The NFL is just so fascinating, and as I’ve openly discussed, I’ve often woken up Monday morning more interested in writing about the topics impacting a league in transition than the fantasy stuff. But of course that doesn’t mean I’ll replace the fantasy stuff — I just write about what interests me in addition to the breakdowns.
Sometimes I’m writing a bit lost, but today’s tone is the opposite of that. Big storylines this season have frankly fit together into my little view of this league pretty conveniently, so apologies if this anything sounds a little too high on myself. As always, I truly know nothing. Let’s jump into a couple topics.
A subscriber sent me this article from Warren Sharp a few weeks back, and I finally got around to reading it late last week. It’s thus now a few weeks old in its own right, and should be read through that lens, but it’s a breakdown of why scoring is down, which is a common topic around NFL circles this year for obvious reasons.
I recently wrote about being in and out of position analytically, and this is a topic I feel pretty “in position” on, given I identified the drop in QB aDOTs as teams tried to sit in deeper zones and take away the downfield shots while it was first happening in 2021 (writing about it in this Stealing Signals intro), discussed it through the 2022 season, and then also this offseason broke down learning more in the fantastic The Playcallers series when Robert Saleh was discussing the goals of these defenses in plain terms, and Sean McVay broke down how we’d more or less crossed the Rubicon from a time when defenses would line up and show you the look they were going to play, but now it’s all rolling coverages and secondary pieces seemingly allowed to freestyle a little (he famously wanted defenses to play perfect coverage, because it made it easier to draw up ways to beat it, but one issue has been the variability from snap to snap and look to look).
In that Signals intro I just referenced, I shared the below tweet and also wrote this prescient passage where I emphasized this was, to me, a significant change to football schematically and implied it might impact the league over multiple years, as it has:
So what I’m not satisfied by are these explanations that amount to saying this is the natural ebb and flow of things. I’m also not saying all these quarterback aDOT shifts are going to stick forever, but man, there’s too much happening to too many offenses — and it’s been too successful for defenses — to not want more information.
Hell, here’s more from that initial 2021 breakdown which I couldn’t get any traction on (that tweet about the QB aDOTs has like 7 likes or something)
But I’m pretty lost, and I’m not afraid to admit that, in part because while I do think some people understand this well, this reeks of one of those football things where 95% of people commenting on it are lost, too.
Is it a brag if I say everyone was lost at that time, and I was ahead of the game in admitting it?
And of course, that doesn’t mean I have the answers now. But this is a great topic to circle back on the idea of being in or out of position analytically, because it’s not about me being ahead of the game as much as just feeling comfortable with my understandings (or lack thereof) since the beginning, so being able to see other arguments more clearly (whether I think they are being true to the root causes, or are reaching as they try to explain a concept they don’t really understand). In other words, I’ve mostly just been studying other peoples’ opinions on what is causing this, specifically those that understand the Xs and Os better than me and can break down specifics that I can’t (I did this with the coach quotes in The Playcallers, for example).
I also recently wrote about being willing to look at the evidence and not necessarily always agree with the conclusion of pieces of content. And both of these concepts I’ve recently written about were why I wanted to reference this piece from Sharp, which does an incredible job of relaying a ton of data that has shifted over the past couple years, including not just scoring being down but some things I learned in this reading like average margin of victory being up this year, penalties being down, and specific penalty shifts that favor the defense versus the offense.
Sharp also puts numbers to many of the things we’ve discussed that go along with passing aDOTs being down, like rate of zone defense rising, rate of no-blitz zone rising, and rate of two-high safeties rising. Correlating with that, offenses are seeing fewer heavy boxes, and their rate of explosive plays are down. Saleh more or less said this was the goal of these defenses — the focus these days is on preventing explosives and forcing offenses to run more plays and be more consistent. Defenses are sitting back more than ever, which has been clear.
“These offenses are too good. They’re just gonna look at you and they’re gonna — you wanna stay away from their uppercut. You know, I’ll take their jabs all day. But as soon as they start throwing those old school Mike Tyson — get in close and throw their haymakers at you, it’s over. And so you just want to make sure that you keep them guessing, keep them pure in their playcalling, where they’re staying away from their — again, like I call it, those haymakers. Because you’re going to get about five or six of them a game, where they throw those haymakers at you. And, if you can keep them to a minimum, you got a really, really good chance to keep the points down. And so it’s just one of those deals where you want players to be able to do a lot of things so you can hold the skies a little bit better and you can do multiple things out of it.”
