ATL@NE . FILM preview thread

Ian · Oct 17, 2017

patfanken said:
You see THIS is why this is such a great thread. I never heard of "locked on Patriots", and I just spent the last hour listening to a guy that could be a great resource when we want to know WHY something is happening.

Now I know guys who run sites, especially successful sites (that's you, @Ian) don't like directing people to OTHER sites. But I wonder if we could get a sticky or some other mechanism that would give us links to football nerd type stuff like this.

I would love to have a direct link to the stuff Chatham does. I already belong to Bedard's site. A I think other fans would too. The more knowledgeable we are, the better fans we become, and this only elevates the level of discussions we can have right here.

I'd be interested in hearing Ian's thoughts on this, so if any of you who have direct contact with him, I'd appreciate you reaching out with this suggestion.
BTW- I know I can always search these things out on my own, but I'm 70, lazy, and want all my internet interactions to be laid out for me.

I already have "Football On Football" - which is Chatham's site, in the feed. Boston Sports Journal was also added at the beginning of the year and also runs in our news feed. I'm always happy to add local media sources and will certainly figure out a way to include some of this additional stuff as well

Ian · Oct 17, 2017

patfanken said:
I'd be interested in hearing Ian's thoughts on this, so if any of you who have direct contact with him, I'd appreciate you reaching out with this suggestion.

LOL, and BTW, everyone has direct contact to me. PM or @ me anytime

kennyb · Oct 17, 2017

Pats have no speed on defense. Won't be able to do what Miami did.

luuked · Oct 18, 2017

PP2 said:
First time I've read anything by Mark Schofield.. just added him to my twitter feed, thanks.

If you have the time (and a pod casting app that can speed up play speed) his podcast is also pretty good. It is like 20-30min episodes almost every day and works pretty well as a complement to his articles.

dafoe2016 · Oct 18, 2017

I did a little bit of research. As far as I can tell, the record for points allowed in a game by a team is 73- given up by the Redskins to the Bears in December of 1940, Just saying.

I will be very pleasantly surprised if we score less than 40 and win this game.

luuked · Oct 18, 2017

dafoe2016 said:
I did a little bit of research. As far as I can tell, the record for points allowed in a game by a team is 73- given up by the Redskins to the Bears in December of 1940, Just saying.

I will be very pleasantly surprised if we score less than 40 and win this game.

How is any of this relevant to the topic of the thread ?

NE-VT · Oct 18, 2017

Michael Lombardi discusses the Falcon's offense @ 11:00 in his podcast:

'GM Street’—Where Do We Go From Here?

I have said this elsewhere, but I strongly recommend this podcast generally.

luuked · Oct 18, 2017

NE-VT said:
Michael Lombardi discusses the Falcon's offense @ 11:00 in his podcast:

'GM Street’—Where Do We Go From Here?

I have said this elsewhere, but I strongly recommend this podcast generally.

Really like him for a macro level view on things.

But it is clear that the longer he is in the national media circus the more he loses a sharp analytical view on individual things. He is watching all the games which -- to use his own saying -- means he is watching no game. Last year when he started out on that Make me Smarter podcast he actually had pretty deep insight into NE and what they were doing almost on a play by play level. Now he tries to cover every team and the depth is lacking a bit in terms. As soon as he leaves the minutiae of games and talks about slightly bigger themes he immediately becomes my favorite NFL listen.

I wish Bedard had the budget to snag him up for his thing and make him focus on the Pats.

luuked · Oct 18, 2017

In addition the Jets game review Chatham has also made a game preview for the Falcons game.

long distance · Oct 18, 2017

Joker · Oct 19, 2017

Oh look...the mob has THEIR ref heading things up this Sunday Night...why is it always a choice between these crooked scumbag refs(Corrente, Steratore, Morelli) and Goodell's fixer (the reprehensible Jerome Boger)?

NE-VT · Oct 19, 2017

(This post is about DVOA, it might be slightly OT: it relates to a post from last week's preview thread. This might be better in a new thread?)

@BradyFTW! In last week's preview thread you mentioned some interesting DVOA statistics.

The strangest thing about that stat is that the other four defenses on that list vary from good to average by DVOA: Chiefs are 11th, Panthers are 10th, Jaguars are 7th and Chargers are 16th. The Pats, meanwhile, are 32nd, and are as far from 31st and 31 is from 20th. We're a DVOA trainwreck.

As damning as that stat seems, YPC allowed on first down doesn't seem to correlate all that strongly with overall defensive effectiveness at this point in the season.

I criticized the DVOA metric because it was somewhat of a black box. Later I felt bad because football analytics is an interesting subject, and I was not intending to discourage you (or anyone else) from pursuing it.

I just came upon are reddit post describing a DVOA alternative called EPA. It claims to be similar to DVOA, yet it has 2 important advantages:

1) It is open source. Anyone can look at the source code. The calculations involved are not secret.

2) It claims to be out performing DVOA as a predictive measure.

[OC] Calculation of EPA ranking and it's better than DVOA • r/nfl

The code for the calculations is written in python.

------

If people are interested, it might be fun to explore EPA in more detail. Getting into the nuts and bolts of the calculations in the above links might require some quantitative and/or computer science background. Still, it might be fun to break down the calculations as much as possible so that folks who have an interest football analytics but don't have coding skills can follow also. If people are interested I will report on my experiments with and explanations of EPA.

