Stealing Signals, Week 5, Part 1
Maximizing good outcomes, plus TNF and early Sunday games
I’m quite sure it comes through on these pages, but I love football as a sport. Many of you have said ways I talk about this sport have helped you think through things outside the realm of fantasy football, which is first of all very cool, and secondly to a lot of people I’m sure laughable because we’re talking about a hobby people like emphasize is dumb, but is most importantly I think not a coincidence.
Football is such an amazing sport because it’s a microcosm of so many things. There’s the obvious machismo and gladiator mentality and physical aspect of the game that gets us on a certain level, but it’s more than that. It’s far more of a thinking person’s game than the meatheads can ever understand, and among other things, you see the value of attention to detail and preparation, and of organization, and of structure. There are so many moving pieces and it’s what I always hate-admired about the Patriots during their dynasty was how all 53 men on the roster were prepared to handle the little aspects of the gameplan each week. And you watch it for enough years, starting with these sort of scrappy early 2000s teams and how they overperformed, and then looking at how the best of the Patriots’ teams also overperformed to reach an undefeated season with no letdown games (until obviously getting beaten by another good team in the biggest game of all, but that’s the point is losses do happen in this sport), and it’s just not a coincidence. There’s something more there, and for as much as The Patriot Way made me vomit in my mouth a little bit every time I heard about it, there’s not just a broad standard but also a weekly standard that frankly has to be so boring but also somehow keeps the whole team engaged, and you just think about it and you do understand why it can’t be replicated easily, even by the coaches who worked in the building, as they moved on to other jobs. The expectation of getting all the people in an organization required to buy in, to all buy in, and to all understand that preparation of all the minutiae of every minor blocking assignment that makes a particular play work, or how to buy into each weekly gameplan week after week even if the plays you’re repping don’t even come up in the game, and to just do it again just in case until the Super Bowl is on the line and you’re Malcolm Butler and — as he’s said — you saw that play on tape and were prepared for it in that moment.
But then also to have the presence of mind that it’s not just that you’ve seen this play but also there’s this larger picture, this Football IQ element, where it’s like, “OK, well what do I do with that information?” And you don’t have time to ask coach about it — you have to understand the sport. You have to understand that in that moment, the play is to get hyper-aggressive and try to jump the route and create a turnover because there’s essentially no other path to victory and the payoff is worth the risk. That’s the thing I always loved about Butler’s play there was the lack of hesitation to understand he’s gotta sell out in that moment.
And I think in some respect with the Patriots there was probably an element of bringing in the right players, and understanding these are humans and wanting the ones that are driven, and have what might be called a growth mindset, and we always joked if you’re not going to buy in that Belichick isn’t going to keep you around, but it’s not just a pettiness or a power trip — it’s an understanding of what it is that makes you successful, which is the coordination and understanding of the sport and relentless pursuit of the details. And so the decision to move on from certain people who aren’t buying into that is that you just can’t win with them. They don’t fit.
But the other thing is just practically, you can’t get all your coaches and all 53 of your players and everyone to be obsessed with football on a certain level, and to even just have the mental approach I’m described. So I’m sure there’s a balance with some people in the building of making sure they have what they need, where you’re prioritizing certain things and to the degree you can get them any information, you’re finding ways to make sure they are getting what will most impact the games and the successes and failures of your teams, and then you’re also just getting out of the way in some ways and letting people be who they are, too. I was attributing all this to the Patriots but I’m also just venturing out to broad ideas, and maybe not even related to football. Maybe just about how to live, and how to interact with the people you spend time around, and how what I’m describing is a sort of control that we can’t actually have over our surroundings, or definitely over a sport where variance is a rule. An oblong ball, and all that.
But then football is this highly tactical game, which is the a whole other element that doesn’t necessarily impact the players as much, at least not in the minutiae. It does in the ways I was describing Butler’s aggressiveness, and when you get into 2-minute situations and those things, and you need the players to understand when to get out of bounds or when not to, and how to get lined up to spike to get a field goal unit on the field without getting a penalty, and all those things that make or break the games. So there’s definitely detail to correctly implementing all the strategies you want to, and when that doesn’t go right, how it falls back on the coaching as we make these hindsight generalizations to try to explain all the stuff I just discussed that seems like it would take five years to coach into a whole team but you have different rosters every season and you have more like a couple months in the summer and then the weekly gameplanning, but when it goes wrong because one guy isn’t on the same page we have the dreaded “undisciplined team” that becomes a product of coaching. And in many cases it is — the way I speak so glowingly about Belichick, which is quite possibly all exaggerated, you can imagine the alternative of a coach who is a little more focused on his objectives and his job, and on drawing up plays and on all these things that then detract from his ability to get everyone on the same page. And then when something goes wrong, you realize after the fact that you should have prepared for that before. But you didn’t. Any parent knows that feeling of, “Oh, I should have taught you that before, and the reason you don’t know this thing that seems super obvious and feels like you should obviously know this — because why wouldn’t you know it? — is a reflection of the fact that you were born a blank slate into this world and it’s been my job to teach you these things, and I have just not taught you that yet.”
