Episode Transcript
I asked chatGPT what the definition of mid was, and it told me the NFC South. A trio of seven win teams; your eight win division champion Tampa Bay Bucs. Each team has a new starting quarterback. The division seems as wide open as any. Hey, we're back. Let's kick off our 2023 division previews with Baker Mayfield's, N F C South.
Let's hit the opening bell.
It's 11:23 PM on Ball Street, July 20th. I'm @deepvaluebetter with @throwthedamball Judah Fortgang, and our guest, @pattonanalytics Steven Patton. A new face, a new voice of reason, with Alpha delivery this season. Steven has some exquisite modeling abilities, has an economics background, so speaks our language.
We stumbled upon some of his work this off season. We've been collabing on some projects over the summer, so more to come from him. But welcome to Alpha Bets, our new show name. Judah, I know how your summer's been, but for the sake of our audience, how's your summer been?
My summer has been great. I've been deep in the lab researching, building. A lot of cool things that we'll have upcoming for this season. Quite frankly, by the time February rolled around, I was like, you know what? I love football season. I love the grind, but I'm kind of looking forward to the off season of research.
And now that we're here, I hear that music again. I hear the beautiful sounds of the SportfolioKing's intro, and I'm like, when is September? I'm dying to get back into it.
And it'll be here before you know it. Cause I can't believe it's already July 20th. Yeah,
steven, how about you?
Been deep in the lab. I've been working on a couple models, like you said. We've been kind of collabing on some stuff for almost six months. And the off season it's come and gone way too quickly. Feel like I've touched on a lot of things, but there's still definitely a lot of work to do and excited to get into it today.
Let's start with an overview of win total futures. You got the Saints at nine and a half wins. The Falcons at eight and a half wins Panthers seven and a half wins. Bucs at six and a half wins.
So all very tight. And really as I opened a very mid division, so, you know, there's no four game winners. There's no 10 11 game winners, all bunched up there in the middle. Very tightly priced. Also I should have opened with, we do have an asterisk here from Steven that he is a Panther's homer.
So filter his feelings about the Panthers through that. But I, he's academically honest, so I, I think There's, he'll be able to balance that.
There's definitely a little bit of bias and I more want to talk about the other three teams. I feel like the Saints as the vision favorites, that's a little off.
I think they actually got worse than they were last year, and we're gonna see a lot of regression. And the same's probably true for the Buccaneers. Those teams I think are definitely going to be towards the bottom of the division. And this is gonna be between the Falcons and Panthers
down the stretch. I disagree on the Saints. I think actually they should be bigger favorites. And I absolutely love the division bet for the Saints more so than any of the over unders. And I don't hate a Panthers under six and a half, even a bucks under five and a half.
I also would take the under of the Falcons. That's certainly where I lean on. I'm not sure how I feel about the alt under. I think this is worse than a mid division of football. I think this is gonna be an absolute disaster of a division, with the exception of the Saints.
And maybe the Falcons can kind of sneak around. But I think the the Bucs and Panthers have possibilities being among the worst teams in the league.
Okay. So there's a taste of some of our views. For me, I would say, at least at this point in time, I'm still early in my research. We've been doing a lot of macro oriented research, a lot of building, so.
From a portfolio King's perspective, we're gonna be delivering and talking about and have tools this season unlike anything that we had last season. Game trade is gonna be Chef's Kiss. So a lot to look forward to there. But when it comes to the actual, like researching the teams themselves and things that have actually happened over the off season, as I was putting together some of these slides, I was like, oh wow.
I didn't know Adam Thelan was on the Panthers. So still figuring a lot of that out. But you know, I've been listening to other podcasts as well. And another cool tool that we're gonna have that actually will help us do this more seamlessly, more efficiently and more quantitatively is our sentiment analyzers.
We're gonna be able to scrape the transcripts and assess how the speakers talk about teams, quantify it from a sentiment analysis perspective, using natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence to be able to do that and then do it in aggregate so we don't have to listen to every single 45 minute podcast.
We can aggregate it all together. We have our market consensus power rankings, we have betting splits, we have other aspects of understanding how the market positions around teams. And this is gonna be another new alternative data point. That's something we're gonna continue to share over the course of the season.
Looking at other podcasts, analyzing it, quantifying it. And when I've done that from a few tests already, a lot of betters out there really like the Falcons. So the Falcon seems like a very hot trade. And then the the opposite side of that spectrum is
everyone wants to sell the already sold off Bucs. And so for me, just from a broader market positioning perspective, I don't see the potential upside in Falcons as much as others do. I'm lukewarm on the Saints, and I think the best opportunity here is probably in the somewhat of bottom dwellers in the Panthers and Bucs.
That's how I'm seeing it. I, I see like the Bucks could definitely get over six and a half, could definitely get over seven and a half. And then the Panthers, if they're, if they didn't have Bryce Young and there was like more certainty at quarterback, I would like them even more. So I would have them as probably division win
I'm just excited for Brett, you to kinda look back in about an hour from now and be like, man, did I really say that I liked the Bucs at
over. Wow. Only just an hour from now and you're wrong already. I, I think, I think I have low conviction, so that could happen.
Okay. So what we have on the screen here is now we, as we start to dive in, we'll start with looking back, alright, what happened in 2022? Remind ourselves, I know a lot of people are already coming out with preview podcasts. We're a little late in the game, so I'm sure everyone's probably maybe familiar with this, but we're doing it for ourselves and also we're gonna analyze it from a different perspective.
No one has the charts we have. No one analyzes the data the way we do everyone just pontificates, right? So on this slide we talked about the range of outcomes and one thing we're also gonna be doing a lot this season is using EDP. Our custom metric from our drive quality metric earned drive points, certainly using that more so rather than epa.
Judah, maybe you wanna talk a little bit about this.
Yeah, sure. So earn drive points is kind of exactly how it sounds, which is how many points do you earn on a drive? What does it mean to earn points? Essentially how sustainable or reproducible is your drive. To say like a 75 yard touchdown off a blown coverage is not the same as a 10 play drive where you kind of march up and down the field.