I transcribed that quote in this early August piece because it stuck out to me across that five-episode series given how it explained what I’d been hypothesizing; this is what that “being in position” concept looks like.
One of the fascinating things Sharp goes on to break down is how offenses are struggling in the red zone this year, in part — he theorizes, and shares data backing up — because they are in shotgun more, and are running more out of the shotgun, and defenses are playing more zone in the red zone specifically, and are zone blitzing more, et al.
And there’s so much interesting stuff there, and then Sharp goes on to share his conclusions which it so happens I just don’t really agree with. He says it’s not all on the defenses, that we must blame the offenses for a lack of creativity, that they can’t allow their aDOTs to fall and completion percentages to also fall (these should be inversely correlated), and they can’t all their quarterbacks to be blitzed less but sacked more (these should be inversely correlated, theoretically). He also theorizes the NFL must have made a greater point of emphasis on certain penalties, even saying the league “clearly has quietly told their officials to call (certain penalties) more often, such as ineligible man downfield and pre-snap penalties along the line.”
And since this article is a few weeks old, Sharp notes most of these trends came with healthy quarterbacks, but how going into Week 7 (when he wrote it) things looked dire there, where QB health was starting to fall off. And that’s clearly been a major factor since that point.
In the end, after emphasizing this isn’t just about defenses, Sharp concludes there are “too many contributing factors.” And I’ll readily admit, and have, that offenses aren’t great right now, and should be better at finding answers.
But the data shared in that article, as I read it — it all fit my prior theory about defenses making a significant shift in their focus and what they were trying to accomplish, essentially conceded certain things to offenses in order to stop the more damaging things (whereas for the history of football the focus was less clearly defined and more broadly was “try to stop everything”). And I want to walk through the data Sharp shares in this piece and why my conclusion would actually be that these are all symptoms of the broader macro shift that defenses have started.
Let’s start with the emphasis on certain penalties. The ineligible man downfield penalty is closely tied to the rise in RPOs, because the penalty is called on pass plays and RPOs are passes where the line blocks like it’s a run, and the ball has to get out early. It’s not really on the linemen at all — it’s on the QB being indecisive. In other words, these penalties may be getting called more because the play design where they are most at risk of occurring has risen dramatically as teams try to find more answers for consistently stable gains against the defenses being run.
The decrease in DPI? Defenses are running more zone, and are stopping offenses more overall, so couldn’t it just be that they find themselves out of position and getting burned less?
On the red zone defense, I remember in a discussion about the macro trends on Stealing Bananas this year — because my cohost Shawn Siegele circled back and emphasized this point I made — that I referenced how everyone was saying offenses will have a counterpunch but argued that defenses had only just started this new style of play and very well could get even better themselves. I think that’s what’s happened in the red zone, where the whole concept of their zone defenses and deep shells being to take away explosive plays — that’s not as much of an issue with the field is condensed and the end zone is near by. But you can still play some of the same zone concepts, just with the deep safeties not needing to be so responsible for getting burned over the top, and the extra numbers allowing for more zone blitzes as Sharp notes. And then good coverage — and more use of zone, which Sharp shows has been the more effective red zone defense versus man for many years — is going to make it tougher on QBs and lead to the lower aDOT because of checkdowns, but these are not intentional lower-aDOT throws, they are late read throws that are unsuccessful plays they are being forced into, and that’s why you’re seeing the low aDOT plus reduced completion percentage combination.
It’s not that offensive coordinators aren’t creative enough; I mean, it probably is that to some degree. But it’s more that the defenses are just winning! The thing they are able to do successfully everywhere else works even better when the back of the end zone operates as the “umbrella” over the downfield routes, and they can condense everything in their zones that is already so effective all around the field.