But that’s sort of how I imagine a lot of these other coaches, who routinely make mistakes that are known and they should be on top of. Even Belichick had his tactical issues, and game management remains a massive concern for NFL coaches far and wide. But I would still classify these decisions in a few different buckets, which is the main point of this intro. I’ve written about these things before, but in talking with one of my best friends this weekend before and during the cathartic rematch of last year’s National Championship where my Huskies were able to beat Michigan, I came to some ideas about what some of my issues are with the new UW coach — who is a great play designer and schemer and recruiter by all accounts, and has all these connections, and has a ton going for him — and just with some of the tactical stuff in general, which we saw more of on Sunday.
Football is about this idea of maximizing the good outcomes, and trying to minimize the bad ones, and understanding in real time where the risk and reward equations intersect. Every little mistake you see where there’s some personal foul on a third-and-long, or a coach mismanaging the clock in a big spot — where it’s like “You just can’t have that there” — always comes back to this idea of not understanding the bigger picture. There are so many details in football that some people get hyper-focused on the micro situation at hand and forget about the macro objective. Which is, of course, always: To win the game.
And the micro thing that gets different coaches or teams or players can be different. For some coaches, they lose a game because they want to show something about toughness or something with some playcall that’s not necessary in a key spot, and they talk after the fact about how they needed to trust their team to do that. (Usually this is “trust the defense” after a surrender punt when they could have trusted the toughness of their offensive line.) And it’s not to say that there’s not value in the thing the coach hyper-fixates on in the postgame situation, because there is. But it’s just one of the key details, whether it be planning or execution. So, so often in these cases, the answer is just, “OK, but why did you lose sight of the macro objective, to win the game?” These micro objectives can have a time and place and still be focused on in a moment that betrays a complete misunderstanding of the sport.
See that’s the thing that I think Belichick definitely must have gotten right. I was never in the locker rooms, but the thing about football is none of it is ever solved. It’s so fascinating that the smartest/nerdiest among us have been modeling these things and trying to get at truth and understanding and the advancement of all these things that do maximizing win probability — and those objectives absolutely are all very noble and absolutely do a great job of keeping the macro focused, and thinking about all these micro things through the lens of how best to win the game. But there are two types of these things, and it’s basically the coinflips or close to it, where there are at times some win probability disagreements with some of the models but you can make a case that reasonable people could disagree because of a lot of the minutiae — basically, I’m not trying to argue modeling is the answer to all of football’s problems — but then there are the other ones, where if you go the wrong way on it, you clearly just do not understand how these things work. The way I’ve said it is you do not understand the sport, which is laughable, because we’re talking about coaches who have lived within the sport and have forgotten more about it than I’ll ever know, but I guess specifically it’s the tactics of the sport, and no matter how much you might think this game is won in the trenches and all those things, you can’t just be a meathead and ignore all that and still consistently win. And the macro objective is always to win.
So what I’m saying Belichick must have always gotten right is this broad approach, that allowed his players to be dynamic thinkers, where the bigger picture was always squared in their frame of reference. Maximize the good outcomes and minimize the bad. Be risky when necessary, and not when when unnecessary. Everything is a cost/benefit analysis in the NFL.
And then you get the coaching situations where there’s just a clear lack of understanding of that whole mental framework. People are criticizing the Bills today because they threw three times from their own 5-yard line and that wound up helping the Texans to a game-winning field goal try, but they are saying the right things. They were focused on the fact that regardless of what they did, they likely needed a first down to guarantee Houston wouldn’t get some kind of chance.
