you think? Because with Seattle, it's easy. With Seattle, it's like,

I know why they're worse on third down than they are. on early downs because of the way they're constructed. When you look at the Rams relative struggles on third down this year, what do you think is driving that? Well, you heard me for the early part of the podcast talk about, hey, when they can't know if it's run or pass, you have an advantage.

Guess what happens on third and medium plus? This is why both teams want to run the ball, because I don't want to be there. If they can convert on fourth, it's much helpful because they lose the benefit of surprise. It's hard to be an under center, again, with double mug fronts where you can't be in under center against the double mug unless you plan on running the football into it, what you can do. It's allowed. People don't do it, but you're allowed to do it. The bills did it last week. It was beautiful, actually. It was like one of my favorite reps of the

entire week. Come on. Finally, someone did it. It's cheating. I remember it, sorry. I remember looking at it the first time and Fangio did it. And I was like, this is cheating. We should just, you shouldn't be allowed to do this in practice. And I was like, come on. But I think that, They can't use the element surprise anymore. They're not surprising anymore when you're under center in that spot. They're also really, Matt Stafford really phones out on who his top guy is. If he's going to go to a guy, he's going to go to a guy. It's the beauty of having an army trust.

It's like Dak Prescott. He trusts it because throwing it here and here, I'm talking my shoulder on my chest is actually very different location. When you have a quarterback that can do that, he's going to put it in the guy he wants to. So I think that's the big element. watching the film i was like because i was i i do my early game prep sundays the mondays i check myself and then tuesdays my producers like you have a lot of mumbo jumbo here let's let's let's let's let's let's go file this in and i was spent a lot of time looking at and i think it comes down to you have to go gun there they lose that element of surprise by doing the under center by not having the about the ability

to say guess if it's runner pass this is me just nerding out because i'm curious about this. When you start your prep for these games, do you do numbers first or film first? Depends on the game. Depends on the team. I really try and start film first. So I'm doing film TV copy and I go, ooh, I think that's cool. I'd say 50%. Why TV copy first? Charles Davis and Devin McCordy work really hard on preparing for a game. And so they have a lot of good preparation. I wouldn't let that go to waste. J.J. Watt prepares really hard for the game. And so I go TV copy early and say, hey, these guys research this game. What would they see?

They're going to get their best stuff out there. So this is actually really fun. They're going to get their best stuff out there. I'm going to go on TV copy. I want to see what their NGS package was that week. I want to see how they're understanding about the quarterback play versus that. If I'm listening to J.J. Watt described defense, I'm getting better. And so I want to hear that.

And then I go, oh, that's cool. I go to the analytics. I then see from the numbers, was I wrong? right. Was I on a game basis, was this right? What changed about this game that went to it? So I spent a lot of time this season, especially going game by game and what Keganadu, Bailey Dieter, Callie Baker, all the people I work with Nick Exposito at an X-Gen is how can we be really good about bi-week changes? Because a lot of teams make bi-week changes and go from a game basis. Then I go to the All-22. I'm going to then look at what teams are doing as unique. I watch in situational football.

I do not watch all the way the game through on Monday. Third down, red zone, fourth down. Those are the big things you're going to hear of us talk about on TNF because that's how I prepare as a player. Those are the things that I can provide that might be a little bit different than what Kirk's can provide. Then it's complete games because now I've got my two-month-old daughter, Shea. In the mornings, I'll put a complete game on, watch all the 22 all the way through sideline end zone, sideline end zone, and get my ideas there. So it's evolving over time. and throughout that time I'm having meetings

with my producer Scott Carpin who's refining the ideas and he's also doing research analytically and also watching the games and going I want to tell this story with safeties how can we make it right? This is unique. Baker Mayfield struggles against single high

versus too high. How can you make it right? So that's my game prep in a nutshell. When you're watching the full game back and you're watching both angles for 120 plays over the course of a game, what percentage of you? percentage of those plays do you think you're taking notes on? Probably 30%. And the way I take notes is

I pause the film and I go straight to the NGS page. So if I could send you a screenshot on my page right now, you'll see 20 different NGS pages open at least, or I guess this is probably 50 right now. Or I'm looking at a pocket health render. Oh, what would this have looked like if they had pocket health on this play? So I re-render that play. Or how do I approach? Okay, It said this. Well, do we have an analytic that will show Okada sprinting into the box? Because this is a fun thing with analytics. It's going to show it's a light box when Okada starts at 22 yards.

But the moment you see Stafford sprint into the box or turn his back, it's no longer a light box. It's now stacked box. There's an extra guy there. But when we capture the data at the moment, so how do I tell that story? And so I'll pause the film and I go, oh, that's weird. That's typically when I know if I take a notice, oh, that's weird. And it's about 30% of the place. But it's normally like this with a one arm.

Be nice to daddy. Be nice to daddy. This is me just asking curiosity questions because my process and my prep is always such a f***ing mess that I'm trying to do everything I can to make it better. The other part is to round this out. Next year, this is our next innovation, just planting seeds for you. We need box counts at the snap of the ball. We need box counts at the time the handoff is happening. And I need those numbers now.

And so if you want to get started on that, so we're ready for those by the time we get to next season, that's your homework. Hey, you might be in London with us in January, brother, when we do our audiation because that is a big, we have, we had a couple innovations this year. I don't know if you got to see what we've done with field of target lines this year and showing what it's not career long

or not what we saw them make in practice during the game because wind can change, everything can change. what is the live data from NextGen telling us about this kicker, this direction, on this night? And what's their likelihood to make it at three different spots? And it's been a huge innovation and something that it's data that was available to us. But Scott Carpin or producer had a lot of ideas on how we could show it the right way. And we introduced it four years ago. But it didn't look as good on the sideline all 22.

But now when you can, when that area of the field is visible at all times, when you know a team's driving for a get a field. field goal range. But you want to know what's their likelihood to not, not just is this a career longer. What's the actual likelihood to make it? It really amps up that anticipation. So there's a lot of stuff that's like low, that doesn't need to take, you know, lots and lots of bad hours and AI to solve problems that will be really cool for us

in the future. You don't have to twist my arm, my friend. If you want me to come out, like, come ask weird, weird nerdy football questions for a little bit. You know that I'm down to do it. Always appreciate the time. Sam Schwartzstein. You can see him.

on the Prime Vision broadcast on Thursday night football and we've got a good one tonight. So please go check out Sam during Ram Seahawks. I'm sure we'll do this again very soon, buddy. Awesome, man. This is blast. All right, guys, that's all we got for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you to Sam for his time. We'll be back tomorrow with a jam-packed week 16 preview on the athletic football show. Please come back and check that out for now. That's all we got. I appreciate you listening. We'll talk to you very soon.