Point Blank – December 9
What a “Bettor Better Know” – NFL #14
The NFL Week that Was, and some key takeaways that you can incorporate into your own handicapping portfolio, in order to gain major edges on the betting boards ahead.
Item: Pete Carroll channels his inner Nick Saban
There have bee numerous takes here about the issues that the Seahawks have been facing due to injuries in their defensive front, the last being the loss of Brandon Mebane four games ago. Yet no defense in the NFL has been better over the past month, with Carroll showing once again his ability to adapt to the personnel he has to work with, and also in keeping them going at a high level of motivation. And naturally it helps to have someone like Richard Sherman on hand, with his current run almost unprecedented - over the past three games he has two INTs, without allowing a single pass to be caught by the receiver he was covering. But there is a critical part of those numbers that you need to digest in order to understand this surge properly – the aspect of game management.
Nick Saban has produced superb defenses in taking Alabama to the top of the NCAA heap in recent years, but context is required – the Crimson Tide indeed have been staunch on that side of the ball, but they have also been the statistical beneficiaries of some of the slowest game paces in the nation. That has changed a bit this autumn with Lane Kiffin running the offensive show, but there were full seasons in which the Alabama defenders were essentially facing nearly one full quarter per game less of opposing snaps than the NCAA average.
Which takes us to this Seattle surge. Through a combination of game management, and flat-out shutting teams down, depth has been rendered a non-issue recently. Let’s take a look at just how much that has impacted the Seahawk bottom line over the past month -
Seattle Defensive Snaps, Last Four Games
NFL Season Average: 63.8
Seahawks: 47.8
It has been an average of 16 fewer snaps per game in this span, and what happens when you multiply 16 by four? It comes to 64, which is the league average for a game. In the course of those four weeks, they managed to effectively shave a full game’s worth of defensive plays off of their workload. Not only is that mattering now, but it will be of extra importance come January, should they win their way into the playoffs. So make sure you understand fully that most of the great current surge is their ability to make stops, but a big part is also limiting the number of stops they have to make. Which takes us too…
Item: But let’s also give Russell Wilson his due
The best way to stop the other team’s offense is keep them on the sidelines. That was particularly an issue at Philadelphia on Sunday, where Chip Kelly’s pace was a threat to Seattle’s depth issues up front on defense. So it was up to Russell Wilson to direct an offense that could accomplish that, and the Seahawks rolled to 28 first downs and 440 yards. It was another strong game for Wilson, who has had added pressure put on his shoulders, and has responded with poise and precision. Here is how he has fared over the last four games, when better production was needed to protect the defense a bit -
Wilson Passer Rating/Completion Percentage/Yards Per Pass
First 9 Games: 86.7 60.2 6.8
Last 4 Games: 107.1 65.5 7.9
And note that these were legitimate challenges, against the Chiefs, 49ers, Cardinals and Eagles, teams that are a combined 32-20. Wilson does not have a few of the key weapons he had to work with LY, which is making this run even more impressive.
Item: Peyton Manning is another week older
While Wilson’s recent stretch has been terrific, his opponent in last February’s Super Bowl has been veering in the wrong direction. This was first dealt with on Friday’s column, which noted how the Broncos were altering their run/pass ratio ("When running the ball becomes the “Thing to do in Denver” ). But Sunday’s showing vs. Buffalo requires an update. For while Manning is still one of the very best out there, any lessening in his effectiveness is a serious handicapping factor.
Manning Passer Rating/Yards Per Pass:
First 9 games: 114.0 7.4
Last 4 games: 89.1 6.7
For the first nine games, Manning rates #2, only behind Aaron Rodgers. But if we pro-rated the last four to a full season he is #18, directly behind Kyle Orton, and just a tick ahead of his brother Eli. The concern from Sunday is that he threw two INTs against Buffalo, despite never trailing for a single moment in the game. As you will be familiar with by now, one of the things frowned upon most at Point Blank are QBs throwing picks when playing with a lead, which means that they are not forced to take risks. Like a third-down INT when the ball was snapped from the Bills 35-yard line in the third quarter, with the Broncos were up 21-3 and in FG range. Peyton looks a little old right now.
Item: Cleveland’s secondary shut down Andrew Luck (and the Browns still lost)
Andrew Luck also had a tough time on Sunday, before finally putting that late 90-yard TD drive together (a 35-yard pass interference penalty certainly helped) to lead the Colts past Cleveland 25-24. He finished 24-53 for only 293 yards, with a pair of INTs, one that was returned for a TD, and it was his fumble that Craig Robertson recovered in the end zone for the game’s first TD. It was the latest in a series of performances that has us taking a closer look at how well the Browns have played at the back end of their defense, but unfortunately for them, they scored more TDs than their own offense and Billy Cundiff missed a FG for the fifth straight game, which caused their playoff hopes to fade.