That is more sticky if we're going to predict future performance. So that's essentially what earned drive points says. It kind of builds in a bunch of different features. I recommend checking that article out. It is on our site sportfoliokings.com.
This range of outcomes chart is using a Bayesian framework to understand the distributions of that.
So it's one thing to kind of get a mean or a sum for a particular week. This kind of paints a picture of what is the high percentile outcome, right? If you look at the peak, let's say, of the Falcons they kind of start from a different point, meaning that their peak is about like the Bucs median.
And they have a fatter right tail, which means that they have a higher distribution and propensity to score more points.
This is the type of charts that we'll definitely be leveraging a lot over the course of the season to try to understand what teams do you wanna potentially bet high leverage situations, high leverage potential outcomes, tail scenarios for.
So, like, in this type of scenario, like it wouldn't really necessarily pay off. Be like, yeah, maybe you wanna be, you know, a little cute, a little cheeky, and try to bet on the Panthers to like outperform to the upside. Well, this is basically just saying like, eh, I mean, that's probably not a great bet. Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't.
But if you really wanna roll the dice on a potential upside outperformance, this is something you might wanna like, hey, maybe the saints, maybe the Falcons. And what this is also telling you is, hey, in fact, maybe you might wanna roll the dice on a potential downside underperformance from the Panthers.
Hey, maybe they only score three points, maybe some alt unders or something like that. Something we'll definitely be using a lot over the course of the season. So let's start into the Tampa Bay Bucs. A team that we made a lot of money on last season.
One of the charts that we'll show after this really demonstrates and quantifies this. But we'll first start with earned drive points where the books stood relative to the broader league.
Yeah, this crystallizes how bad the offense was. I think Tom Brady was fine and we'll kind of discuss ramifications of that for this upcoming season. But this offense was in line with the Patriots and Giants and, and Rams. Even the Bears had a better offense. This was not a particularly good unit.
They suffered a lot of interior offensive line injuries early on in the season.
And you saw that impact Brady's kind of performance and the overall efficiency of that offense. I think they're only gonna get worse because they lost Donovan Smith this year, Shaq Mason, and of course Tom Brady. So when you're looking at a bunch of new guys on that interior O line and Baker Mayfield at Quarterback, all of a sudden the efficiency that was there with Brady is completely gone and the floors kind of
given out.
Well that definitely does seem like how a lot of people are evaluating the box going into 2023. And we can see in 2022 the market has just really flipped. Now everyone's very quick to sell the bucks and last year it took 'em forever to come around to understanding how bad the Bucs actually were.
We see all the way up through about week six, week seven, they were still ranked as a top three team when it was very clear that they weren't. So what we're showing here on the screen is a general market consensus power rank.
This is an equal weighted average of how PFF, how ESPN, how 538, how football outsiders and how Inpredict was ranking the team on a week by week basis. And then seeing how that changed week over week over the course of the season. What we have new on here is our drive quality model power rankings, which we leveraged last season that we talked about on every single week's market outlook.
And one of the things that we had kept pounding the table on is about how the bucks continued to be overrated. And we can see how ahead of market drive quality was. By week four, the bucks were already a bottom 13th, where it was ranked 14th. Yeah, 13th, 14th, few weeks later, by week seven, week eight, all the way down to almost 20th.
By week 13, almost touching 25 as literally one of the worst teams in the league. And you can see that the market.
Dripped lower and lower, closer and closer to drive quality as drive quality was ahead by double digit amount of weeks. This is the type of insight, the type of forecasting that you need, that you want as a sports bet to give you forward looking actionable advice.
So something that you're gonna wanna listen to over the course of 2023, you know, how is drive quality evaluating these teams?
And in case it's not clear.
You talked about in the note of it's like understanding drive quality and earned drive points. It's that it's at its best sourcing short term information and there is no better example than the Tampa Bay Bucs of last year. I remember the live bet on the Panthers which they lost 21 3.
I remember the, so many of these. And we'll, that was a big turning point. That was a big turning point. Just seeing just how far ahead, drive quality was, and, and also it kind of like peaked back as the Bucs put together a couple of performances. And it's honest in that way but really was ahead and there's no better example of the short term signal.
Yep. And it's not romanced by superficial results because you look at week one and week two, okay, the Bucs started off 2-0 and started off 2-0 ats. So they're actually making betters money, but Drive Quality sees through that bullshit and sees and understands how the team's actually performing on the field and Drive Quality was selling off on the Bucs even as they won the games, even as they covered the spreads.
And one of the things I just hate so much about Sports Betts and power rankings in general is they're just so reactive. They just react to whatever the most recent thing that happened and they react directionally with whatever happened, which provides you no insight beyond just broader sentiment, which is why we still capture that information.
Cause it's good to understand, well how does the market, how does the media, how to talking heads feel about this team? Cuz then they influence broader betters and how they allocate their bankrolls. So that's why we wanna make sure that we understand that. And then also we can understand, alright, how does drive quality feel about this team relative to the market?
Cause then that's obviously gonna give you a sense of how something might be mispriced.
So this next slide, diving a little bit deeper into that Team's 2022 performance, this breaks it down on a week by week basis, really gives you more granular insight into how the spread moved.
How did they perform in game? So we have some unique metrics here. We have max lead max deficit. So how did they perform intra game? Did they get hot? Did they get cold? Did they make a comeback? Did they collapse? We have time weighted average margin, TWAM, which is a time weighted evaluation of how much they led or were losing by, multiplied by the time that they held that lead.
So it can give you a more accurate sense of how competitive they were in that game. This will not be manipulated by a last minute score or a last minute score, and then a pick six and a three point game turns into a 17 point game, and the final score looks like one team blew the other team out. When that's not at all what happened. TWAM is gonna tell you exactly how that game was actually competitive.
So TWAM can give you a better sense, especially when you're looking back and maybe you forgot some of these nuanced details. Can help give you a better, more accurate sense of evaluating those past games. And we also have a similar metric, TWAP, which is the time weighted average win probability.
Again, same philosophy and then we have the bet percentage, cash percentage. Some people are skeptical of those. Well, if you are, we also have the Circa rank. So where did this team rank from a picks perspective in the Circa Millions contest? That's real data. That's fact. So just another metric that we can use to help understand broader, better positioning, broader market positioning.
