The NFL Thread - Root for your favorite team (or laugh at the Browns, whichever's easier)

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Who are you rooting for in Super Bowl 60?

  • New England Patriots

    Votes: 11 22.0%

  • Seattle Seahawks

    Votes: 25 50.0%

  • Team State Farm

    Votes: 1 2.0%

  • The Meteor

    Votes: 13 26.0%
  • Total voters
    50
  • Poll closed .
W00K #17 said:
Yess Ms. Virginia sarr. I will help draft better next time time miss Sarr. Please don't fire me Sarr.

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So if the Cowboys HC job falls through, I should shoot my shot here, right?
I've shit talked a lot about the Chicago Bears and they've only failed miserably so I must know what I'm talking about. If they need me to say it, analytics told me that they were doomed to fail! (and they should hire me)
 
break these cuffs said:
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Fields, Claypool, and Jones were this dude's top three at one point. :story: What are the odds he romance scammed Ginny into getting this position? The guy had 4 years of experience before getting hired as the dept. director. The over reliance, and I'm assuming misunderstanding of how to apply analytics, is an epidemic in the NFL. I think it also gets used as a crutch in game decisions. "The numbers to us to do X" is now an all too common excuse by head coaches during a post loss press conference. There are so many variables to a game that just saying "Going for it on 4 and 2 on our 47 gives us a 3.2% better chance of winning and has a 52% chance success rate" is dumb.

The counter argument is that you have to apply the numbers because it will eventually work out into your favor. Messing with them changes the outcome expectations. How many times will you have to make that decision for you to get the expected outcome advantage? Can it even happen over the course of a season? It's great if you win 3.2% more games over the course of 1,000 games. Was one of them a Super Bowl? How were the numbers derived in the first place? I'm of the opinion that they should be used to inform decisions and not blindly make them.

Analytics has it's place and can be a useful when applied situationally. I was very surprised when noted old school coach and NFL dinosaur Vic Fangio volunteered during one of his first press conferences that he has his own system of analytics he has never shared with anyone including his coaching disciples. The Eagles have a meddling owner's son who is heavily involved in the analytics department and it scares the shit out of me for the future.
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Analytics can help because certain coaches have their own but it was hard to quantify for a while. One of the big hockey analytics terms, Corsi, came from a former Sabres goalie coach who would track his own scoring chances.

I really believe people neglect personal fit when scouting across all sports at their own peril. Yes, you can have analytics but players aren't robots. Trying to maximize efficiency in all human endeavors and actions in sports when the variables are limitless is a dangerous game.
 
JustStopDude said:
The Browns went full retard with analytics, going so far as to hire Paul DePodesta because our idiot owner watched the fucking Moneyball movie.

It's been a fucking disaster.
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Didn't the analytics of Moneyball essentially boil down to "he's cheap and gets on base"? How do you transfer that to a game that doesn't give a shit about getting on base or grossly overpaying mediocre players?
 
Quarterback Rex Grossman said:
Didn't the analytics of Moneyball essentially boil down to "he's cheap and gets on base"? How do you transfer that to a game that doesn't give a shit about getting on base or grossly overpaying mediocre players?
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The point of moneyball wasn't to just use any statistic to win. The point was to figure out which stats can provide wins, identify which players produce the greatest amount of these stats, and get the cheapest ones who produce those stats. Baseball is the ultimate stats game because of how the sport is designed. Football has the problem where stats need way more break down with way less data points. There's different offense concepts, different defense concepts, and different situations that will change how stats can be interpreted. The best you can do is use some stats to identify potentially hidden talent but even then, how are you going to discover someone that other's haven't discovered in time? There are 32 teams, college football that is having scouting constantly improved, and Canadian football. Moneyball just doesn't work in Football
 
Drama Fan said:
So if the Cowboys HC job falls through, I should shoot my shot here, right?
I've shit talked a lot about the Chicago Bears and they've only failed miserably so I must know what I'm talking about. If they need me to say it, analytics told me that they were doomed to fail! (and they should hire me)
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If you need an OC, I'm more than willing to move to the shithole of Dallas for a few  years games before you have to fire me. Wing T and Air Raid hybrid. Take it or leave it.
 
Quarterback Rex Grossman said:
Didn't the analytics of Moneyball essentially boil down to "he's cheap and gets on base"? How do you transfer that to a game that doesn't give a shit about getting on base or grossly overpaying mediocre players?
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Not to derail the thread more than it already has been but the only reason the money ball team was successful was because they had the No.1 ERA in the MLB that year. Their bullpen was INSANE. Hence why their entire offensive strategy was to get as many people on base as possible. Thr analytics played a part in designing the offense sure but they wouldnt have went anywhere without that pitching.

And I think thats a pretty apt metaphor for sports analytics in general IMO. Its not the end all be all, your team still has to play good. It will certainly help you but its not going to take you to the promised land, that responsibility still rests on the shoulders of the individuals that make up the team.

Statistics/analytics/math doesnt offer qualitative assessments, only quantitative. Hence why it works so well in baseball, most of what your doing is just adding single numbers to each other. The point swings for any one play can only ever be +/-1. Meanwhile in football the outcome of anyone given play can be 2 or 3 or 6, but never one. Which is why analytics and stats in general does a bad job of accurately representing what happens during any given 60 minute football game IMO. How exactly do you quantify 22 men weighting anywhere from 200-400 pounds smashing and slamming their bodies into eachother as fast as they possibly can until someone scores 2,3, or 6 points?

