NFL

I try to do this weekly during the season. Third year now. The previous edition can be found here.

#What is ANY/A and why does this matter?

ANY/A is a QB statistic which correlates extremely well with wins. Aside from EPA/play (which as far as I’m aware is much harder to calculate as an individual, I think it’s the best available (to us plebeians, that is). Its full name is Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt, and it’s basically a modification of yards per attempt in the following manner:

(20 x TDs + passing yards - 45 x INTs - sack yards)/(pass attempts + sacks)

A higher number is better.

Is it perfect? No, obviously not. It doesn’t account for a lot of things, like fumbles and rush yards and pick sixes and several other things like torrential rain games which skew stats in weird directions, but it is a pretty good stat and is not too terribly difficult to calculate by hand.

ANY/A is often computed over at least several games, but most often over a season or career. This is because it’s very prone to volatility. As you’ll see below, QBs can put up ANY/As in a single game that can be far better or worse than their career ANY/A.

So, why should you care about this? Frankly, if you don’t care than feel free to ignore this post. I just like statistics and thought it was be interesting to put up. But my argument for it is that even at a small sample size, the larger ANY/A in a game seems to win a lot (generally because it means the QB played better than the other QB). So maybe it’ll give you one more aspect you can pay attention to in a football game.

With all that being said, here’s the data I’ve accumulated.

#Data Table for Week 12

#Grades

Now, what are those little letters listed after the ANY/A? Well, those are my grades.

Before you start screaming at me about your favorite player’s grade, let me just say that it isn’t just random where the cutoffs are. Specifically:

An A grade corresponds to a single-game ANY/A greater than or equal to 10.

A B grade corresponds to a single-game ANY/A greater than or equal to 7.5, but less than 10.

A C grade corresponds to a single-game ANY/A greater than or equal to 4.5, but less than 7.5.

A D grade corresponds to a single-game ANY/A greater than or equal to 2, but less than 4.5

An F grade corresponds to a single-game ANY/A less than 2.

Now, these grades aren’t like those in school, where the average ends up usually being a B, and very few people get D’s and F’s. This is a curve where the average is intended to be a straight C. Similarly, the vast majority of single-game performances also are intended to be a C, because C’s should be enough to be competitive in most games. As such, B’s and D’s are somewhat unusual but not extraordinarily so, and F’s and A’s are extraordinary games, for either good or bad reasons.

Note that single-game ANY/As do not necessarily match up with season-long and career-long ANY/As. Single-game ANY/As are much, much more volatile and will yield a much larger spread than a typical season-long ANY/A spread. For that reason, you cannot treat them the same as you would a season-long ANY/A, where an exceptional, MVP-caliber season would be an 8+ ANY/A. It’s kind of like the PFF system, where a lot of consistently good performances will get you a higher grade than one great performance and a bunch of mediocre performances.

Well then, what do the grades mean? While they are certainly somewhat subjective, this is what I intended them to represent:

A: This grade represents an exceptional game through the air. This performance was nearly flawless and is incredibly difficult to replicate game in and game out. It’s nearly unsustainable, even for the best QBs. There should be no more than a few of these per week. A string of these would probably result in the greatest season of all time.

B: This grade represents an excellent game through the air. While some mistakes were present, the good vastly outweighs the bad. These are certainly more sustainable than the A-graded games, and the best QBs can sometimes have these games for long stretches at a time. A lot of these games will probably put you in the MVP race, and there should be a handful of these per week.

C: This grade represents a mediocre or satisfactory game. There were mistakes and success, but neither vastly outweighed the other. This kind of performance will put most teams in contention to win most games, and the majority of QBs in a week will have this kind of performance.

D: This grade represents a bad game. Many mistakes were made, enough so that they significantly outweighed the successes. A team with a QB playing like this will be hard-pressed to win games, and if your QB is playing like this often, it’s probably time to look for a replacement. There should t be too many of these per week, but there should definitely be some.

F: This grade represents a terrible game. The QB had essentially none or very few positives throughout the game, far outweighed by the negatives. With this kind of performance, it’s almost impossible to win a game. A string of these warrants a benching almost immediately. Just like for the A’s, there should only be a couple of these per week at the most.

My opinion is that my cutoffs do represent these grades well. The vast majority of grades fall between B and D, with the most in C, and A’s and F’s are few and far between. I didn’t just throw darts at a board either, I spent quite a few weeks looking at the numbers before coming up with these cutoffs, sometime last year (unfortunately I do not remember exactly when). Obviously you can always make slight changes here and there, but I’ve been using this system for a while and it’s easier for me to keep using it than to do some statistics with standard deviations and percentages and the like and figure out what the perfect cutoffs would be. [And actually, most of the time, these track pretty well with the idea of standard deviation - usually the number of C’s is pretty close to the amount within a single standard deviation of the mean, and usually there are only a couple A’s and F’s, which are ideally meant to be outside 2 standard deviations from the mean. While this hasn’t been numerically tested or anything, I feel pretty good about it in general].