How were they feeling this team on a week by week basis? And we can see on this with the Bucs specifically, we can see that they were a top pick in Circa in fact, I, it's a, it's a great example what we're talking about, how drive quality doesn't get romanced by superficial outcomes.
We see the Circa rank in week one and week two when the Bucs won and covered. They were actually not a popular pick in circa. Week one, 25th ranked pick, week two, 15th ranked pick. So they're two and oh two and oh ats. Now the market warms up to them. Now the market wants to start betting the Bucs.
And you're late. You're late to the game. Circa rank ninth, 12th, first, third, third over the next five weeks. So the market is romanced. The market gets taken for a sucker by this team. Just great examples of how you can kind of use these charts when evaluating these teams.
Anything kind of stick out to you guys from this?
To your point this team was not an underdog in a game until week 14. And like, that's kind of irrelevant for making money next year.
Except there's probably going to be another team that comes in with huge expectations really is under performing. Or like, oh, they're gonna are, they're gonna turn around. They're gonna turn around and let the bucks be a cautionary tale. Like this could go on until week 14 where you'll hold onto priors.
There's going to be some team that is well below expectations. It's going to happen.
Yeah, there's a shelf life for certain teams.
And E D P was reflecting of that. It caught that. And where a lot of people thought there'd be market correction or they'd be able to pick it up, they really weren't able to.
Yeah, if we look at the max deficits, I mean, the bucks are just getting their faces ripped off, week in and week out, down by 11, down by 21, down by eight, down by 18, down by 11, down by 13, down by 35, down by 17, down by 10, down by 14, down by 13.
They're down double digits almost every single game. And again, as we showed on this chart, despite all that happening, they were ranked as a top 10 team all the way through week 14, before the market finally started to soften on them.
Actually, I'm gonna take back what I said. I think that there is a lot to learn from last season, which was like this roster was, was bad as it is. Tom Brady was probably the thing keeping it together.
With the off season changes this roster was dreadful, Tom Brady, the key stat here is, was getting rid of the ball in 2.3 seconds, which was by far the quickest in the nfl.
The guy in second place, Joe Burrow, was 2.5 seconds, which kind of mitigated the offensive line and, and how weak they were as a unit. Now they project as one of the worst units, if not the worst unit in the N F L. Looking at their offensive line, just using, attrition, wear their great left tackle.
If you even just look at their PFF grades, you've got a 46 a rookie, 28.9, a 54.6. These are all bottom third, if not worse in the league. Add in the fact that Baker Mayfield is a guy who holds onto the ball for too long. His pressure to sack ratio, meaning when he sees a pressure, how often is he taking a sack?
He's 30%, which is like 7% more than the second place team. That's a disastrous combo. Add in a new offensive coordinator. This team was throwing into perfect coverage, meaning a combination of their receiver's, lack of separation, the lack of offensive creativity, and in the defenses they're playing certainly plays a role in that.
But doing it almost 50% of the time. Your, your base rate of success there is a horrible, it's a negative 0.3 EPA that's almost two times worse than the worst offense in the NFL last season. I'm just not sure what they have on offense. It's like a bad offensive line. A quarterback who holds the ball for too long.
Maybe Chris Godman comes back, he's on the decline. Mike Evans' separation numbers are way down. There's really nothing on offense here. It was a bad unit last year. And they just lost
the one thing that was keeping 'em together, which is Tom Brady.
Steven, do you know anything about this new oc?
Dave Cannes, I don't have too much on.
I think he's a significant downgrade to Byron Leftwich. Byron Leftwich
and Oh damn. This is dumpster fire then. Yeah,
so you have a dumpster fire on that. You, you've lost two starters on that offensive line that were key last year. So you need WFS to literally man down the left side while you have a second year guy and a rookie on your right hand side.
Baker holds onto the ball so long, he had a top 10 offensive line in Carolina. He does not know how to play in structure and that's gonna hurt him here in Tampa Bay and it's looking
bleak. Yeah those wide receivers. I mean, they can look one way one year and then one off season can just fall off a cliff. Dan asks what do you think the Bucks record is last year without grading
three and 14?
Well, they were four 12 and one ats, so sounds about right. So let's look into 2023 and see who they play. From the futures perspective, six and a half. Again, it's like basically not juiced on either side. So if it adjusted also six and a half wins.
Strength of schedule from a futures implied perspective. So this can still like be kicked around in the realized strength of schedule can end up being totally different, but at least from a futures implied perspective, it's right down the middle 16th net rest minus six days. So that's a disadvantage.
Mean spread is about plus three and a half. So on average about a field goal underdog over the course of the season the Python 2.0 model would say it likes the over
here. Yeah. He doesn't know
Tom Brady's retired. It doesn't know anything.
Yeah. Yeah.
If we wanna look for a silver lining with this team, because I don't think it's gonna be on the offensive side.
They lost Hakeem Hicks, but they also added Greg gangs and free agency and they drafted Kaja Caney. You pair that with Vita Bay and Shaq Barrett that's already there. That's what's gonna keep 'em in games because that's what's gonna allow Lavante David and Devin White to do what they do best.
It's gonna allow Antonio, Winfield, Carlton Davis and Jamal Dean to hold up that backend and make plays back there. So if they're gonna stick around, it's gonna be because of the defense, not because what they're doing offensively.
That's a good point. So, a lot of the defenses coming back.
It is, and it looks great. They reinforce the interior with getting Greg Gaines from LA, super underrated. And then Kh Caney, who is kind of reminiscent of Aaron Donald his arms are a little bit shorter, but he's that smaller, more explosive interior your defensive lineman, and he could wreck some havoc in Tampa.
Bold. Aaron, Donald predictions?
Reminiscent. Yeah.
So the defense was pretty good as we talked about. And obviously it was a bad offense.
Like, how much worse can it be? They aren't gonna be able to run the ball.
I don't think the defense will be as good just from a regression standpoint, right? This is probably a top five defense by EDP.