For example, one of the best teams (statistically speaking) of the superbowl era, the 2010 Chargers never won the superbowl... or a playoff game... or even WENT TO THE PLAYOFFS. All because their special teams unit was so UNFATHOMABLY ATTROCIOUS it completely negated the fact that the Chargers offense gained ~2000 more yards than their defense allowed. Thats literally they exact opposite of what happened with the Moneyball A's. Jon Bois made a video about them to attempt to analyze what exactly happened.

I think analytics and statistics are useful for giving you context for making a decision or creating an explanation for what happened during a given down. But in terms of using it as a crystal ball for predicting the future? Im not sold.
 
I don't particularly think it's off topic especially when it's in the drought between playoff games. As a non-baseball enjoyer, it just seems like baseball lends it self much more easily to quantification because there's just far less states that can exist on any given play. The most important people are always the pitcher and the hitter, so immediately it's pretty easily reduced to pitches that are counted as strikes, balls, fouls, and hits. Hits are the only one that really complicates things, and that's really only adding the guy fielding it (can he catch it y/n which will lead to an error if yes but he fucks it up) then the guy at the base he's throwing it to + a few more variables depending on whether there's other guys on bases already, ect). It's a much more tracable set of outcomes and they can usually be forked off with a few obvious, quantifiable outcomes depending on what happens. Trying to map how a football play is executed is just nonsesnse given that there's 11 people on both sides, and all are going to be acting in a way that could potentially effect the outcome of the play mostly in unquantifiable ways (how the fuck do you quantify a downfield block, a chip, a presnap motion, a fake to one side of the field, ect) , and you're repeating that for every single snap taken on a drive consisting of 1-who knows how many that has further divergent outcomes based on coaching... and do that for a dozen or two drives both ways.

It's just an absurd proposition for football, so we have extremely crude metrics that we then try to hammer into some predictive value and call it data driven analytics. Everyone from the locker room to the coaches to the guys at the bar know the numbers don't really mean much of anything, but it sure does give the announcers something to talk about to chew up time and give some off the cuff "analysis" during the game.

Maybe 10-20 years down the line, some super advanced AI running on 10 server farms worth of the highest quality nVidia AI gigabrain chips can analyze players using analysis based on 10590 collected data points per player will be able to assemble a dream team determined on metrics that humans don't even have words for, but until then the gut feeling and vibes will have an important part to play in any analysis of players and teams. Stat weenies should learn their place.
 
The issue it comes down to with football is that it is very much a team sport. Every man on and off the field plays a role.

Analytics is going to say do your job, when that’ll change depending on other people on and off the field. The offense can run a power right, the defense can read it might be a run and infer what it is based on a players tell, they can also fail to read it, a lineman can miss his block, the running back can miss his hole, the defense can fuck up and trip into the running back, the QB can fumble, a bad snap can happen, and fuck ton of other shit.

You can run numbers for best player in whatever role, but the game has way too many odds. It’s played in conditions that induce variables for further fuckery.
 
Joined in a Super Bowls Squares and I got AFC 3 NFC 5 :(
The Lions might get a 15 from Dan Campbells agression but other than that I don't really see any of the remaining NFC teams ending in a 5. Maybe Washington can get 5 field goals if they make it.
 
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I have one request for the Football gods - let the Lions and Commies just run up the score.

The Lions have everything to prove re: this is Their Year, the Commies are just happy to be here, I say neither team plays a defense and they both just try and score 100. It'd be more watchable than most of the Wildcard games.
 
Ensok said:
Save us Texans. Please. I'd fucking hate it if it ended up being Ravens and Eagles but I'd still accept it if it meant no Chiefs. Please Texans, do it.
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You know the fucking NFL is gonna want to have Travis propose to Taylor Swift in the Super Bowl post game and is going to do anything they can cover up in terms of referee shenanigans to make sure this happens.

In any event, no team seems to be able to go into KC and win in the playoffs. I suspect Mahomes shakes off the weird lethargy that has gripped him this season and returns to form. Sigh.

I do want the Lions to win it all, but the sheer number of injuries makes me wonder if they get past the Eagles.
 
For anyone wondering, there’s no need to tune into this game until there’s about 10 seconds left.
DSP's Tax Lawyer said:
The point of moneyball wasn't to just use any statistic to win. The point was to figure out which stats can provide wins, identify which players produce the greatest amount of these stats, and get the cheapest ones who produce those stats. Baseball is the ultimate stats game because of how the sport is designed. Football has the problem where stats need way more break down with way less data points. There's different offense concepts, different defense concepts, and different situations that will change how stats can be interpreted. The best you can do is use some stats to identify potentially hidden talent but even then, how are you going to discover someone that other's haven't discovered in time? There are 32 teams, college football that is having scouting constantly improved, and Canadian football. Moneyball just doesn't work in Football
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Stats that can work in football is stuff related to kicking and fourth down conversions. Otherwise I mostly agree with you.
 
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