For the second straight week, an NFC West team produced a monster game script. This week, it was Seattle dominating New Orleans and taking control of the NFC. The Seahawks can clinch homefield advantage throughout the playoffs by simply winning the team’s final two home games, and Seattle appears to be (again) getting hot just in time for the postseason. Among passers with at least nine starts, Russell Wilson has the second best ANY/A average behind Peyton Manning, and the team should have a healthy Percy Harvin for the playoffs. In other words, it’s going to take an incredible effort for a team to knock off the Seahawks, who also rank #1 in DVOA.

Six teams in week 13 won with negative Game Scripts, with Matt Ryan leading the biggest comeback of the week. In surprising twists, the Patriots and Cowboys trailed early before toppling the Texans and Raiders, while the Vikings came from behind late to defeat the Bears. The Jaguars won in the final minute in one of the more exciting games of the week, while the Giants won (in somewhat controversial fashion) after falling behind 14-0 early in Washington. Below are the Game Scripts data from each game in week 13: [continue reading…]

The game of the week 12 was obviously Brady/Manning XIV, and the Patriots comeback victory resulted in the second lowest Game Script by a winning team this year. Due to the big lead, Denver rushed 55% of the time, and Knowshon Moreno set NFL season-highs with 37 carries for 224 rushing yards. In regulation, the Broncos held an average lead of 10.5 points, although that still trails the Andrew Luck-fueled comeback by Indianapolis against Houston in week nine. The other big comeback in week 12 was by Cam Newton and the Panthers.  Carolina trailed 16-3 with one minute left in the second quarter in the 2nd quarter, but scored the final seventeen points of the game to steal the win from Miami.

The biggest blowout of the week was by the Cardinals, who clobbered the Colts, 40-11.  Arizona led 34-3 entering the fourth quarter, and this was the second time this season Indianapolis has held an average deficit of 18+ points. That, in my expert opinion, is not good. Things are even worse for the team that selected after the Colts in the 2012 draft: for the second week in a row, Washington posted a Game Script of less than -9.0. I don’t have any desire to talk about the RG3 drama, but I will point you in the direction of this interesting article written by my former co-blogger.

Below are the Game Scripts data from week 12. I’ve highlighted the Vikings/Packers row in blue, since I know of no other way to shame both teams (you can move your cursor over that row to see it more clearly, not that I know why you would want to). [continue reading…]

Last week brought us the most lopsided game of the year. The games were more competitive this week, with the largest Game Script belonging to Tampa Bay (yes, Tampa Bay) at 14.0. The Philadelphia-Washington game provides a good example of the information conveyed — and not conveyed — by Game Scripts. Philadelphia won by 8 points, but that would be misleading if you thought it was a close game throughout: the Eagles held an average lead of 12.8 points. On the other hand, Game Scripts don’t necessarily tell you how lopsided the game was: Washington had the ball with a chance to tie, at the Eagles’ 27-yard line, with 54 seconds remaining. The Eagles came away with a very low Moral Margin of Victory (5.8) but a high Game Script, with neither bit of information being right or wrong. On one hand, Philadelphia’s Win Probability was over 85% for the final 2.5 quarters, but it was also a game where Washington was not really out of it until the final seconds. I prefer a toolbox with lots of different tools over trying to find one do-it-all device.

Here are the week 11 Game Scripts data:

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We have a new leader in the clubhouse for most lopsided game of the season. The St. Louis Rams pulled off one of the biggest blowouts by a heavy underdog in league history in week ten, defeating the Colts in Indianapolis, 38-8. In the process, the Rams also held an average lead of 23.2 points, the largest Game Script score of the season.

Indianapolis kept it close early, and the only first quarter score came via the St. Louis defense. On that play, Robert Quinn — who with 12 sacks through 10 games, is a legitimate Defensive Player of the Year candidate — stripsacked Andrew Luck, and Chris Long picked up the fumble and raced 45 yards for the touchdown. Incredibly, the Colts are lucky this game wasn’t even more one-sided. Late in the first quarter, Kellen Clemens and Zac Stacy botched the exchange on a handoff on the goal line with the Rams looking to go up 14-0, and Indianapolis recovered to end the scoring threat. That didn’t set back the Rams for long, however, as St. Louis scored 21 points in the third quarter to take a 28-0 lead into the locker room. Tavon Austin — who had a day for the ages — scored in the third quarter to give St. Louis a 35-0 lead early in the third quarter, effectively ending any hopes for another Luck comeback.

Three teams lost with positive Game Scripts in week 10, but unlike in week nine, there were no big comebacks, as all three games were back-and-forth affairs.  The Panthers won with the worst Game Script of the week, holding an average deficit of 2.6 points against the 49ers. San Francisco jumped out to a 9-0 early, but Carolina eventually won 10-9 on a late field goal. Since I wrote about how the 3-9 Panthers were about to turn things around, Carolina has gone 9-3. In an unrelated note, I recently injured my hand on my back.