They're also a relatively old defense. You know, guys like Carlton Davis and Jamel Dean. They could be propped up by their schedule, could win a bunch of grinder games, but
the point is that the, the defense, yes, can probably keep them in games, but this might be the worst offense in the league.
My biggest worry that would potentially keep me off actually betting the upside of the Bucs is coaching. What you just said about the OC Stephen and then just Bowles in general.
Look at the schedule right here.
I don't think they beat Minnesota in week one. Chicago's revamped. They're definitely not beating Philly. The Saints is gonna be a grinded out division game. They're probably gonna get blown out by the lions and the bills. does Todd Bowles even hold his position past week eight?
That was gonna be my prediction is that I don't think he lasts this season, but looking at the schedule, if you fall to like two and six, at that point the offense looks abysmal. At that point you're firing Todd Bowles, you're trading Mike Evans and you're playing for Caleb Williams or Drake may. That's what it's gonna boil down to.
I also think there's a tank variable here, which is a non zero chance. This team has absolutely no intention of winning. And Baker Maple is the perfect stop gap quarterback.
Well, we see on the screen FST wins bucks plus 800. When you're thinking about tail potential outcomes, there is a fat tail for this team to be one of the worst teams in the league given every single thing that you just talked about.
Like why aren't they actively trying to trade Mike Evans or Godwin right now?
Because his price is gonna go up middle of the season. When the Rams were making a push for the Super Bowl they traded Von Miller and they traded a second for him.
So it's a team desperate and it someone desperate. Yeah, exactly.
I think they're delusional .
Dan also points out buck's got 40 to 50 million in dead cap this year. That's yikes.
Let's move on to the Panthers. Looking at their offensive and defensive e EDP chart. Again, in line with the Bucs there, and that's why they actually ended up flirting with the division title near the end of the year.
I had, I don't know, maybe in like week 10 or 11 or something like that, I took like a lottery ticket bet on the Panthers potentially win the division. I can't remember what it, what it was. It was like 21. Why do I
remember your best?
If I, and it came very close, and in fact, remember I was in Paris when the Panthers hit their peak and then collapsed first the Bucs.
They had a double digit lead. I'm like, my God, this, like, this ticket is gonna win. Plus I like the Panthers. The Panthers gonna make the playoffs, they're gonna sneak in, plus the Bucs suck. They're gonna lose again. My gosh. It's like everything's coming together and then it all collapsed.
We couldn't covered Mike Evans that game. CJ Henderson was the starter on that side and they just torched us on Go routes.
That was a short glimpse of what people thought the Bucs were gonna be doing, like all season.
As we could see on the E D P chart here, the Panthers were right there in like the same range of the Bucs. A pretty elite defense and a miserable offense. So if the Panthers can actually come around and put together a decent offense. It seems like there should be more stability there.
When we look at the Panthers 2022 power ranking volatility we could see their average rank was about 28th. The average opponent rank was about 16th seven day rolling rank.
Volatility was about four and a half spots. So in any given week they were up or down four and a half spots. The way that the market was evaluating them we can see they started off around 28th, had a spike and then came down lower. And this is rhymes a lot with what we saw Judah last season.
That there's this initial preseason understanding of how good a team potentially is. And then there's a bunch of noise in between, but they end up relatively close to where people thought they were gonna be.
But people abandon relatively quickly sometimes those narratives. And then oftentimes they hold onto the ones that are definitely wrong, like, like the Bucs. But we can see here that there wasn't too much volatility with the Panthers. There was a little bit of a belief at the beginning of the year, then a sell off, and then just a general trickle around 32nd, 31st 30th. Drive quality was always a, as we can see here, a little bit hotter on them than the market was.
And we can see the drive quality actually does lead the market. So, but not, not was, wasn't a great kind of leading indicator here for like really cashing tickets, and we didn't really end up betting the Panthers hot too much last season.
I love you obviously pointing at the kind of inter volatility here, but also I love this chart.
It's a great reminder of a classic expectation of a team. They're actually a little better. Oh no, they're as bad as we thought. And then right at that bottom, you have that game against the bucks where they're power ranked at 31st or 32nd. We're like, okay, they're as bad as we thought they were in the preseason.
And that's always when the team goes on a little run or at least as bitter than that 32nd ranking. We saw that here with the beating the bucks and then a three point loss against the Falcons. And then, they do get crushed by the Bengals, but then rattle off you know, a bunch of wins.
That's a classic spot right there of the buying the dip.
Well buying the dip, it was the firing of Matt Rule after the 49ers abysmal game. He goes you see Steve Wilkes take over as the interim guy and they go into LA with PJ Walker and they take the L there, but after that, you just saw them buy into it.
And that's what happens when you have competent coaching, which I think is what David Tepper leaned into this off season is making sure he had one of the best, if not the best coaching staff available to him.
This is a really good example of drive quality.
Basically being exactly one week ahead of the market. You can see drive quality shoots up a week before the market shoots up and then sells off hard on the Panthers a full week before the market sells off on the Panthers. So that's exactly what you kind of want to see, from any sort of true leading indicator that gives you tactical insight into how to position around a team.
And as we can see here, also dry quality isn't always necessarily intended to be an indicator of a broader, longer term macro view. It can be volatile in itself, but like Judah talked about, it can actually have a lot of power using it as a short term signal of how to evaluate this team on that one to, to three week window.
When we look at the week to week x-ray. We see a lot of volatility at the quarterback position. Mayfield started the first five weeks. Then we had PJ Walker, then we had Mayfield, then we had Darn old end the season and he actually did bring some life to this team.
Gotta highlight those Darnold performances there.
He's not bad. He just,
he's not bad. Well, I mean, if, if he gets the opportunity in nsf, we'll see what happens.
He was pretty bad. I think he had a really good season. His average EPA was 0.23.
Yeah, pretty, pretty good. The turnover where he plays were really low. He was good.
I think the biggest thing that's always been Darnold's fault is that he doesn't process well, but he can throw a damn good ball. So I think in that context, if Kyle Shannahan can simply have him point and shoot, he's gonna look really, really good if he has to play this year.
I like that point.
What I think is also interesting here, Is, using the market as a contrarian signal, right? So the Panthers, generally not a great team, if anything, like best case scenario is like kind of in the middle, an average kind of team. When the market buys into them, right?
