I've got a theory that there aren't necessarily teams that can only play the run well or can only defend the pass; rather there are just good defenses and bad defenses (and everything in between). Certainly there are teams that have played well against just the run and not the pass, and vice versa; there's no denying that looking backwards, certain teams in certain years were great in one area of defense and terrible in the other. But looking backwards, there are teams that recover lots of fumbles and teams that faced opposing kickers who missed a high number of field goal attempts, but that doesn't mean that those things will happen again in the future.

My claim is that theoretically -- i.e., if we played 1,000,000 games so that randomness would be eliminated -- defenses should just be defenses. No good run-D, bad pass-D teams; no average run-D, excellent pass-D teams; just defenses. That (I think) is a bold claim, so I better have some good reasons behind it. What are they?

1) Defenses are like chains: they're only as strong as their weakest links (for the flip side to this argument, see Brian Burke's article that offenses are like chains). Picture an unbelievable run-D teamed with an awful pass defense. That defense isn't going to be very good, as almost every team in the league could pass on them all day long. Flip the script, and nearly every team could control the game with power football against a defense that can't stop the run. On defense, if you have a weakness, almost every opponent can exploit it.
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Last week, the SRS (along with just about every human being) was unimpressed with Iowa's resume. After an embarassing loss to Northwestern, the Hawkeyes are now at #29 in the SRS.

Before moving on to the results, a quick thanks to Peter R. Wolfe, who makes the results of every college football game available in an easy to use format. Early in the year, I was hesitant to use the results from the FCS (formerly I-AA) teams, as the small sample size was likely to skew the results. With ten weeks in the books, I am no longer lumping all FCS teams into one big group; now, each FBS team (formerly I-A team) that plays an FCS opponent will be given that specific team's strength of schedule grade, as opposed to the rating of the average FCS team. Along with an interesting week in college football, this tweak means the week 10 rankings look quite a bit different than last week's set.

The ratings are going to be a lot higher for each team as a result of eliminating the "FCS Team" and simply iterating every team in all of college football. But we're only concerned with the differentials between teams, and that hasn't been amplified. A quick reminder: these ratings are meant to be predictive, not a list of how college football teams should be ranked. Teams like Virginia Tech, Clemson and Oklahoma shouldn't be ranked that high in the polls, because they've had a number of losses this year. But based on their large victories, close losses, and/or tough strength of schedule, they're much better teams than their record indicates.

The full list of the 120 FBS teams, after the jump. As you will see, Texas finally broke the tie at #1.

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Courtesy of Matt Knobbe and the Tecmo Super Bowl Repository, here's your Tecmo Super Bowl Game of the Week for Week 8, featuring the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Denver Broncos. The highlights:

(How did we do this? Matt and the other dedicated folks at the Knobbe.org message board have spent a lot of time over the years updating this classic Nintendo football game, including the introduction of a 32-team ROM a few seasons ago. Sounds complicated, but don't worry, it's easy for you to enjoy the fruits of their labor: just get yourself an NES emulator, download the 2009 version of Tecmo here, and play to your heart's content. And be sure to check back at Matt's site for roster updates and more Tecmo-related goodness all season long.)

I've spent alot of time talking about familiarity and home field advantage. Most recently, I wrote about the New York teams sharing a stadium. Today, I'm going to do mostly a data dump of other research I had done on the familiarity issue.

From 1997-2003, a flurry of new stadiums opened in the NFL, with the following franchises playing in a newly built stadium: Washington, Baltimore, Tampa Bay, Cleveland, Tennessee, Cincinnati, Denver, Pittsburgh, New England, Detroit, Seattle, and Philadelphia. I pulled the results for those eleven stadiums, in terms of how many times the visitor had previously visited. I didn't use exhibition data, but did use all regular season and playoff visits. These numbers are through the 2008 season and playoffs, and do not include results this year. The win percentage is the wins and losses from the perspective of the visitor.

Visit		W	L		win pct
1		134.5	242.5		0.357
2		60	113		0.347
3		50	54		0.481
4		29	34		0.460
5		20	30		0.400
6		19	25		0.432
7		21	18		0.538
8		6	10		0.375
9		7	7		0.500
10		4	5		0.444
11		3	2		0.600
12		2	1		0.667

These are the overall results. I divided the games out into divisional and non-divisional games. We know that divisional opponents get to play at a venue every year, whereas non-divisional opponents typically do not. There is a bit of a grey area when it comes to teams that were division opponents until the realignment in 2002. I treated games as divisional games if the road team was in the same division that season. So, Tennessee is a divisional road opponent of Baltimore for games before 2002, and a non-divisional opponent after 2002.

Here are the division opponent only results, sorted by number of prior visits to the same stadium:

Visit		W	L		win pct
1		22.5	31.5		0.417
2		17	37		0.315
3		28	24		0.538
4		24	23		0.511
5		18	22		0.450
6		15	24		0.385
7		19	18		0.514
8		9	9		0.500
9		6	9		0.400
10		7	5		0.583
11		3	2		0.600
12		2	1		0.667

There are a small number of games once we get beyond five visits, but the combined win percentage of division opponents when visiting these stadiums for the fifth time (or more) is 79-90 (0.467). Also, with a couple of exceptions, every one of those first visits by a division opponent was in the first year that the stadium opened. We see that the division opponents actually perform worse in the second season.