If they’d run three times, they could have forced Houston to use all their timeouts, and then Houston wouldn’t have had the ability to run a play to the middle of the field that they ran for a 5-yard gain. But honestly, Ka’imi Fairbairn stuck that 59-yarder, and he may as well have made one from 64 yards, too — he’s already made six kicks of 50+ this year, and his career long is 61 — and when Buffalo had the ball backed up like that they made a calculated decision to keep the ball in Josh Allen’s hands and try to get a first down that took that opportunity away, whether it was ultimately going to be from 59 or 64. I think the way they played this was a very close decision, and there are some interesting implications on the punt that I’ll get into further down in this intro, and to me this falls into the category of only a minor tactical error (if it was one at all).
I think what the Bengals did in overtime was likely a clearer poor decision, taking the ball out of Joe Burrow’s hands in service of settling for a long field goal, but ultimately I would classify that as another minor tactical error (and a clearer error than how the Bills played it, for me). Ultimately, they took over at the 38 — so 55-yard field goal range — and their three straight runs did show a deference to ball security, but also I think not wanting to run the risk of a sack (if they drop back and take a sack there, everyone asks why they didn’t just run three times and shorten that to something like a 48-yarder, which is similar to what happened with the Falcons in the 28-3 Super Bowl loss to the Patriots).
That the Bengals were right on the edge of field goal range and felt like three runs for even something like 6 or 7 yards could push them down inside 50 yards helps explain the process, even if that didn’t work and they only gained 3. I do still believe throwing the ball there, with the way Burrow was playing, would have been preferred, but you understand some of the hesitation. You’re probably not throwing on third down because of the risk of a sack taking you out of reasonable field goal range, so you’d need to throw on one of the first two downs, and on those downs you don’t yet know whether the runs will be effective, so you run to see if you can improve your situation enough to not have to throw, or at least this is how you land on the sequence of playcalls they did. (Ultimately, their holder just didn’t get the ball down cleanly, which also isn’t necessarily an issue of kick length.)
“Playing the percentages” always gets brought up, and I do think in both of these examples the coaches probably didn’t strictly make the correct decisions on those grounds. But also, sometimes both options do have some merits, and one thing we know is there’s always going to be variance in the outcomes in football.
I’m going to pull this back to my Huskies — which is going to require some explanation because I would expect about five of you to be following them closely enough to know the specifics of some of these spots — but that’s where I’ve seen some examples of the egregious outcomes lately.
When I was talking to my buddy before the game this weekend, and recounting a really frustrating loss to Rutgers the week prior where we out-gained them 521 to 299 (including an edge of 8.5 to 4.8 yards per pass and 7.1 to 5.6 per run), there were two main things that I was focused on. The first was a decision to kick a 37-yard field goal on 4th-and-5 with 7:21 left, down 11. You can understand the idea that it would cut the game to 8, but we’ve talked in these pages before about how 8 shouldn’t be thought about as a one-score game really, because you’re talking about needing two coin flips even if everything goes right — you need the 2-point conversion, which is typically about a 50% proposition, and then that just forces overtime, so you need to win in overtime (broadly, the failure of coaches to recognize that playing for overtime can cost them potential to win the game in regulation is a great example of overvaluing the micro at the expense of the macro, winning the game).
The field goal was missed, which added insult to injury, but more notable was that in a game where you were chasing two scores late but managed to average 7.9 yards per play for the game, you gave up a 4th-and-5 try from the 20-yard line to play for an outcome that — if executed perfectly — would require two coin flips, or give you a 25% win probability. Again, if everything went right, meaning you get the stop you need and you get a TD that you still need.
The second issue came after that missed field goal, where they got a quick three-and-out and got the ball back with 4:31 remaining. On the first play, from their own 24-yard line, they completed a pass to the middle of the field for 8 yards. Not a terrible outcome, but you have to start that drive with the understanding you still need two scores, and you need to move quick. They did hurry up to an extent, but then they ran the ball up the middle. That didn’t convert, so they ran the ball again on 3rd-and-1. By the time they ran their next 1st-and-10 play, a full minute of game clock had run off — there was 3:31 remaining — and they’d reached just the 38-yard line.
This might seem like kind of a minor thing, but it really gets at this point of coaches who misunderstand the macro “win the game” perspective in service of some micro focus. When you take over down 11 under five minutes, you’re talking about needing to score as quickly as possible. You’re doing everything in your power to maximize, which requires tempo. You also — to win the game — will need to gain a lot of yardage. And you’re obviously in four-down territory.