So whether they're top 10, circa pick, week one, seven, rank pick, week two, sixth ranked pick. Both times failed to cover, oh, and two market sells off on them. Now the third week, again, we're oh, and two we're butt hurt. Not betting Panthers anymore. Fuck the Panthers. 21st ranked pick.
Then they cover. Then they cover by a full touchdown as the market sells off on them. But market buys into 'em again a few weeks later. Gets to be a top 10 pick. All right, maybe we'll start to flirt with the Panthers again. Oh, they lose, you know, they don't cover by 21 points. You know, market's pissed again, not betting the Panthers anymore.
Next week, 28th ranked pick. Oh, and then they cover by double digits. So as soon as the market sells off again, cut a few weeks later, takes a while for the market to buy back in The Panthers. Buys back in the Panthers. The third ranked pick don't cover by eight points, and it sells off now another like back to 11th, and then they cover by two touchdowns.
And it's just when the market tries to get clever and like buys into a team that's like not very good. And then when they try to sell off hard on them creates opportunity. I think another thing that I thought was interesting, when I'm looking at the max lead, max deficits here, it's pretty much any time that the Panthers took a considerable lead, they held it.
So when they took a 15 point lead versus the Saints, they never trailed and they ended up winning. 18 point lead never trailed, ended up winning 13 point lead. Once they got to that double digit lead, never trailed, ended up being the Falcon 20 point lead, never trailed. 17 point lead, never trailed.
24 point lead, never trailed. Only this last one actually, versus the bucks that the one we were just talking about had a 14 point lead, blew it, ended up losing. Any other time. And so these are the types of like rhythms that you want to start to recognize in the season, especially Judah, like for us, you know, when you're thinking about live betting
yeah. Trying to understand what teams are stickier once they get those leads. And it's harder to give it up and which teams are more vulnerable.
I was just thinking about this today. I should put together a chart.
How you perform on offense when you have a comfortable lead. The Vikings for the last bunch of years have always been in the bottom left. Oh yeah. Yeah. I'll make one more general point about the Panthers.
The run game here is where I think that the Panthers really leaned into, especially late in the season and exactly your point about their ability to kinda hold leads, which is like this team got leads.
They ran the ball effectively and did not let teams back in. And that's kind of a path, I guess, again, it's a totally different system with Frank Reich here. So there isn't so much to say about the Panthers, but for another team, perhaps that might be able to win seven games or, or eight games just on the backs of having a good run game that can kind of win you these floor games where you get out to a elite and you just hold it. Play, keep away, and like that happens and you can kind of variance your way to a better record than probably your fundamental value is. That's not gonna have ceiling but can kind of steal a bunch of games on the backs of a run game and a team
that can protect leads. Yep. Panthers nine and eight ats something we'll talk about a lot over the course of the season also is active points.
A key attribute to what feeds our Pythag 2 model, which we've demonstrated has more predictiveness than your traditional Pythag. We have a note on that, on sportfoliokings.com. Check it out. Active points is basically just how many points does the offense score more so than with the betting markets, assume they're gonna score.
And then how many points does the defense give up less than the betting markets assume that they'll end up giving up. And of course each one of those would be the team outperforming betting markets and that would be your collective total active points. And so total active points with the Panthers last year, plus 38.
Another signal just saying how this team was habitually undervalued mispriced last season.
So when we talk about the off season changes, of course, Bryce Young, Frank Reich we know this. Adam Thelan. I didn't know that until about an hour ago. So maybe others listening out there.
This team has Adam Thelan. Does it matter. I don't know. Judah says no. Miles Sanders and DJ Chark. I always liked DJ Chark, if you could say healthy. Of course lost DJ Moore. Mattis. Corey Littleton. We have the local Panthers fan. Steven, is there anything else I missed here?
We not only brought in Frank Reich we brought in Thomas Brown from Sean McVay's Tree. He's our offensive coordinator, so you get a little touch of that. We retained James Campan, who was a huge part of us having a top 10 O line, which paved the way for the running game that allowed us to hold on the leads.
We retained all five starters. We added some more depth this off season. So that looks to be a strong suit and that's what's gonna keep Bryce Young up in the pocket and finding guys and making tight window throws
really happy about De Daley. We got him from the Detroit Lions. He's a running back coach and assistant coach. And then a former quarterback and a guy who's acted like a quarterback coach when he is been a quarterback on rosters is Josh McCown.
Yeah, we don't have a lot of firepower on offense, but I think they're gonna be really smart in putting us in the best position possible to make plays and win
games.
Steven, I think it makes the case for a bullish long-term view of the of the Panthers.
I think that it presents a case for upside that I probably was not willing to to consider before. But ultimately what this comes down to is rookie quarterbacks are not generally good. And if you look back at like the most successful rookie seasons I have in front of me rookie seasons from like 2015, got like Dak Prescott, who was a complete unicorn
but what did he have? He he, he had a great offensive line. He had a great running game and he had a couple receivers that that's all
he needed. Yeah. That was all he needed. He was a third or fourth round pick. It wasn't supposed to start. He just got kind of got thrust into it.
That is a unique situation. And then you've got like Deshaun Watson and Justin Herbert had good rookie years, and then basically no one else has like the highest EPA after that is like Mac Jones at point 0.85. I totally buy the long term case and like I'd like to see some signs of progress for Bryce Young and I think that's kind of what the Panthers are going for this yearly. But just like absolutely the base rate of even good quarter, like who will be good quarterbacks in the future.
It's just the rookie years are probably not gonna be that good and he doesn't have the talent on the field. I think to elevate his play.
You referred to Ben Johnson and we actually brought in DJ Char to be the guy that takes the top off the defenses.
The role Jonathan Domingo is gonna probably play, especially when you look at what he did at Old Miss, is he's gonna have crossers coming across the field and he's gonna play that Aman Ross Saint Brown role. And so if Chart can clear stuff, you have Hearst and Thilan as just simply security blankets on those money downs.
If you can get Mingo out in space, he has a better relative athletic score then DK Metcalf and AJ Brown. And if you can get that kind of production from Mingo, then all of a sudden some of the pieces around you maybe you do make that wild cart push and win the division.