If you don’t like them even after this explanation, feel free to ignore them. I just made them for fun anyway.

#Tl;dr

ANY/A is a QB stat that tracks well with wins; larger is better. This includes a list of the single-game ANY/A for any QB who played significant snaps (aka both meaningful in number and meaningful in value) this week. There are attached grades which are somewhat arbitrary (I set the cutoffs once in the past but I don’t make changes to individual grades). I think they make sense and fit my goal, but if you don’t like them feel free to ignore them.

This is actually 2 questions:

1. How do you proceed after the bye
2. How do you proceed after the season

As you can imagine, Vikings fans have a lot of opinions here. You have your Kirk loyalists, your tank commanders and even your Dobbs defenders.

It’s a bit of a cluster, but I am confident /r/nfl will have the answers.

Let’s start with the 1st question. You have 3 options here:

1. Start Mullens: very likely this will give you the best chance to make a playoff run, but let’s be real… you are not going to do anything when you get there.

2. Start Dobbs: Maybe you could delude yourself into thinking last week was a blip and not his luck running out?

3. Start Hall: He looked good in the couple of series he played, why don’t you see what you have to get a more accurate picture for our next question?

Now on to question 2, again we have 3 options here:

1. Resign Kirk, make no mistake, you will not get a discount. Let’s assume it’s a market rate deal. He will be 36 for most of next season coming off the injury.

2. Fuck them picks and try to get in spitting distance of one of the top QB prospects in the 2024 draft.

3. Let it fall to you, take a QB in the top 50ish picks, have Hall and rookie QB dual it out, let the chips fall where they may.

It’s a complicated situation, and we need answers. Obviously Kwesi is here religiously so give him some good advice.

Week 1: SF - L
Week 2: CLE - W
Week 3: @ LV - W
Week 4 @ HOU - L
Week 5: BAL - W
Week 7: @ LAR - W
Week 8: JAX - L
Week 9: TEN - W
Week 10: GB - W
Week 11: @ CLE - L
Week 12: @ CIN - W

So if we go by the pattern….

Week 13: ARZ - W
Week 14: @ NE - L
Week 15: @ IND - W
Week 16: CIN - W
Week 17: @ SEA - L
Week 18: @ BAL - W

PLAYOFFS (if they make it)
Wild Card: W
Divisional Round: L

It seems that the fate of the Steelers season rests in the hands of the all-mighty pattern. We dare not to question its choices. I know that this is a really dumb post and is just a result of pure coincidence, but I’ll believe anything that says we won’t get blown out in the wild card round… again

It's officially the Christmas season, /r/NFL! Everyone has their holiday decorations up, their gift lists sent out, their letters to Santa on their way, and their ugly sweaters out of storage. We had another interesting week where I went 11-5 on my picks, bringing me to 119-61 on the season. How did everyone else do? We're back to the byes in force, with six teams out and three less games to watch. We have just two division games this week, with five inter-conference and six cross-conference games lined up. Let's get to it!

Byes: Bills, Bears, Raiders, Vikings, Giants, Ravens

Those are my predictions, let's hear yours. Keep it civil and fun.

https://www.boston.com/sports/new-england-patriots/2023/11/27/tom-brady-nfl-mediocrity-comment-quarterbacks-read-defenses-line-of-scrimmage-check/

When Tom Brady said that there’s “a lot of mediocrity” in today’s NFL, some were confused and debated his point.

The Patriots icon further explained what he meant in the latest episode of his “Let’s Go!” podcast, focusing more on the inability of quarterbacks to read defenses and check out of plays at the line of scrimmage. As Brady was discussing how well of a game the Eagles’ overtime win over the Bills was, Jim Gray (one of Brady’s co-hosts) asked him why we don’t see as many games as intense or as well-played as that one, calling back to Brady’s “mediocrity” comment.

“I think the point is, you want to see the game continue to grow and evolve,” Brady said. “That means better coaching, better quarterback play, and better defensive playcalling. I think a big difference too is the lack of time that coaches have with players, coaches have together in the building, people don’t understand the full picture a lot of the time.”

As Brady said that players at most positions only need to know how to do a few things well, he explained that quarterbacks “need to know what everyone is doing.” But he doesn’t think quarterbacks in the league now necessarily know as much as they should, placing some of the blame on coaches because they’re trying to “control the game from the sideline.”