The 2nd-and-2 run I described, to keep the clock moving, and then the third-down run as well, moved the sticks. But that first down literally did not matter. If you’re in four-down territory, you’re throwing on second, third, and fourth down there, and you’re stopping the clock with incompletions if unsuccessful. If you fail three plays in a row, you go home a loser, because inherent in your strategy for how best to win the game is an assumption you’ll be able to complete some passes and gain some yards. Your focus is not on moving the sticks. It can’t be. Tactically speaking, your focus has to be on the clock.
Again, this feels like a little thing, but it’s a bigger thing from the perspective of misunderstanding the macro objective. The stuff where coaches make decisions to prioritize “delaying a loss” rather than trying to go win — either by kicking when they should go for it, or playing for overtime, or not playing with enough urgency or tempo — is the best example of how coaches routinely misunderstand the sport they are coaching, to be as blunt about it as we can. This isn’t hindsight analysis, either, which is a frequently-made objection. This is my favorite team and I was having an absolute fit watching this in real time. It just can’t happen; you can’t misunderstand the larger objectives this poorly in these spots.
We had another one in the Michigan game, but I’ll finish up this thought by noting that the Huskies did wind up scoring a touchdown and getting a conversion on that drive, but not until after the 2-minute warning, with even a conservative broadcast booth not understanding the lack of urgency in doing everything possible to score before the 2-minute stoppage, so you could use that on defense, because UW only had two timeouts. And then, they got the three-and-out, got the ball back with just 30 seconds, got a fortunate break with a stoppage on the sideline that should have been a running clock, got gifted two hyper-quick out patterns at the very end with no timeouts to gain a few extra yards, and then asked their kicker to make a 55-yarder just to force OT, which a very important distinction here relative to my Fairbairn and McPherson comments before is this is a college kicker whose career long is 48 yards. And that kick was no good and people commented that the kicker was going to have a long flight back to Washington because he missed three kicks in the game, but putting him in a spot where he had to make a career long by 7 yards to redeem himself was frankly unfair to a former walk-on. They essentially ran out of time.
More to the point, even though they executed all the things they needed to — they got two three-and-outs, plus converted about everything they could with the plays that were called — it still wasn’t enough. If you’re making decisions where near-perfect execution still isn’t enough, your decisions are just too risk averse, and you’re not maximizing opportunities to actually positively impact the game. We can’t know about alternate realities, but going on the 4th-and-5 I described wouldn’t have had extra negative consequences from what we observed (given the missed FG was essentially the same outcome as going and failing), while not calling the two run plays just to get a first down and instead saving that minute of game clock is also fairly straightforward. In all likelihood, they outright conceded their actual chance to win the game with those two moves, instead opting for a slower loss that would confuse fans into blaming a kicker, or a player who had earlier run onto the field while the ball was still live after a blocked FG, in a costly mental mistake that changed a turnover into a first down into a touchdown. But those were things that actually could have — and still should have — been overcome.
In the Michigan game, late, UW had taken a 7-point lead and gotten the ball back on a fantastic interception. There was 3:14 left and they had the ball in plus territory, at Michigan’s 41. But of course that’s not field goal range, and that’s not enough time to milk the clock. Similar to the calculation Sean McDermott and the Bills made, the thought immediately has to be you have to get at least one first down. Nothing else really matters, and if you do get that first down, even if you’re not able to do anything else, you will be in makeable field goal range this time, converting to at least the 31 and then presumably able to get a few more yards before needing to kick, so a 45-yarder or shorter. With that time and field position, what’s clear is you can’t just run the clock out, which again is what the Bills knew with the Texans having three timeouts. They didn’t want to have to punt from their own end zone at all, because covering that was going to be difficult when they needed to max protect, and also the punter can’t worry about angling it because if he shanks then the Texans are just in field goal range, so they need to protect and he needs to just boom it and outkick the coverage a little bit, and that’s how you wind up with the 13-yard return that got Houston close. And that’s why Buffalo prioritized the first down so strongly.
Washington went the other route, calling two relatively straightforward runs for 1 yard each, setting up a 3rd-and-8 for all the marbles. This was very different than the scenario I described for the Bengals earlier, despite seeming similar in some ways, and it’s these similarities that often confuse people who discuss these situations, because they don’t keep the macro view in focus (and just see micro similarities). The key difference in this example is UW had to have a first down, whereas the Bengals did not necessarily, and also really couldn’t afford to lose yardage.
The way that UW played it left it all on a third-and-long, where the defense knows you are going to pass. That’s a tricky spot! Research has shown time and again that throwing in “nonobvious situations” increases pass efficiency, and it’s a lot more difficult to count on a conversion in a situation like the one UW left themselves in.