I think that's ambitious. It is ambitious. I think there, there are a lot of ifs there. I see the potential for upside more so than I do the bucks. I don't, I don't think how you can, you know, talk me into a bullish bucks case. It's important in kind of handicapping the, the Panthers to understand the base rate.
Not to say that they can't kind of exceed that expectation, but where should this expectation be? Even if Mingo is good, like it's still a bottom unit, it's quarterbacks. I don't care who they are. And Bryce Young is certainly not a generational prospect by any stretch of the imagination.
I do think the Panthers have Yeah. More upside than the box if everything breaks. The only thing that's gonna be holding them back, right. Is Bryce Young? I'm not bullish on Bryce Young.
Isn't Bryce Young? Supposedly five nine.
And also isn't Kyler Murray supposed to be five nine. If that's the case, like, I mean, first of all, Kyle Murray can't be five nine then.
He's definitely really small and what I will say that lends himself more to a Kyler Murray or even a Russell Wilson is he seems to see the middle of the field pretty well, which I think is gonna help him finding
he doesn't move like them.
Right.
No, he does not have that mobility. He's just good about getting the ball out of his hands and avoiding hits. That's gonna be the thing that keeps him alive.
The skills that Bre was good on in college, as you're alluding to Stephen, the kind of ability to get the ball out to avoid hits that might be a totally different ballgame in the nfl. If we see Bryce Young struggling early, I would not be surprised to see that prolonged, but also there's a potential for that swing after where he starts to learn towards the end of the season.
And it's like Bryce Young's game might be priced in as like a disaster of a quarterback. He's really bad in his rookie season. And it wouldn't shock me if like by week 14, week 15, week 16, Bryce Young kind of turns it around a little bit, starts to process. Better.
That's something I can see to, to monitor, which is like, is that skill translating and how can we capitalize that in the short term
and the long term.
I also wonder to what extent, like do you think that the coaching staff is gonna be aggressive with Bryce Young? I mean, you have a good defense, you have a good offensive line, you ostensibly have a good running game.
Like that's a lot of strengths to lean on without having to actively expose yourself to a rookie doing stupid things on the field. Do they use him as a game manager, you know, ADOT of negative two.
That's definitely gonna be more of his role coming in.
He was the guy that had the highest S two score this past draft class. His processing's phenomenal. He picks up a playbook extremely fast. He pretty much ran Andy Dalton out of the starting gig before even training camp.
Well, let's look at the road ahead for Bryce Young and the types of defenses that he'll be facing. So open up with the Falcons Saints two division foes. Then go out to Seattle cross country.
Come back, play Minnesota, lions, dolphins into the bye. So not a devastating opening there for rookie quarterback. And even out of the pie, then you got Texans, colts, and bears.
You look at the strength of Schedule 29, so one of the easiest schedules there is. That's gonna help grease the wheels.
When you're looking at defenses, I'm looking at the Seattle Seahawks, they added a lot of depth to their defensive line.
And then looking at the Dolphins, they have Vic Fangio, and they added a lot of pieces on that defense. That will definitely be a test.
I don't think they're gonna ask too much , at a Bryce Young especially early in the season. But I'm not paying attention much to, to schedule the teams we thought would be good.
Sure. Thought would be bad, turn out to not be the case.
From a PY 2.0 model perspective, slightly to the under, but basically not recommending a bet only at 2% edge.
The Panthers are only favored in four games all in the second half of the year. Texans, Colts, Falcons, Bucs and then an underdog in every other game. Certainly the back half is definitely more formidable than the front half. You got the Cowboys, you got the Saints, the Packers, the Jags but holistically, and there's always gonna be an asterisk around how you evaluate schedules and whatnot.
But you can still operate under kind of like, you know, again, those range of outcomes for these teams. And most of these teams have ranges of outcomes that are tilted for towards the downside.
I assume the number that's placed at seven and a half is relative to last season's win expectation, which was on the backs of good quarterbacking. I'm not saying that Sam Donald's a good quarterback, but the production was there.
And that angle kind of leads me to say that this pricing is a little bit off.
Yeah. Well Darnold only did play like five games, so, but that's where they
got their wins.
Yeah. All right. Let's move on to Falcons Offensive Defensive EDP perspective.
I think the range of outcome chart is, is best to kind of encapsulate this this Falcons team, which is like the left tail is not very wide to the left.
It's kind of right down the middle, which is a very high floor team, but also not such a high ceiling. If we look at the saints, the mean was much worse than the Falcons, but their kind of right tail is very similar. Which is to say, I think that this almost perfectly encapsulates who the Falcons are, which is that a high floor team.
As I said with the Panthers. A team that likes to run the ball and bleed clock. That's what, that's what the Falcons are. And they played last year as kind of a run and gun. I imagine they'll see more of the same, which is a lot of runs and a lot of deep passing hiding their quarterback as much as they can.
And they're kind of like gonna finish with mid results cuz that's the offense they're running. They made a lot of moves on, on defense. Perhaps that improves but. I think, I think the perspective of the Falcons maybe there's a lot of bullish talk, but looking back from last year, this was a team that way, overachieved.
And I think the EDP chart says, no, actually, they're kind of exactly what the record indicates. Mm-hmm.
Arthur Smith has a balanced approach. He had a 58% pass rate out of 11 personnel, 52% out of 12 personnel, and 46% out of 21 personnel.
And when you draft Bijon Robinson at running back, you have Matthew Bergon slated as your starting left guard. That should improve your efficiency out of 12 personnel. And it's gonna lead for those like play action deep shots down the field to Drake London, Kyle Pitts.
Arthur Smith's, that kind of guy where he's just gonna pound the ball at you and then off that you're gonna have play action.
Yep. Falcons seven and 10 last year. Eight, eight and one ats. We're looking at the power ranking volatility. Average rank was about 24th. Average opponent rank was about 18. Seven day rolling rank volatility, two and a half spots, so not too volatile of a team.
One of the things that we talked a lot about last year from a in our season previews was just how. Overly bearish. The market was on the Falcons going into last year. Four and a half wins. We were talking about how the market was pricing the Falcons like a few years ago.