Naturally a game like that can cause frustrations. Since 2008 there have been 50 games in which a team scored two defensive TDs, and those teams went 48-2. The two losses? Both by Cleveland, on Sunday, and a 38-31 defat vs. the Bears last December. The feelings were evident post-game from Donte Whitner – “We went out there and put hands on those guys, played man-to-man with them, and we are supposed to come out with a win. After four turnovers and two defensive touchdowns, it’s really unacceptable. That’s the way we feel.” Perhaps having heard Whitner use “we”, CB Joe Haden was more diplomatic towards his own offense - “Our defense’s only job is to create turnovers, try to score points and try to get the ball back to the offense. Everything else is outside of our hands, outside of our control. We just want to try to control what we can control, stay on our side of the ball, keep it going, keep pushing and try to be the number one defense in the league. The other side of the ball, they’re going to get it together.”
And Haden was obviously exaggerating when he noted those aspirations of being the number one defense in the league, right? Perhaps not - they may actually be even closer to that than he thinks, when it comes to shutting down opposing passing games, and certainly above their market reputation -
Cleveland Pass Defense/NFL Rank
Passer Rating: 72.6 (1)
Yards Per Attempt: 6.4 (5)
Interception Rate: 3.8 (1)
Touchdown Rate: 3.8 (7)
And it really is about the secondary, because…
Sack Rate: 5.2 (27)
In other words, the cover guys are getting it done despite not being blessed with a lot of push up front (the rush defense is also allowing 4.4 per attempt). They have come up with at least one interception in 12 of 13 games, and as a group are showing a tremendous resolve. But now for the other side of the ball…
Item: Johnny Manziel time
The Cleveland defense has played well enough to help grind a 7-6 record, which is within striking distance of the playoffs, but help is needed – the Browns are a game-and-a-half behind Cincinnati in the AFC North, and trailing Pittsburgh, Baltimore and San Diego by a game in the Wild Card chase. So with the offense struggling so badly it will be Johnny Manziel getting his first start as an NFL QB. It is rare to recall a setting in which a rookie got the nod when a team was in playoff contention this late.
Assessing Brian Hoyer is easy enough – he is who he is, a journeyman that produced about what his abilities call for. His 76.4 Passer Rating for the full season checks in at #31. But the recent stretch has been abysmal – his last TD pass came more than 14.5 football quarters ago, with 8:58 left before halftime vs. Houston, with 134 attempts since then, eight of them caught by opposing defenders. It has been a dismal stretch. But it is in assessing the “offense” that there is a challenge.
In one of the first PB NFL columns this season there was a take on just how limited the Cleveland skill positions were without Josh Gordon, relying on a pair of rookie RBs and a receiving corps that lacks depth, with the latter exacerbated by Jordan Cameron being injured. Now Gordon is back, and while the offense showed a different dynamic in his first game at Atlanta, when he caught eight passes for 120 yards, that may have been more about the Falcon defense. He was simply terrible vs. the Colts, with a couple of easy drops, and the failure to make what would have been a difficult catch on the final drive that might have turned the outcome. Which leaves that same bottom line of Manziel not having a lot to work with at the other skill positions, and that is going to be a natural problem for his debut, vs. a Bengal defense that has now faced some of those other new faces already. The jury is absolutely out as to whether Manziel has the size and pocket discipline to succeed at this level, and it is anything but an automatic that this offense gets better.
Item: Is anyone playing better than Julio Jones right now?
The lift Cleveland was hoping for from Josh Gordon has not materialized, yet there are examples across the NFL of what a high-impact WR can bring to an offense. As Calvin Johnson gets fully healthy, the Lion offense looked much different on Sunday. But nowhere is that more evident than what Julio Jones has done the last two games. His success against Patrick Peterson was enough to be the lead topic in the NFL review column last Tuesday ("What the Falcons did, without Roddy White"), and he followed that up with a remarkable performance at Green Bay, catching 11 passes for 259 yards. That makes it 448 yards over the last two games, a historic production level. But now there is the matter of that late-game hip injury that becomes a key part of the handicap as the Falcons host Pittsburgh this week, trying to hang on in the NFC South.
The Steelers are #29 in the NFL in yards allowed per pass attempt at 8.0, and also #29 in opponents Passer Rating at 100.3. And that has come despite facing Brian Hoyer and the Browns twice, and also the struggling pass offenses of the Buccaneers, Titans, Jaguars, Panthers and Jets. It is an intriguing style matchup that bears watching closely if Jones is going to be able to go. And then he and the Falcons are on to New Orleans the following week, where there is another defense they can feast on...
Item: The Saints allowed 6.8 per rush, had no sacks, and forced no turnovers
Sunday was a big day for the Saints. There was plenty of momentum off of that solid win at Pittsburgh, the prospect of taking the division lead with Atlanta a major underdog at Green Bay, and a chance to essentially knock the Panthers out of the race. Which makes the astonishingly bad performance by their defense something that needs to be highlighted.