One of the biggest keys to all of this type of decision-making is how it’s all probabilities, and so whenever possible, you don’t want to leave it all on one play. For the Bills, they either needed to run three times and force three timeouts and play it that way, or if they were going to pass even once, then they might as well do what they did and pass three times and give themselves three chances to be right with that decision. In doing so, they might even get that “nonobvious” efficiency benefit with the early-down passes, if they can catch the defense off guard at all. And hell, if a guy breaks a tackle or something and you get 25 yards right away, maybe you’re talking about trying to use the remaining time to get yourself in long FG range. There were a bunch of ancillary benefits in this situation, but the main point is you have to commit. Your decisions can’t just be reactionary, down to down. You have to have the macro in full focus, and that has to inform the whole sequence.
Washington decided to give up two downs, even though Michigan had two timeouts and the clock was such that it wasn’t going to prevent Michigan from getting another drive, down 7, with a chance to tie right at the end of regulation. You needed a first down to prevent that, and because the clock situation wasn’t even that dire, Michigan didn’t even burn both of their timeouts after the first two runs.
But after the two poorly-conceived runs, and leaving it all on one 3rd-and-long play, and then calling a low-probability fade to the boundary on that play, UW was bailed out by both defensive pass interference and roughing the passer penalties, a sort of hilarious emphasis that what they were playing for was an automatic first down, and they did get it, twice. After the free 15 yards, they ran the ball three times and kicked a 32-yard field goal on fourth down with 1:06 remaining, going up by an insurmountable 10-point lead.
They got their first down, and went on to win, in spite of their own misunderstanding of the objective. Buffalo didn’t, but I don’t really have an issue with them going after it on all three downs. The lesson from the Buffalo-Houston outcome as well as the UW-Michigan one is that the outcomes lie to us all the time. In UW’s case, all you have to do is look back at the Rutgers loss to understand that the thinking isn’t sly like a fox; it’s just bad, and among other issues, it cost them their best chance to take a winnable game in New Jersey the week prior. But they got the huge win Saturday, despite the poor decisions, because there’s variance in this.
This was meant to all go back to where I started this intro: Maximize the possibilities of good outcomes, and minimize the possibilities of bad ones. And one of the big dichotomies there is just whether you’re winning or losing. When you’re trailing in football, your goal is to maximize everything: Plays, possessions, time remaining, chances to score. You do that through tempo, smart preservation of timeouts, aggressiveness with play-calling. And when you’re winning, it’s about minimizing all of that, so your opponent has fewer chances to score. So you run the ball, you wind the play clock between every down and play slow, etc.
There are always unique circumstances, but the people who comment on this sport well are the people who keep the bigger picture of winning focused in their minds, and think dynamically about what they can do to maximize that potential. There’s a whole lot of noise otherwise, and a whole lot of comments that — as I’ve written recently — just chase last week’s box scores, i.e. focus on the lying outcomes while ignoring the far more important processes.
Let’s get to the games, and there was plenty of scoring and stuff to talk about, as we seem to keep moving forward in a positive way as a league and an overall offensive environment.
Another update this week for those who pay attention to the visuals: We’ve moved to NFL Pro’s routes, as I talked about a little last week. Having done a little spot-checking, I can say they run a little lower than PFF, but are close, so hopefully they won’t adjust the scales of the per-route stats too much.
As always, you can find an audio version of the posts in the Substack app, and people seem to really like that. You can also find easier-to-see versions of the visuals at the main site, bengretch.substack.com.
Data is typically courtesy of NFL fastR via the awesome Sam Hoppen, but I will also pull from RotoViz apps, Pro Football Reference, PFF, the Fantasy Points Data Suite, and NFL Pro. Part 1 of Week 1 had a glossary of key terms to know.
Falcons 36, Buccaneers 30
Key Stat: Falcons — 79 plays, 77.2% pass rate, 59 pass attempts (most in an NFL game this season, through Sunday)
Week 5 got off with a bang on Thursday night, and I covered a lot of it in the intro to Input Volatility on Saturday. I noted Kyle Pitts (8-7-88) “had a really solid day, but… we talk about market share stuff for a reason.” Kirk Cousins’ 58 pass attempts and 509 pass yards, with all of Darnell Mooney (16-9-105-2), Drake London (13-12-154-1), and Ray-Ray McCloud (9-6-66) seeing more volume, is important context, especially since the team talked about using him more and did from the early going. Pitts’ 16% TPRR reflects that, but his 81% routes were good to see.