The Texans, when the Texans were blatantly tanking at the very beginning of the season, that's how the market was pricing the Falcons. That seemed overly bearish. We talked about how we liked the Falcons over, we were betting on the Falcons quite early last season and in fact, we started to abandon that thesis maybe a little bit too early.
But we see we are actually right on target. The Falcons come outta the gate pretty hot. They impress versus the saints there at home. Covered again versus the Rams this next week covered it again versus Seattle. Covered again verse the Browns. Covered again versus the Bucks and again, versus the Niners.
And you see climbing this wall of hatred that the market had for the Falcons. And then the market starts to buy in. And then that's when it, you know, they start to revert back. And we can start to see a lot of like got a good forecasting from Drive Quality as we can kind of see starting to sell off on the Falcons, you know, before the market starts to kind of catch up on that.
When we look at the week by week
I see max deficits, some pretty ugly numbers, so they are definitely digging themselves some nasty holes over the course of the season. Down 25, down 21 down, 21 down 13, down 10 down 13, down 14, down 14. So a lot of double digit holes and not a lot of like big leads over the course of the season.
The market was never too hot on them. At any point in time. Anything from you guys on this?
One thing I I'm gonna look at is the active points here.
The. Offense accounted for most of their positive active points at, at 13 and a half. And I think we're going to see the market's gonna kind of price in Desmond Ridder as really bad quarterback as they did with Marcus Mario to last year. And I think the point of the range of outcomes that we were just talking about is of all the teams in the nfl, I think the quarterback position matters least to the Falcons because they're going to hide him.
They're gonna be games where he is gonna attempt 15 passes, 20 passes. There's a chance for sealing. I mean, you can talk yourself into, into rid, I know some people are doing that, but I think there is going to be value on the offense.
And I think it's a very similar constructive team to last year, and I see no reason why it shouldn't repeat itself.
From the, from the Max lead perspective, multiple games did they never have a lead or a very short lead? So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 games, almost half the season, did they never have a lead at any point in time in the game?
And then another flurry of games, where they only had a field goal lead.
That's a great point about trying to pay attention to some of these team tendencies. I don't think it's a team that can be able to come back in games, right?
If they're down I think it's a team that's so reliant on being ahead and using that run game that they're gonna struggle to make comebacks.
They did add a lot to the defense. They added Kaas Campbell, David Ayata, and Bud Dupree.
All those guys are over the age of 30, so is Grady Jarrett who's there, but you're gonna get the ability to stop the run with those four. And then when you look at what they did to the secondary, they paired, Jesse Bates went out, got Jeff Kudo, they have Mike Cues, and they already have AJ Terrell. And I think this is one of the more sneaky, underrated secondary groups in the nfl.
So when you can stop the run with your front four, you can drop those four back. You can send a couple guys on pressure like blitzes or simulate pressures and try to get after the quarterback that way. So I think they're gonna be improved from a defensive standpoint.
I disagree with you there on the, on the cornerbacks. I'm not exactly so, so bullish. And they lack in the pass rush, such that this could be a defense that is, you know, turned for, for a bunch of big gains. The combination of a lack of pass rush and, and certainly Jeffrey Acuta has been a very beatable corner. Plenty of weak links in the secondary. If they're good against the run as I think they will be as, as, as you point out a team to attack via the passing game especially early in the season.
But that narrative of like, oh, they improved their defense, I think is gonna be valuable for, for DFS or betting props, maybe even some, some early same game parlays.
But that's something I, I definitely wanna keep on my radar.
This is a pretty wild one. I've been thinking about it for like the last three minutes, trying to piece it together was, I was almost thinking that this is an error in the code that the Falcons beat the 49ers by 14 points and never trailed and they won 28 to 14.
And I'm like, did that really happen?
And that looks like it was pretty much the peak for the team. Yeah, that was right after that Niners game. And then there was a reversion back to what the market was priced him at the beginning of the season.
All right.
So off season changes. John Smith I think is an interesting ad. You know, obviously having that relationship with Arthur Smith
before he was the offensive coordinator for Mike Vrabel. He was the tight ends coach for Ken Wien Hunt in Tennessee.
So why he takes Kyle Pitts at four, why he brings Janu Smith back. Like now you see the philosophy from Arthur Smith and why he's built this roster
I just want to pick up a bit on Desmond Ritter. Present maybe a, a case for the upside. Again, I think this is gonna be a, a floor offense. He was awesome in a bunch of the unstable areas. How he played under pressure, according to Pff, had like a, his 98 percentile grade on perfectly covered plays had a, like a top five epa.
That shows up on film of a guy who can kind of create out of nothing. And I think that's why some of the, the film people have, have fallen in love with him a bit. If he can get better in all of the areas in which quarterbacks generally get better I'm looking at the percentage of times he throws to an open receiver.
Basically across the board. Every quarterback from a rookie to your sophomore to your third year improves in that category. Adjust has your, your ability to process improves and your ability to adjust the the speed of the NFL improves. It's like if he can get better in those areas, which are generally the stable ones, then he can put together a good year, assuming that traditionally unstable metrics, but because of his skillset set, his ability to kind of create, cause he's definitely got a good arm and can definitely use his mobility to avoid sacks.
If that's sticky and he can get better as everyone else does, there's certainly a case for Ridder to be good. I'm not betting that, I'm not buying that, but I certainly think that would be remiss to overlook that possibility.
I think a lot of people are focusing on that upside.
I haven't heard that
I have heard it from some people and I'm with you Judah. I'm not really high on redder because this is, is first full year as a starter. But what I will say is Mariota absolutely sucked at hitting the deep ball last year.
And deep ball accuracy is volatile year to year. So if Ritter can come in and just hit those open guys that are running down field and your Kyle Pitts and your Drake London's off those play actions, the fan base is gonna love them. Yeah, he's gonna make a couple bonehead decisions throughout a game.
Like that's, that's just going to happen and you just want him to play consistent and within the system.