The table below shows the Game Scripts data from week 10:
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Week eight brough us the two biggest blowouts of the season; in week nine, we saw the third most dominant win of the year and the biggest comeback of the season.

The first game involved Chip Kelly’s blitzkrieg offense. Nick Foles threw for seven touchdowns against the Raiders in one of the most lopsided (and surprising) games of the season. The Eagles held a 28-13 lead at halftime and 49-13 at the end of the third quarter; over the course of the game, Philadelphia held an average lead of 21.3 points.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have yet another Andrew Luck comeback victory. The Texans led 14-0 after the first quarter and 21-3 at halftime; on average, Houston held an 11-point lead throughout the game, but a 15-0 edge in the fourth quarter gave Indianapolis the win. That’s the highest Game Script of any team to lose a game in 2012, replacing…. Houston’s victory over the Chargers on opening week, when the Texans had a Game Script of -7.7 points.

In addition to the Colts-Texans game, the crazy comeback in Seattle now gives each of the Seahawks and the Bucs two of the five biggest comebacks/giveaways of the year. In week four, Seattle won in overtime against Houston despite trailing by, on average, 7.7 points in regulation. That was probably an even more crazy game than the win against Tampa Bay, where Seattle came back from a 21-0 deficit but only outscored the Bucs by 10 points in the fourth quarter. As for Tampa Bay, this was the fourth game of the season where the team lost despite having a 95% win probability at some point in the game. This was also the second time the Bucs lost a game with a Game Script of over 6.0 points, joining the come-from-ahead loss to Arizona.

Without further ado, the table below shows the week 9 Game Scripts data:
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The 2013 Game Scripts record was broken not once but twice in week eight. In an unsurprising turn, the 49ers obliterated the Jaguars in London 42-10, holding an average lead of 21.3 points, breaking the largest average margin previously held by… Seattle against Jacksonville. But it was the Bengals demolition of the Jets in Cincinnati that set the new Game Scripts record.

The Bengals took a 14-0 lead with 4:26 left in the first quarter; by halftime, the score was 28-6. The first play from scrimmage in the second half was an interception of a Geno Smith pass that was returned for a touchdown by Chris Crocker, and Marvin Jones’ fourth touchdown reception of the day brought the Bengals lead to 42-9 before the end of the third quarter. The final score of the game was another pick six of Smith, this time by Adam Jones, at the start of the fourth quarter. The game was every bit as ugly as this paragraph makes it sound. For the record, both San Francisco and Cincinnati had Moral Margins of Victory of over 30 points, which puts them in the top five for the season.

Last week, the Patriots were the only team with a positive Game Script to lose; this week, New England is one of just two teams with a negative Game Script to win. That game was a pretty weird one: New England rushed on 37 of the team’s 59 plays from scrimmage against Miami. The Patriots threw just 22 passes, the lowest by New England in a game since a extremely windy week 17 visit to Buffalo in 2008. For Tom Brady, this was the fewest attempts in a game for him — excluding games where he was injured or meaningless games where he was benched — since 2005. And this came in a game where the Patriots had a negative Game Script! Brady and the passing game are really struggling — the Patriots rank 31st(!) in Net Yards per Attempt — but it’s still just weird to see New England be so run heavy. Then again, the Patriots had 100 net passing yards on 25 dropbacks against the Dolphins, while Stevan Ridley and LeGarrette Blount had 125 yards on 25 carries.

Below are the week 8 Game Scripts:
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It’s Friday, so I thought it might be fun to play around with some stats.  Net Yards per Attempt is probably my favorite predictive statistic to measure quarterbacks, but there are some problems with even that metric.  One issue is that Net Yards per Attempt — which is simply yards per attempt but includes sacks data — is pretty sensitive to outliers.  A quarterback who consistently pieces together short passes with a high completion percentage can be pretty valuable, and may end up undervalued compared to some mad bombers.

There are a couple of ways to deal with this.  One is to use a different measure of central tendency than the average production per dropback; for example, we could look at the median yards gained per pass attempt (including sacks).  Another is to measure the standard deviation on all of a quarterback’s pass plays. I thought I’d compile the data on both and see what you guys found interesting.

No matter how you splice the data, Philip Rivers looks outstanding. After a couple of down years, Rivers is experiencing a career revival under new head coach Mike McCoy.  The Chargers no longer rely on a downfield passing attack (and with Vincent Jackson gone and Malcom Floyd on IR, that may be more out of necessity than design), but Rivers has found a Darren Sproles replacement in Danny Woodhead.  As a result, Rivers has completed an incredible 73.9% of his passes this season.

