A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that over his 4-year career, Jameis Winston had been great at picking up first downs and also at throwing interceptions. Well, now that Ryan Fitzpatrick’s interception rate has ticked back up, the same is true for the 2018 Bucs as a whole.

Jameis Winston leads all players with a 6.8% interception rate through 9 weeks. But Fitzpatrick’s 3.8% interception rate puts him as the 5th most INT-prone passer of the first half of the ’18 season. On the other hand, there are just five players this season who have picked up first downs on 40% of their dropbacks so far: Jared Goff (43.2%), Patrick Mahomes (41.0%), and Philip Rivers (40.9%) — three of the top MVP candidates — and then Fitzpatrick (42.6%) and yes, Winston (40.4%).

On the team level, the Buccaneers have picked up a first down on 41.5% of dropbacks (calculated based on a league-high 148 passing first downs, divided by the team’s 333 pass attempts and 24 sacks).  The Rams lead the league in this metric at 43.3%, followed by Tampa Bay, Kansas City, the Chargers, and the Saints. The worst five teams are the Bills (22.2%), the Cardinals, the Browns, the Jets, and the Cowboys.

When it comes to interception rate, the Bills have the worst performance in that category, too, at 5.5%. But here, Tampa Bay ranks 2nd in the NFL at 5.1%. Usually, there’s a pretty strong relationship between these two categories: teams with good interception rates have good first down rates, and teams with bad interception rates have bad first down rates. Tampa Bay is a very… very large outlier. No other team ranks in the top 9 in first down rate and bottom 9 in interception rate, while Tampa Bay ranks 2nd and 2nd-from the bottom. The Bengals (11th-best 1st down rate, 10th-worst INT rate) are the only other team in the top/bottom 12 of both metrics, and the 49ers, Texans, and Lions are the only other teams in the top/bottom 15.

On the flip side, Baltimore and Washington are the anti-Bucs. The Ravens rank 25th in first down rate, but 9th (aka 24th-from-the-bottom) in interception rate, while the Redskins are 22nd in first down rate and 5th (aka 28th from the bottom) in interception rate.  Yes, Alex Smith is still your anti-gunslinger.

On the graph below, I have plotted where each team fares in first down rate (X-Axis) and interception rate (Y-Axis).  Interception rate is plotted in reverse order, so a low (good) INT rate is high in the graph; therefore, you want to be in the upper right corner of the graph.  The worst passing teams — the Bills, Cardinals, and Jets — are in the lower left corner of the graph.  And all alone in the bottom right? That’s where you’ll find Tampa Bay, the biggest passing outlier this season. [continue reading…]

In the last 8 days, Ryan Fitzpatrick — sorry, journeyman, Harvard graduate Ryan Fitzpatrick — just produced two of the best games of his career.  He had one of the best games in recent memory in week 1, completing 21 of 28 passes for 417 yards and 4 TDs with no interceptions or sacks.  Today, against the defending Super Bowl champions in week 2 of the 2018 season, Fitzpatrick went 27 of 33 for 402 yards with 4 TDs, although he did add one interception and two sacks for nine yards.

Fitzpatrick averaged 17.75 ANY/A in week 1 on 28 dropbacks; if we use the NFL average ANY/A from 2017 as our estimate of what the average will be in 2018, this means he produced 332 Adjusted Net Yards of Value over average. Today, he averaged 12.49 ANY/A on 33 dropbacks, which is a still remarkable 230 ANY over average.

Fitzpatrick started his career with the Rams in 2005, then the Bengals, then the Bills, Titans, and Texans. In Houston, Fitzpatrick had the other remarkable game of his career: he went 24 for 33 for 358 yards and 6 TDs, averaging 14.48 ANY/A in a game against one of his many former teams, the Titans. Given the league average in ’14 of 6.14 ANY/A, this means Fitzpatrick had 276 ANY of value over average.

Then Fitzpatrick went to the Jets, and while he had some good games, it also produced the worst game of his career: a 6-interception disaster against the Chiefs that produced -356 ANY over average.

The graph below shows — color-coded, of course — each game of Fitzpatrick’s varied career.

Are Fitzpatrick’s last two games a mirage? You take a look at the graph and tell me…

This week at the Washington Post, a look at how the Jets built an offense the “wrong” way.

Fitzpatrick is the team’s leading passer, Ivory the leading rusher, and Decker and Marshall the two leading receivers.

It’s very rare for a team’s top passer, top running back, and top two weapons in the passing game to all come from other teams. In fact, the 2015 Jets will become just the second team in the last 10 years to meet those criteria, and just the 12th since 1970. The question now is how well this core can sustain this high level of play. As you can see from the table below, which illustrates the first 11 teams that featured out-of-house core fours, success isn’t that common for teams of this type.

You can read the full article here.

Twice in four years, the Buffalo Bills have teased their fans. In 2008, the Bills started 5-1, and Peter King named Trent Edwards his MVP after the first quarter of the season. Edwards had led fourth-quarter comebacks and game-winning drives in the second and third weeks of the year, and he ranked in the top-five in AY/A after seven weeks.

The former Stanford Cardinal would rank 24th in AY/A the rest of the season while Buffalo finished the year with a 2-8 record.

The Bills won just ten games the next two seasons, but made some noise at the start of the 2011 season. Going back to the nerd well at quarterback, Buffalo raced out to a 5-2 start. Fitzpatrick led two fourth-quarter comebacks/game-winning drives and ranked 11th in AY/A after eight weeks. Unfortunately, the former Harvard star ranked 32nd in that metric over the last nine weeks of the season, and the Bills finished the season 1-8.

How unusual is it for a team to have such a hot start and cold finish? It’s simple enough to look at first-half/second-half splits, but I prefer a more nuanced approach by weighing each team game based on when it occurred; e.g., game 1 counts 16 times as much as game 16, game 2 counts 15 times as much as game 16, game 3 counts 14 times as much as game 16, and so on. I looked at each team since 1990 and calculated their actual winning percentage and their “weighted” winning percentage.

The 2011 Bills had a 0.375 winning percentage last year, but by placing greater weight on games earlier in the season, Buffalo had a 0.507 weighted winning percentage. In 2008, the Bills had a 0.438 actual winning percentage and a 0.566 weighted winning percentage. As it turns out, those were two of the five “strongest-starting” teams of the last five years. The table below lists the “strongest-starting teams” since 1990, along with their actual and weighted winning percentages. The last column represents the difference between the two winning percentages.
[continue reading…]