I'll often watch more too. Cause not a lot comes to mind, but I did just last week rewatch that Saint's Game Week 15, 18 to 21 loss. And the reason I watched it was I didn't like actively select that game. It was just like the first one that came up when I was like looking for highlights on YouTube.
And I did it because I had been seeing sort of like a litany of different tweets from different people arguing for upside for the Falcons, specifically due to outperformance from Desmond Ritter. And that Saint's game looks vintage. Every single thing you would not want a quarterback doing.
Looks slow to process. Looks at one ride receiver, overthrows 'em. Inaccurate. There was nothing, nothing. It all looked ugly.
What, what do people see in this sky? There's no promise. There was no promise. Now it's just one. And it was his first. He's played another few games, but it was a nine to 17 loss to the Ravens and then squeaked one out versus the Miserable Cardinals.
And then that last game versus the bucks when I think the bucks didn't even need to win it. Backups they were losing. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't remember a lot from those games. I mean, look at the Q B E P A here and again, there's tons of asterisks with that of course.
If people are really talking themselves and said the upside of Desmond Ritter, I think that presents betting value if that's reflected in the market.
Mm-hmm. Something to keep an eye on. I just know, yeah. From what I've anecdotally listened to and heard, And that's why, you know, we'll continue to bring online our sentiment analyzer so we can quantify it even better. And I don't much have to talk about just my own anecdotal experiences. All right.
Falcons in 2023, look at their schedule over the course of the season. Python 2.0 model has a short lean to the over 3.3% edge, so it's not gonna actually make any bets. Strengths of schedule from a futures implied perspective, one of the easiest ranked 31st net rest negative four days mean spread is about pick them.
A handful of games that they're favored, handful of games that they're underdogs. But this is a relatively tough start for a team that people are high on. I mean, you have to see there, there's a huge repricing of this team.
How meaningfully different is this team from last year? The team was priced at four and a half wins last year. Now they're priced at eight and a half wins a doubling. And there's people outwardly bullish, so they've been repriced up and people wanna buy 'em, whereas last year they were sold off hard and no one wanted to touch him.
And I don't even know what's changed?
The NFC South. Yeah.
Tom Brady's not there anymore.
But we were talking, but fine, the broader agree, agree. Market doesn't realize that, but last year we were already talking about that. Yeah. That that was gonna happen. No,
no, I certainly agree. I'm just trying to understand the expectation there.
And I think there was a correction. They won seven games last year and Mariota wasn't that good. But I agree with you. There's definitely value on the under.
You think, do you think like Mariota did not play well, but there was games that he did play well?
And net net, like what's the probability that Desmond Ritter in totality is going to offer meaningfully more upside than Mariota? I think he has more meaningful downside.
Agree. Agree.
Four of their five starters on the offensive line last year played over 99% of the snaps. So you had continuity there with Mariota and Ritter to where they at least had some form of a pocket as some of those guys get injured. That definitely shakes it up to where that that under you can juice a lot more.
Plus a wide receiver core is pretty thin. Right. It's
real. They're starting Mack Collins.
Yeah, Mack Hollins. They have Scotty Miller. They don't have anybody outside of Drake London. They're gonna be running a lot of two tight end sets.
They're gonna be leaning on Bijon. If that offensive line gets hurt. They just resigned. Chris Lundstrom, they just drafted Matthew Bergeron. They have Jake Matthews at Left Tackle. They have some high named dudes on that offensive line. But
we'll see.
This is a weak roster. The more I'm looking at it, it's yes, you can fall in love with the talent of London and Pitts. That's very weekend. One of them goes down. You just have a defensive game plan that just like takes out the one guy. That's easy. Yeah. And like, yes, they're gonna be creative in the run game.
And it's relative to expectation. But this team does not look good at all. I'm really struggling to find the ceiling.
I also, I always feel like in the off season, everyone's like, Arthur Smith, they got Arthur Smith.
Arthur Smith's a great play designer. And it's like always like this bullish ammunition. But then in the season when you're actually trying to bet them, they're like, but Arthur Smith, so conservative. They don't try to capitalize when they should. I would like the Falcons here, but they have Arthur Smith calling plays. And starts to swing the other way.
I remember throughout all of the middle half of last season, people would cite Arthur Smith as a negative factor. Yeah. Not a positive.
That was certainly the off season outlook for the team. It was like Arthur Smith negative. I think I'm alone thinking that he's a, he's a good play designer.
Well, Steven doesn't, don't sum your charts and stuff. Put him up there or no. I
have Arthur Smith. He's right around Ben Johnson, which are in like the teens. He's consistent as a play caller.
The other thing is, is the teams in this division, we talked about the Panthers, talked about the books, if they have any somewhat consistent strength.
It's the defensive side and that's not gonna help essentially a rookie quarterback and Desmond River. Sell. Fade. Alt under Falcons.
What are they, what are they at? Eight and a half right now. Yeah, that's eight and a half. If you get to nine wins and the NFC South, you're gonna win the division.
It's hard to see the Falcons winning more than eight, no more than nine games this season.
I like the regular under more than I like the alt under, but I, I certainly like the under here.
I don't even think the schedule's that week at basically plus close to plus 200 on under Falcons, that actually does sound pretty attractive so far.
All right, saints Division favorites.
Another team in that same kind of quartile there on looking at the E D P chart, offensive and defense, having a pretty decent defense but not a good offense. So kind of like all having kind of similar thematic factors here underlying these teams at least last year.
And again, a lot of it does rhyme this year.
When we look at the power ranking volatility for the Saints. We can see here. Drive quality really liked the Saints pretty much all year and the market did catch up.
So as the market started to really ramp up towards the end of the season, drive quality was basically flat cause we were already there. So this is another example of the market catching up to it. What I would say is drive quality was a little bit too hot, too fast, a little bit too eager on the Saints.
Cause a lot of that performance didn't actually come through even though those underlying fundamentals seem to be there. And I know the, the Saints because of this, you know, were was not a team that I have like very fond memories, particularly petty.
Definitely led to some, some heartbreak.
Especially that Ravens one. The Ravens one, and I remember that Rams game when I had Dalton passing and saints minus nine and a half. The Saints had the ability to run out the clock. And then Bryce Perkins led a 55 yard drive with