I’m not trying to criticize Sharp here, because he does an awesome job of breaking down a ton of useful data in this piece, and I learned a ton from it. But it was interesting to me to get to his conclusion, because as I’d been reading all of what he was writing, I actually found myself nodding along that all of the shifts did seem to be logical symptoms to what defenses have done: offenses are trying different things that are leading to more calls of different penalties, defenses are actually able to shift and emphasize certain things like how they’ve gotten that much better at applying their edge in the red zone, etc.
So for me, coming at it with a strong hypothesis, I didn’t find that there were a lot of contributing factors; rather, I found that there are a lot of symptoms of what is essentially still one broad thing that defenses have done. And this is one of those really interesting things about football data, where it’s such a scheme-driven game, that if there truly is one major cause of all these data shifts here, it’s very understandable why the conclusions might differ because that one central issue is impacting tons of different data as everything reacts around it. And I’m not even saying I am definitely right; I’m saying that your mileage is going to vary based on what your hypothesis was and what angle you come at this stuff from.
For me, this data all felt like the fallout of a larger, multi-year macro change we’ve been seeing take place. And I laid out why here, and hopefully I made a pretty compelling case for why I believe that. But you don’t necessarily have to agree with me either! What’s fascinating is how the exact same data can be used to reach two pretty different conclusions (which doesn’t even get to the fact that the data used in arguments — not this one from Sharp, but generally speaking — is often not even accurate, or being parsed well).
Since I’m spending some time patting myself on the back for being early on trends, I just have to say how enjoyable it has been to watch the entire NFL world turn on Arthur Smith for all the reasons I’ve been hammering him about for more than a year now. I took a decent amount of criticism for calling for him to be fired after a 2022 season where their 7-10 record seemed to overperform their talent level, noting that I did acknowledge he was able to produce a mediocre team from weak circumstances but was clearly not the leader that would take them anywhere significant, like on a big playoff run (and to be fair, I’ve also argued they weren’t exactly mediocre, but that their 7-10 record was a bit of a mirage in a bad division and with two wins to close the year against teams without their starting QBs after being at 5-10 with four wins of four points or less, including the D.J. Moore helmet toss game; I will never miss an opportunity to emphasize Smith’s so-called good results are super fluky).
Anyway, people have been emphasizing exactly what I wrote a few weeks back about how this dude never just answers a question in a press conference, and he doesn’t just evade but often berates the reporter instead. He’s been on a kick of referencing weird conspiracy theories lately, acting like the smartest guy in the room as the only person who knows “how the world really works.”
People have also been emphasizing how his family’s ties probably influenced his coaching career, and this was sent to me on Twitter as a fascinating breakdown:
He did survive three head coaching changes in Tennessee, so he worked under four different bosses there over the years, which just doesn’t happen. It’s not even that a coach can be good enough to be retained that many times; new coaches tend to just want to appoint their own guys, and the mark of good assistants is they always seem to land on their feet somewhere else, and quickly.
That’s not to say it can’t happen or literally never does, because there are examples of like head trainers who were in one organization for 50 years and stuff like that. But most of the time that’s not coaching, and if it is, it’s not a guy moving up in the ranks with each firing and eventually landing the offensive coordinator job. Smith’s family being very influential in the Nashville area has to be at least an interesting footnote in relation to his long career with the Titans.
Oh, and then the other funny thing is how Arthur Smith wants to be thought of as the smartest person in the room.
Anyway, I didn’t really want to go into Smith at length. I’m just noting I’ve been having fun reading all these other takes, and seeing how much they are being shared and those things. I should feel bad for wishing on someone’s downfall, but I just don’t. I’ve said it before: Smith sucks. And this type of public sentiment building in one direction tends to put pressure on his job status, and also likely removes him from major consideration for other head jobs going forward.
So while I don’t like being this negative about someone, and I frankly look forward to the day when he’s not someone I think about at all, for now it’s been cathartic to see such agreement. Let’s keep up the Arthur roast!
A few of you in the chat wrote a couple weeks ago that you’d like my thoughts on strategizing for the playoffs:
Also, at some point could you address strategizing for playoffs? Once you feel like your team is playoff bound, I feel like every player you add has to include a focus on their playoff schedule. But how far would you go with that strategy?
I too would love to hear Ben's thoughts on strategy for playoffs.