Rivers ranks 27th in average length of pass (or average depth of target), reflecting the shorter passing attack, but Tony Romo, Chad Henne, Matt Schaub, Sam Bradford, Matt Ryan, and Alex Smith have lower average distances and worse completion percentages (among other stats).  The Chargers star has also been great at avoiding sacks: he’s completing passes on 70.8% of his dropbacks this year, a stat I’m calling Adjusted completion percentage (A_Cmp% in the table). In the table below, I’ve listed each quarterback’s number of attempts and sacks, his Adjusted completion percentage, his Net Yards per Attempt, and his standard deviation on pass plays. Since standard deviation would be biased towards quarterbacks with higher averages, I’ve sorted the table by the Ratio of each quarterback’s standard deviation to his NY/A average. Finally, I’ve also displayed the median number of yards gained for each quarterback on each dropback. All data excludes last night’s Carolina-Tampa Bay game.
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The Patriots and Pythagoras

With the exception of a blowout win over Tampa Bay, each Patriots game this year has been in doubt until the final minute. Against Buffalo, Stephen Gostkowski hit the game-winning 35-yard field goal with nine seconds left. In week two, the Jets had the ball, trailing by three, with 56 seconds remaining at their own 29-yard line, but a Geno Smith interception ended the comeback attempt. The Falcons failed on 4th-and-7 from the Patriots 10-yard line, trailing by a touchdown, with 41 seconds remaining. And last week, Tom Brady had not one, not two, but three chances to win the game in the final three minutes; eventually, he hit Kenbrell Thompkins with 10 seconds left for the game-winning touchdown.

To be fair, the Patriots sole loss was a nail-biter, too: it wasn’t until Adam Jones intercepted a Tom Brady pass at the Bengals three-yard line with 26 seconds remaining that Cincinnati sealed the 13-6 win. Still, New England has “only” outscored its opponents by 28 points so far this year. That’s a pretty low number for a 5-1 team.

From 1920 to 2012, 222 teams started the season with a 5-1-0 record. In an odd bit of trivia, the only one of those teams with a negative points differential through six games was a Super Bowl champion: the 1976 Oakland Raiders, who were blown out by the Patriots in week four but finished the year 16-1 (including a controversial revenge victory against New England in the playoffs).

If we limit ourselves to just post-merger teams, there are 148 teams that started 5-1-0 prior to 2013. If we throw out the strike seasons, that leaves us with 139 teams. This is the part of the post where you’d expect the teams with the highest points differential to perform the best over the rest of the season, but that actually hasn’t been the case.
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Every week this season, I’ve posted the Game Scripts and Average Field Position data from the prior week. For new readers, you can read the background and how to calculate Game Scripts here, but the Game Scripts number simply tells us the average points differential for a team throughout a game. There are 3600 seconds in a game that does not go to overtime, and he Game Script is the sum of the score at each of those 3600 seconds, divided by 3600.

This week, the 49ers’ blowout victory against Houston produced the highest Game Script at 18.3, putting it just a hair behind the Seahawks victory over Jacksonville (18.4) on the list of highest Game Scripts in 2013. (We’ll see if Denver/Jacksonville gets the Game Script over 20. The highest Game Script of all time was the Patriots 59-0 blowout in the snow against the Titans, clocking in at 33.7.) Colin Kaepernick completed six passes, but you don’t need to complete many passes when your team is leading by 18 points throughout the game. San Francisco went up 7-0 ninety seconds into the game following a Tramaine Brock pick six of Matt Schaub, and things stayed ugly from there. That reminds me: pick sixes continue to be up this year, an issue I discussed in the dead of March.

Without further ado, the Week 5 Game Scripts:
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Every week, I’m posting the Game Scripts and Average Field Position data for each team. In an effort to get these up a bit quicker, I decided to get these numbers crunched before the Monday Night Game in the result – let me know if you like this method better than waiting until the end of the week. For new readers, you can see the results from the first three weeks here.

For the second week in a row, the Jaguars had the worst Game Script score. And for the second week in a row, Peyton Manning’s Broncos held an average lead of over 15 points. These two teams play in Denver in week six, and the early reports suggest that the line will be 27 points, the highest spread in N.F.L. history. The current record was set in 1976, when the expansion (and winless) Bucs traveled to Pittsburgh to face a Steelers team that had won the past two Super Bowls and had allowed just 28 points in their last seven games. That game had a spread of 26 points, and the Steelers won 43-0.