Furthermore, if anyone else has a stat/data-sci/CS or related background and wants to collaborate on this let me know!

luuked · Oct 19, 2017

Joker said:
Oh look...the mob has THEIR ref heading things up this Sunday Night...why is it always a choice between these crooked scumbag refs(Corrente, Steratore, Morelli) and Goodell's fixer (the reprehensible Jerome Boger)?

What exactly is your issue with Steratore ? Him and Vinovich are among those that dont immediately ring the alarm bells for me.

Kontradiction · Oct 19, 2017

kennyb said:
Pats have no speed on defense. Won't be able to do what Miami did.

This got a sarcastic "funny" rating, but it's somewhat correct. I wouldn't say they have "no speed", but they don't have the speed that Miami did and that's where the Atlanta offense exploited them in the first half of the Super Bowl. I'd expect to see them use their two backs in a lot of misdirection plays to get KVN and Hightower pursuing sideline to sideline. That's the formula KC used in Week 1 and the results spoke for themselves on plays that weren't given up by a communication or coverage breakdown.

Kontradiction · Oct 19, 2017

luuked said:
What exactly is your issue with Steratore ? Him and Vinovich are among those that dont immediately ring the alarm bells for me.

The fix is IN.

Ring 6 · Oct 19, 2017

long distance said:
Let's start this week's film preview with #1 nemesis: ATL outside running game.

Here a great study with pics and vids by Mark Schofield:
Scouting Atlanta - Blocking Angles in the Running Game - Locked On Patriots
____

Let me add one reminder how it worked in SBLI:
(McClellin was the guy they easily removed from the edge here like you see in the article..)

ncclellin clearly doesn't have contain responsibilty on that play.

Joker · Oct 19, 2017

luuked said:
What exactly is your issue with Steratore ? Him and Vinovich are among those that dont immediately ring the alarm bells for me.

The last game he reffed in NE he used expletives directed at Pats players and reffed a completely lopsided game for the opposition. I was there to witness it. **** him.

BradyFTW! · Oct 19, 2017

NE-VT said:
(This post is about DVOA, it might be slightly OT: it relates to a post from last week's preview thread. This might be better in a new thread?)

@BradyFTW! In last week's preview thread you mentioned some interesting DVOA statistics.

I criticized the DVOA metric because it was somewhat of a black box. Later I felt bad because football analytics is an interesting subject, and I was not intending to discourage you (or anyone else) from pursuing it.

I just came upon are reddit post describing a DVOA alternative called EPA. It claims to be similar to DVOA, yet it has 2 important advantages:

1) It is open source. Anyone can look at the source code. The calculations involved are not secret.

2) It claims to be out performing DVOA as a predictive measure.

[OC] Calculation of EPA ranking and it's better than DVOA • r/nfl

The code for the calculations is written in python.

------

If people are interested, it might be fun to explore EPA in more detail. Getting into the nuts and bolts of the calculations in the above links might require some quantitative and/or computer science background. Still, it might be fun to break down the calculations as much as possible so that folks who have an interest football analytics but don't have coding skills can follow also. If people are interested I will report on my experiments with and explanations of EPA.

Furthermore, if anyone else has a stat/data-sci/CS or related background and wants to collaborate on this let me know!

Very cool - as a general rule of thumb, I think that open source is almost always better than closed alternatives, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if EPA really is better than DVOA. I'm no expert in any of this stuff, but I do have a very elementary background in both statistics and Python (I basically just use it to automate boring stuff that I don't feel like doing repeatedly, but within that narrow range I'm fairly proficient), would definitely be interested in helping to check it out to whatever extent my limited skill-set can be useful.

NE-VT · Oct 19, 2017

BradyFTW! said:
Very cool - as a general rule of thumb, I think that open source is almost always better than closed alternatives, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if EPA really is better than DVOA. I'm no expert in any of this stuff, but I do have a very elementary background in both statistics and Python (I basically just use it to automate boring stuff that I don't feel like doing repeatedly, but within that narrow range I'm fairly proficient), would definitely be interested in helping to check it out to whatever extent my limited skill-set can be useful.

Awesome, glad you are on board. I feel very comfortable with statistics side of things on this one; I know and use the logistic regression techniques they describe as part of the calculation. I have a working understanding of python, but I am much much better with the R language. Having a second set of eyes on the python source code will definitely be helpful!

I don't know when I will actually get started on it however. It might not be for a couple weeks. I also don't know long this thing will take to get going. Often getting data into the right format and properly cleaned for analysis is the most time consuming part of statistics and data-sci. The python code is already written, so I assume it just "works" once we give it the right inputs. Yet explaining what is going on might be the more interesting part.

In the mean time, here is a few articles on EPA:

Expected Points and EPA - Advanced Football Analytics

Expected points and EPA explained

long distance · Oct 19, 2017

thoughts from Lombardi on ATL

--- reasons for drop in Ryan's and O efficiency:
1. Ryan is back to his average (last yr was above his norm)
2. Different formations under Sarkisian, different attacking the D
3. Shanahan was better at in-game adjusting (sic!) than Sarkisian:
in 2016 ATL averaged 8yds/att in first half and over 10yds/att second half

They are creating a false problem of JJ not being involved enough . Quinn was on the record this week asking for more JJ.

Lombardi (in great Bobby Fisher analogy at around 12:00): “When you're worried about your knight (JJ) getting involved you're trying to make people happy not adjusting..“

link: 'GM Street’ — Where Do We Go From Here? (Ep. 163)
__

Here from Sarkisian on the subject:
Falcons OC Steve Sarkisian explains why Julio Jones has just one red zone target on 11 red zone routes.

ATL@NE . FILM preview thread

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