ESPN NFL Analyst. DMs open. I tweet more on bluesky.

Brooklyn
Joined October 2009
Updated NFL analytics staffer list!* As always, this list is to the best of my understanding based both on what teams list and conversations with analytics folks around the league. (*Re-posting because I had a mistake on previous post)
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26
309
362,003
Green light go on 4th-and-2 for Patriots here Breakeven percentage: 46% Conversion probability: 62%
2
1
1
26
5,732
Vrabel deserves credit for trying any type of offense at the end of the half! 9 seconds left, two timeouts at -34. A lottttttt of head coaches are kneeling it out there. Rams essentially gave up at that same spot on the field this week with 46 (!) seconds left, 0 timeouts.
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76
9,058
Wild (?) dot path from Malik Muhammad (24) on the end-of-half play
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5
13
129
98,711
Seth Walder retweeted
With all the talk about Kyle Shanahan's 51% comment, I want to take some time to walk through why a lot of the discussion yesterday was off the mark. I'm going to focus on just one of the points made--uncertainty. Thread:
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12
198
146,129
So @Ben_Tmeyer made this very fun cool new thing: the NBA Trade Lab! Let's you build fake trades, vote on deals proposed for your team and see deals liked by fans of both teams. If you want this for NFL let us know so we can bully our boss into letting Ben make it!
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4,829
OK I’ll weigh in because there’s a few different arguments here. If you know the true odds, it doesn't matter if you have one chance or 1,000. And the idea that it does is foolish. But in football we don’t know the true odds. So, a more charitable interpretation...
Kyle Shanahan says a 51% analytics recommendation won’t convince him to go for it because he gets one shot, not an hour at a blackjack table “I don’t want to hear about it if it’s 51% of the time we should go for it.” “As I always say, I’m not sitting here playing Blackjack for an hour with no one else at the table, and eventually I’ll get 51% of it. Like, I have this one try, and I have a feel for it. I’ve been doing it too long.” “But what I want to know from him, when it’s not a feel, when it, no, this is 98%. We don’t even need to talk about it. So we don’t need to talk about it. Tell me when it’s that, and I’ll just do it.”
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25,566
But we do not see that. Last year Kyle Shanahnan went for it on 4th down just one time when our model recommended a punt or kick by any margin. But he punted or kicked 24 times when it recommended go.
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39
3,507
It shouldn’t be that way, though. Because there is no default option on 4th down. It’s always a choice.
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31
3,327
It’s a good question and the answer is: depends what you’re looking for! Description of what happened overall thus far? Combined score. But if I’m betting a corner going forward, usually Phase 1. Wrote about Sauce last week! xitter.cf/sethwalder/status/2111…
Replying to @SethWalder
How do we read this then? Should we only look at P1 or should we look at the combined score? Also, what does Sauce having a 90+ P1 and a 0 P2 score mean?
3,596
Updated leaderboards for to-be-named cornerback metrics. Quick thread on how these work:
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33
15,786
One outstanding challenge is zone coverage when a corner’s receiver responsibility changes mid-play. The ghost/metric does not handle that as well as I would like, but fixes I’ve tried to implement thus far have not helped. This, though, is mitigated by the fact that…
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the metric places a heavier weight on man assignment (so still could be man within a Cover-3, for example) snaps vs. zone assignment snaps. This split was determined by strength of correlation with several other measures of cornerback ability.
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1,886