Here’s how to read the table below. The Colts won in Jacksonville (you can click the boxscore to see the full PFR boxscore), 37-3. Indianapolis won by 34, and held an average lead of 15.5 points throughout the game. Andrew Luck, Trent Richardson, and the rest of the Colts had 41 passes and 29 runs, giving them a 58.6% pass/run ratio. Meanwhile, the Jaguars threw 35 passes and had just 17 runs, giving them a 67.3% pass/run ratio. With few exceptions, the team with the positive game script has the lower pass/run ratio, and that effect is just magnified when the Game Script is large.
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The 2013 season started with two weeks of extremely close games; week three brought on the blowouts. On Monday Night Football, Peyton Manning, Eric Decker, Wes Welker, Demaryius Thomas, and Julius Thomas decimated the Oakland Raiders, helping Denver jump out to a 27-7 halftime lead. Yet that comes in as only the fourth most lopsided game of week three, behind the NSFW Jaguars-Seahawks contest, the Panthers 38-0 shutout of the Giants, and the Cowboys lopsided win over St. Louis. The table below shows the week three Game Scripts for each game, along with data on the number of pass attempts, rush attempts, and run/pass ratio for each team. Sacks are included as pass attempts, but all scrambles are included as running plays, something I would like to eliminate when I have more time.

Here’s how to read the Seahawks-Jaguars line. Seattle won at home against the Jaguars, 45-17, a 28-point margin of victory. The average lead for the Seahawks of every second of every game — the Game Script score — was 18.4 points. Seattle had 31 pass attempts against 35 runs, a 47% pass/run ratio. Jacksonville had 42 passes and 23 runs, a 64.6% pass/run ratio.
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So far this season, one thing is obvious: the NFL scheduled Thursday night games every week for the express purpose of screwing with people who do data analysis. Even though week three has started, I’m not ready to close the door on week two, in which nearly every game was competitive into the fourth quarter. But that doesn’t mean the game script for every game was close.

Steven Jackson was injured early in his revenge game against the Rams (and is expected to miss two-to-four weeks), but consider: Atlanta had 45 pass attempts against just 16 running plays in a game in which their average lead was 13.4 points. And that was with a gimpy Roddy White! Last year, I noted that the Falcons were the most pass-happy team in the NFL after adjusting for game script, and it appears that the model hasn’t changed in 2013.

There weren’t any huge comebacks this week, a byproduct of all the competitive games. The Cardinals scored nine points in the fourth quarter to beat the Lions, in a game where Detroit’s offense was shut out in the second half. Matt Stafford and company gained just 90 yards and four first downs on 24 second half plays, enabling the Cardinals to steal a win. Half of the team’s six second half drives were three and outs, one was a fumble on the second play, and the final drive was five plays and ended on downs. The only successful drive of the half was a 51-yard march that put the Lions at the Cardinals 27, but David Akers’ field goal attempt was blocked.

But while the offense had an off day, there’s a hidden factor that explains why Detroit didn’t score more than 14 offensive points (DeAndre Levy intercepted a Carson Palmer pass for 66 yard touchdown, accounting for the other seven points).
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Regular readers know all about Game Scripts, the term I’ve used to represent the average margin of lead or deficit over the course of every second of a game. Let’s use the Seahawks-Panthers game to explain how to calculate the Game Script score.

Steven Hauschka’s field goal with 9:40 left in the second quarter was the first score of the game; that means for the first 20 minutes and 20 seconds, the score was tied. Cam Newton responded with a touchdown drive, hitting Steve Smith for a three-yard score with 3:20 left in the half. So for six minutes and twenty seconds, the Panthers trailed by three. It wasn’t until 2:26 left in the third quarter that the next score occurred, courtesy of Hauschka’s second field goal of the day. This means the Panthers led by four for fifteen minutes and fifty-four seconds. Russell Wilson threw the game-winning touchdown with 10:21 remaining, the final score of the day. This means for 7:05, the Seahawks trailed by a point, and then for 10:21, Seattle led by five points (following an unsuccessful two-point conversion attempt).

As it turns out, that gives us a Game Script of exactly 0.00. In other words, on average, this game was tied. Here’s how to do the math:

By comparison, the Jacksonville-Kansas City game was much more one-sided:

• With 12:32 left in the first quarter, J.T. Thomas blocked Dustin Colquitt’s punt, which resulted in a Jaguars safety.
• That lead lasted all of three minutes and twenty-three seconds, which is how long it took for Alex Smith to find Donnie Avery for a five-yard score with 9:09 left in the first.
• Next, Smith connected with Junior Hemingway for a three-yard touchdown with 1:40 left in the first quarter.
• With 6:29 left in the second quarter, Jamaal Charles punched it in for a short touchdown, bringing the score to 21-2.
• The final score of the day was a Tamba Hali pick six of Blaine Gabbert, with 12:51 left in the fourth quarter.

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