It is difficult to grade just how bad that unit was. The Panthers had season-highs in points, rushing yardage (more than double what they had in regulation in any other game) and total offense. And those counts were still below what they could have been – the last two drives of the game were three-and-outs overland, content to just work the clock.
There is no particular need to bash Rob Ryan again here; that has been done on multiple occasions. The bottom line is that despite the seeming pedigree his last name brings, he has not been a successful NFL DC through tours of duty with four different teams. But take a look at Sean Payton’s post-mortem assessment and see how it lines up with those previous takes about the defense - "I saw alignment problems. I saw execution problems. I saw guys not aligned with leverage the way they're supposed to be ... Blown coverages. There's a guy loose in man to man and it's their top receiver."
OK, so tactical issues are not new. But at least in the past the players were still competing hard, and with a Playoff spot on the line that should have absolutely been the case. Is there a disconnect? It has been four straight games with allowances of at least 27 points and 400 yards, which makes it difficult enough to fix if the effort is there. But what if that is also lacking?
Item: Beating a dead horse in San Francisco
I avoided all of the links back to past Ryan takes above because it could come across as beating a dead horse to those that have been faithfully following along. So that means time to be quick with Jim Harbaugh and the 49er offense, because this really is beating such a horse – there has not been a single topic discussed more often on this page all season. But what has been the most confounding coaching aspect of NFL 2014 was in such evidence on Sunday there has to be at least a brief mention.
San Francisco had 56 snaps vs. Oakland. On only 14 of them was the ball handed to a RB, a mind-numbing 25 percent considering that needs to be the base of the offense. And it had nothing to do with the effectiveness of the the runs - Frank Gore and Carlos Hyde netted 67 yards on those carries, a 4.8 per attempt that any team will gladly accept. It was also not a case of playing from behind – the 49ers were leading late in the third quarter. For some reason they went away from their identity this season, and that raises major questions about the stability of this team as they enter the home stretch – in the past this was a group that could be counted on to go hard to the final whistle, and would have made taking double-figures at Seattle an intriguing notion. Not now. But at least there is another Harbaugh that still has his head in the game…
Item: “The Play’s the Thing” - Ravens/Dolphins
Back in October there was an introduction to the Shakespearean plot twists of how a single play can be worth countless times more than just the touchdown the sport allows (“The Play’s the Thing” ). And sometimes a play does not just change a game, but instead perhaps the arc of a season.
The Ravens were on the ropes at Miami. They fell down 10-0 early, and a defense without Jimmy Smith and Haloti Ngata was struggling. They battled back to within 10-7 at halftime, and managed to stop the Dolphins on the first drive of the second half. The ensuing possession then brought one of those key moments, when Jim Harbaugh decided to roll the dice on a fourth-and-one from the Baltimore 34-yard line with 10:26 remaining in the third quarter. A failure was going to put the defense in a difficult position, with Miami beginning a drive already in FG range. But Harbaugh made the commitment; a sneak by Joe Flacco made the first down; and the game momentum changed in a staggering way. It was a 21-3 Raven run-out from that point, with TD drives of 75 yards in 11 plays, 80 in nine, and 81 in seven.
The irony is that Harbaugh did what his brother has refused to this season – he trusted the guys up front on offense to get the job done. His take – “That decision right there depends on the guys, and the guys up front did a great job. When we’ve got an offensive line that we’ve got, you got a chance to do something like that, and that was big.”
And could it also have been his recognition of something else that was a key sub plot, in terms of the game dynamic at that moment?
Item: Is Miami’s defensive front gassed?
There is a key follow-up here from last Tuesday’s column (you can use the link in the Julio Jones take earlier in today’s sermon) concerning the Dolphin defense, and how the impact of heavy workloads against the run could begin to show. In their two previous games they had been up against 84 rush attempts, including that short turnaround after the Jets ran the ball 49 times last Monday. This is going to be something new in NFL tracking, after there were major changes in practice routines set in place to limit the amount of contact prior to the opening of 2013 training camps. It goes to the heart of whether teams are going to be in the same kind of physical condition without having as much contact in practice, and also how much heavier doses of hitting on game-day could weigh more heavily than in the past.
Flacco touched upon this in the Sunday post-game, when asked about the fourth-down conversion – “Just keeping them on the field for that long drive helped us for that next drive, and I think it really helped us out late in the game too.” The three long Baltimore TD drives were outlined above, and note that for the game they ran for 183 yards at 5.9 per attempt, vs. a defense that was allowing 4.3 per rush coming in. A Miami pass rush getting sacks on 7.1 percent of all pass plays this season could only get to Flacco once in 34 drop-backs.
The three-game total for the Dolphin rush defense is now 115 carries for 661 yards, an alarming 5.7 per attempt. That is not a favorable resume to be taking to Foxboro in mid-December. It may not have just been the Baltimore season that turned on that fourth-down attempt, but perhaps Miami’s as well.
This week at Point Blank:
Monday - What a "Bettor Better Know" - NCAA #15