Super Bowl XLVII Preview

February 3, 2013 Current Events

Before we get to my preview, I feel the need to point you to some excellent Super Bowl previews I saw this week: Bill Barnwell at Grantland with his excellent Super Bowl preview Chris Brown on the Ravens defense against the 49ers offense and the Ravens offense against the 49ers defense, both also at Grantland [...]

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Checkdowns: How the Ravens and 49ers compare to previous Super Bowl teams

January 31, 2013 Checkdowns

Ever wondered which Super Bowl teams were the oldest or youngest? I went and calculated the AV-adjusted age of every team to appear in the Super Bowl. (AV stands for Pro-Football-Reference’s Approximate Value system, which assigns an approximate value to each player in each season; you can read more about it here.) You can probably [...]

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The Schottenheimer Index

January 29, 2013 Coaches

Last week, Neil brought us the latest iteration of the Manning Index, showing which quarterbacks have overachieved in the playoffs relative to expectation (based off of the Vegas line). I’m going to do the same today for coaches. A couple of introductory notes: Neil described the exact methodology in his quarterbacks post, so I won’t [...]

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The Manning Index (and The Brady Effect)

January 23, 2013 Data Dump

Eight years ago — almost to the day — our old PFR colleague Doug Drinen wrote a Sabernomics post about “The Manning Index”, a metric designed to roughly gauge the clutchness (or chokeitude) of a given quarterback by looking at how he did relative to expectations (he revived this concept in version two, six years [...]

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Is Joe Flacco elite?

January 22, 2013 History

Just a guess, but I think that question will be asked quite a few times over the next couple of weeks. While the inanity of the discussion that usually follows that question is not something I wish to emulate, there’s no particular reason not to take an in-depth look at Flacco’s career. The table below [...]

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Super Bowl History

January 21, 2013 History

Now that the Super Bowl matchup is set, I thought I’d start the two-week period with some Super Bow history. The table below lists some information from each of the first 46 Super Bowls. With Joe Flacco and Colin Kaepernick facing off, that ends five-year streak where at least one of the two quarterbacks in [...]

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Previewing the AFC Championship Game: Baltimore at New England

January 19, 2013 Current Events

According to the SRS, this is as lopsided as championship games get. The Patriots are 12.8 points better than average while the Ravens have an SRS of just +2.9; therefore, you’d put New England as 13-point favorites at home (in reality, they are 8-point favorites). I’ve been a Ravens skeptic for a couple of months [...]

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Checkdowns: Every AFC and NFC Championship Game since 1970

January 18, 2013 Checkdowns

Yesterday, I provided my preview of the NFC Championship Game, and I’ll do the same for the AFC tomorrow. But today, here’s a listing of every conference championship game the since the NFL merger. The table below shows each game from the perspective of the winning team and includes a linkable boxscore for each game. [...]

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Previewing the NFC Championship Game: San Francisco at Atlanta

January 17, 2013 Current Events

A couple of interesting notes, courtesy of Mike Sando on ESPN.com. The first is a good bit of trivia: Jim Harbaugh joins George Seifert, Barry Switzer and Rex Ryan as the only head coaches to reach the AFC or NFC Championship Game in each of their first two seasons as an NFL head coach. The [...]

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Reviewing the Divisional Round of the Playoffs

January 14, 2013 Review

The Best Weekend of the Year lived up to its reputation this weekend, as the divisional round of the playoffs gave us three outstanding games. Here is my reaction, with a disproportionate amount of time spent on the Denver-Baltimore game, because, well, if you saw it, you’d understand. Baltimore 38, Denver 35 One of the [...]

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