“When you try to control the game from the sideline, you don’t have the answer for everything that’s happening on the field,” Brady said. “Ultimately, as a quarterback, I had all the things at my disposal to get us into a good play. … I had the ability to change the play to get us to a play that I thought would be more successful.

“I just don’t see as much of that in the NFL,” Brady added. “There’s a lot less time that people are spending on it. That’s just the reality. When I started, there was a lot more time we spent on it. Over those years, I developed a lot of those tools in my arsenal to get us into the best play.”

Playlist Error: This content is currently unavailable from within your country.

Brady said that his ability to check out of bad plays at the line of scrimmage helped him win Super Bowls and made other quarterbacks, such as Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, and Philip Rivers, great. Now, he thinks that only Patrick Mahomes, Aaron Rodgers, Matthew Stafford, and maybe a couple of other quarterbacks have the ability to check plays at the line of scrimmage.

Brady laid blame on the constant pressures of getting things right in the league for the lack of quarterbacks in the league today who are able to check out of plays at the line scrimmage, saying “in an effort to get it right, people are actually getting it more wrong.” As he thinks it’s particularly affecting young quarterbacks, he recalled that being able to spend time with the Patriots’ coaching staff during the offseason helped him check out of a play that led to an overtime win over the Chargers in his third career start.

“We were talking about how they were going to max blitz us,” Brady said. “We said, ‘OK, if they max blitz us and they get us in that look, we’ve got to check the protection to a seven-man protection, and let’s get the receiver a shot down the field.’ [They said that] to a second-year quarterback!

“I was in the system my whole first year. I was being taught by Bill Belichick and Charlie Weis. We had quarterbacks school and the offseason program. We get into overtime after going the full 60 minutes and I recognized they called this all-out blitz. I said, ‘[Expletive] this, I’m changing it.’ I changed the protection, I threw a deep ball to David Patten, pass interference and we got a 50-yard gain. We win the game on a field goal in overtime.”

Instead of seeing quarterbacks doing what he did at the line of scrimmage throughout his whole career, Brady believes there are too many quarterbacks and teams being “reactive” and trying to fix problems after the snap.

“The more you can be decisive as a quarterback, the better outcomes you’re going to have, the better your process is going to be,” Brady said. “You want to be really decisive as a quarterback. You want to be really sure of what you’re doing. But you need to be sure of the gameplan, the protections, who’s responsible for who if they blitz, and where all of the receivers are going. All of that takes time. We’ve got to allow these guys time to develop.

“The pro game is reflecting what the college game is as opposed to the college game reflecting what the pro game is,” Brady added. “We’re asking pro players to play college football. That’s the biggest difference I see. It’s way more checkers than it is chess. I tried to play chess. I wanted to have three moves ahead of you at all times.”

You always see players shake hands after trying to break each other for 60 minutes which leads me to wondering if there's any players who down right hate each other and have gone on record to say so.

If there was an NFL redraft what would your personal big board look if you were a GM in the NFL? I know we all have our biases but I'm genuinely curious what people think.

My personal big board would be

1. Mahomes
2. Herbert
3. Allen
4. Burrow
5. Hurts
6. Lamar
7. Tua
8. Trevor
9. Dak
10. Kirk

If anyone would like any context for what’s to come, https://x.com/emmanuelacho/status/1729547274429075581?s=46&t=5QOwMNyHv2_jBwVeAPneag is a good place to start.

While I agree with the “value” of Trent Williams to the Niners, his unofficial MVP ballot list is flawed. The definition of “value” here isn’t applied universally across the top 5. Going by his definition wrt to Trent Williams (the obvious odd one from his list):

1. Hurts’ unique athletic build unlocks a further down for the Eagles offence in which they have a lesser turnover risk on 4th and short due to his ability to make the QB Sneak absolutely unstoppable. Apart from that he’s easily a top 5 QB so his “value” there is quite face up. However, how much importance are we giving to this unique ability and discounting the strength of other assets on that offence aka OLine and his receivers
2. Mahomes’ talent as a QB can never be fully understood because he makes the impossible possible but in my opinion he’s overrated here. Remove him from that Chiefs offence and with certain I can say that they’re closer to .500 than 8-3. However, he is unanimously the best player in the league so him playing below his usual standards hurts his stock.
3. The wildest shout on here. Tua’s a good QB. But if you were to pick any player to represent the effectiveness and dynamism of that Dolphins offence? It’s certainly going to be Tyreek Hill with his inhuman speed. In fact, the ability of the Dolphins offence actually diminishes Tua’s stock. Hill has helped Tua look better, not the other way around.
4. Lamar Jackson’s maturity this season has catapulted him into the MVP race. A QB who formerly used to take off when plays break down is now posting career highs in passing completion rates. He’s understanding of the next best passing option when his main option is unavailable and the ability to find that option has made him an undeniable horse in the MVP race. #5 is really disrespectful imo Jackson is the best dual threat QB in the league.
5. How does one make an MVP list for this season and leave out CMC? It’s just baffling. Kyle Shanahan has been given too much credit for CMC’s success imo. Yes, undeniably Shanahan’s run game is elite and gets the best out of his RBs. But if the system was the key reason behind the Niners successes, why sacrifice so much to acquire one of the biggest talents at RB in the league? CMC and the Niners run game is a match made in heaven. While this quote is true, it often comes at a detriment to CMC’s stock. The disparity between CMC and the rest of the RBs is not just due to system. It’s also his own prowess as a high IQ runner and a good pass catcher to add.