I also talked about Mooney drawing a lot of volume, and making a strong TD grab, but also having a costly drop late. He and London nonetheless look like the centerpieces of the passing game, and Mooney is in a great spot going forward, as evidenced by his 16 targets and 192 air yards here. London’s efficiency puts him in an even better spot, to me, where he’s now up to a 2.0 YPRR for the season, with both a strong TPRR but also now a very solid 8.0 YPT after having started slowly. He had 12 targets in Week 4 when the pass rate turned, and has at least 7 in every game since Week 2. London certainly feels like a guy who is well-positioned going forward.
I wrote about expecting Atlanta’s PROE to be solidly positive, but they were actually only at +3.0%, which was mostly due to an expected pass rate of 74.2%, elevated by a lot of play volume coming in the late trail script. The Falcons ran a Week 5 high 79 plays (while Tampa ran a Week 5 low 50, driven partially by the Bucs’ early efficiency), with Atlanta producing eight drives of 8+ plays (Tampa had just two). As I wrote about in Input Volatility, my comp for the Falcons’ first three weeks remains the 2021 Bengals, and my expectation for going forward is a pass-friendly offense.
And I talked about Bijan Robinson (12-61, 3-3-16), who I still expect to have strong games going forward, even if this was a discouraging one. For what it’s worth, we did get +20 RYOE here with 5 missed tackles forced, and a solid lead in the backfield. Tyler Allgeier (6-12, 3-3-13) was also very involved, and continues to look good, though he lost at least one good run to penalty.
After some positive comments in the media from the team on the back of a decent Week 4, Rachaad White (10-72, 3-3-(-6)) ran efficiently for the second straight week, or at least had one long run of 56 yards on a well-blocked run (he did make a nice move at the second level) and then his other 12 touches totaled 10 yards. Meanwhile, Bucky Irving (9-44, 2-2-12) lost a costly fumble late, with about three minutes remaining, when he was bursting through the defense for what might have been another first down run on Atlanta’s side of the field as the Bucs clung to a 3-point lead. He did get another couple opportunities on the next drive, after White appeared to get rolled up on (he returned for a play), but the fumble was obviously not a great situation for Irving, and adding in White’s long run probably sets us back a little bit on our Bucky timeline. We’ll see. He’s still clearly been the more dynamic back in my opinion. For what it’s worth, the usage splits in this one did slightly move back toward White, but were closer to Week 4 than I expected watching the game, relative to the first three weeks (it seemed like a lot of White, but for example, he was over 70% snaps the first three weeks, then fell to 58% in Week 4, then was at 64% in Week 5, while Irving actually set a new high at 43% — he’d been 42% in Week 4 — because they were on the field together more). We’d also been watching the green zone specifically, and Bucky got the first two carries in there, but they came after White’s long run, i.e. more of a breather thing, and then White did re-enter and catch a pass for -2 yards from the 2-yard line for his lone green zone touch. Earlier, they were both on the field but White as the singleback with Bucky split wide for a passing touchdown from the 2-yard line, so the whole “Bucky owns the green zone” idea that Week 4 might have implied was more opaque in Week 5.
Mike Evans (7-5-62-2) caught that TD, plus another, and he and Chris Godwin (6-5-64) dominated a game where Baker Mayfield threw just 24 times, as we see often from these two. The backs combined for 5 targets, and Cade Otton (4-3-44) caught three balls, while Sterling Shepard (2-1-4-1) was the only other player targeted. He did catch a TD, but took a clear back seat as the No. 3 WR in this one with the young WRs (McMillan and Palmer) both out.
Signal: Falcons — +3.0% PROE (second straight positive week after three strongly negative weeks to start the season while Kirk Cousins got his feet under him); Darnell Mooney — 16 targets, 192 air yards (huge volume for big part of passing game in concentrated offense); Drake London — after slow start, up to 24.9% TPRR, 2.0 YPRR, looking like a clear No. 1
Noise: Falcons — 59 passes, 509 pass yards, 4 pass TDs (within the scope of this week, volume was massive and elevated everyone); Kyle Pitts — 8 targets, 7 receptions (out-targeted by all three WRs, relatively weak 13.8% target share); Bucs — 50 plays (driven partially by their own efficiency, and also Atlanta’s long drives