Ultimately, what Acho is trying to do here is to be novel, which will show in the interactions he gets from the tweet, benefiting him and FS1. If he’s going off his definition of “value”, CJ Stroud should be the only horse in the race. The competency he has shown as a rookie QB while having OLine struggles puts him at the top of the rankings in Acho’s notion of “value”. The Niners may have lost two games in Williams’s absence. But Houston were projected 3-5 wins overall even with CJ Stroud. Furthermore, leaving out Dak when he’s easily the main reason why the Cowboys are where they’re at is a smart play because America’s team is a good fanbase to target. My main horses for the MVP are CMC, Lamar Jackson, Tyreek Hill while Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts and Dak Prescott are just behind the front runners in the race. With key matchups for all MVP options still yet to come, it’s impossible to call it until the wire.

If any of y’all had spent time to read my opinions, thank you and I would love to hear your opinions in the comments as well.

Why I'm not willing to give up on JF1

The bears as a team including Fields had an abysmal start to the season, be it because of coaching or because of a lack of talent. In my opinion blame lies mostly with coaching, but this is a young roster with a lack of experience (which is why we are seeing this team improve on defense so much).

Then in week 4 something changed (for 3 quarters), the offense seemed to click and we put up great numbers. From week 4 till now, week 12, Justin has played some really good football. He misses some reads, sure, but if you look at every snap (which i have and sometimes this offense makes you want to poke your eyes out) he looks like a mostly good QB who needs to clean up some things, which in my opinion are coachable. In my opinion watching the games he has played after the meltdown in kansas, (excluding the vikins, because he got hurt and the offense as a whole was atrocious) he passes the eye test as a qb1.

He is going through his progressions, checking plays at the line (there is still a good amount of progression to be made here, but he is atleast servicable at this) and he is getting the ball out quicker. He is good at extending plays and when he gets out the pocket he is a pass first qb, which suprised me, because he is such a dynamic runner with the football. He can beat a team with his legs, has one of the best (if not the best) deepballs in the NFL and is starting to get better at the short and intermediate level.

Now for the people who don't care about how somebody looks out on the field and want to look at statistics, here they are.

Passing 4 weeks:

• 1003 yards (250.75 ypg)
• 86/124 for 69.4% completed passes
• Passer rating of 114.42 (only 5 qb's have a rating over 100 this season)
• 9 TD's
• 1 INT

Rushing 4 weeks:

• 245 yards (61 ypg)
• 5.5 ypa
• 4 fumbles
• 3 fumbles lost

Season (17 games):

• 4263 passing yards
• 1041 rushing yards
• 69.4% complete
• 38 Td's
• 4 ints
• 17 fumbles (13 lost)

So that would mean Justin would have 5304 total yards with 38 TD's (which could be more if he gets some rushing TD's which he hasn't in these 4 weeks) 4 INT's with 17 fumbles (lost 13). This would be a 9.5 : 1 TD/INT ratio and a 2.2 : 1 TD/TO ratio.

Don't get me wrong Justin still has things he needs to work on (fumbles, reading defenses and throwinflg with anticipation), but if you 1) look at the tape, he is playing confident and going through his progressions more + adjustments and checks at the LOS, which he has improved upon since coming in the league 2) look at the statistics 3) look at the team (we are in a rebuild with guys who need time to develop and gel together). Justin has what it takes to be a top QB in this league, granted he needs to clean up the fumbles and shows more progression reading the defense, which he has done so far.

Would love to hear opinions on this and answer any questions that you might have (and let's please keep it civil)

Week 12 results

Week 12 standings and picks

Top 3

Not a lot of changes at the top:

• u/DanOfBradford78 is at the top with 394 points

• u/Tameyoshi at number 2 with 372 points

• u/doctor_ben at number 3 with 358 points

Week 13 picks

Please remember that you cannot choose a team you already took in a previous week. You can subscribe to r/NFLScoringGame for reminders.

Submit your Week 13 picks here