Non-divisional opponents, on the other hand, will tend to have their first visit to a stadium after the home team has already been playing there for at least a season. Here are the non-divisional results, based on number of visits.

Visit		W	L		win pct
1		120	211		0.363
2		47	78		0.376
3		22	34		0.393
4		9	12		0.429
5		4	10		0.286
6		4	4		0.500
7		2	3		0.400
8		0	1		0.000

If we exclude the first time visits that occur during the first year of a new stadium (when the non-divisional visitors went 24-29), then we get a 96-182 record (0.345 win percentage) for all non-divisional teams in their first visit to a new stadium more than a year after it opened.

A few weeks ago, I threw out this crazy idea about how to isolate a team's peak performance by SRS:

"Obviously, we can't run the SRS on single-game samples, because it requires multiple opponents to 'work'. But what if we broke each team-season down into 15 to 19 'mini-teams' based on 2-game stretches of the season? Like, the Patriots' win over the Jets in Week 1 of the 2007 season would be part of the 'New England Games 1-2' team, and so would their win against the Chargers the next week. And that Chargers team would be part of the 'San Diego Games 2-3' team, who played 'Green Bay Games 3-4' the next week, who played 'Minnesota Games 4-5' the week after that... and so on and so forth. Now, every 'team' connects to every other team, just like in the regular SRS, but we've also isolated team performance down to the most specific time period possible using the SRS method."

As a follow-up, I calculated the best and worst 2-game stretches by teams this decade (2009 isn't included because not all teams have played the same # of games yet). Remember, the SRS is focused on measuring a team's point differential vs. the point differential you'd expect an average team to have based on the game's location and the strength of the opponent; this method takes it even further and is only concerned with the strength of the opponent at the time of the game, meaning wins against teams with mediocre records can still be positive for a team's SOS if they play them either before or after a strong performance. I think there's definitely some logic to this, because (as Chase pointed out in the post that inspired this series) every game features a different version of the same team; sometimes the differences are so small as to be imperceptible, but sometimes they're huge (think the '07 Giants early in the season vs. late), so it really does matter when you catch a particular opponent.

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As Chase pointed out earlier "the U"s alumni have an active 113 consecutive week scoring streak in the NFL, which is pretty astounding when you think about it. That is over six and a half seasons without missing a weekend. I had to check and see if this is a record of some sort, so I wrote a little perl script to find the longest streak for every school with a scoring alum.
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Yikes, what can you say about the Browns? Things are getting pretty ugly in Cleveland, following a 30-6 loss to the Bears that left the team having been outscored 61-9 over the past 2 weeks. QB Derek Anderson was brutal again, tossing 2 picks and turning the ball over another time on a botched snap. Amidst Cleveland's myriad woes, it might be easy to write off Anderson's performance so far in 2009 as merely one of many breakdowns, but that's understating just how awful Anderson has been... Through 8 games, here are the worst passer-rating performances by a QB in a season since 1960:

That's right, Eric Mangini benched Brady Quinn in Week 3 so he could receive the 14th-worst 1st-half quarterbacking performance in almost 50 years (!) from Anderson. And keep in mind that passer ratings in the modern game are almost always significantly higher than they were in the sixties and early seventies, since today's defenses are greatly restricted in what they can do when trying to stop receivers from getting open and/or catching the ball. Not since another Cleveland quarterback, Mike Phipps, posted a 27.7 rating in 1975 has a QB opened the season as badly as Anderson this year, and among the bottom 25 half-seasons listed above, Anderson's '09 and Heath Shuler's 1994 are the only ones to come after 1980. You can be sure that this is not the kind of history the Browns wanted to make in 2009.

Something historic happened Sunday at Lambeau Field—something that had never happened, but which appeared like it could be a possibility as of last November, and which we had to wait all offseason and eight weeks into this season to finally witness. That’s right, it was the first ever 38-26 game in the history of the National Football League. Bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you? Well, reader David Herson did.

Remember last year, when the Steelers and Chargers played a game that finished 11-10, and everyone was a-buzz with talk about the first ever 11-10 game in NFL history? Well, Sean Forman whipped up a game score finder so that we could find every game for each score combination. (click here to play around with it). David took that information and calculated that 38-26 was the score combination most due to occur out of those that had never happened. You can see his full list of most likely score combinations in the comments to that earlier post.

Next on his list: 42-16. You’ve been warned.

Maurice Jones-Drew rushed for an incredible 177 yards on just 8 carries against the Titans yesterday. Jones-Drew rushed for an 80-yard score on his first touch from scrimmage... in the second quarter. On the first play of the second half, Jones-Drew ran 79 yards for his second and last touchdown of the day. Jones-Drew joined Barry Sanders and Frank Gore as just the third running back ever with two 75-yard rushing touchdowns in the same game.

Jones-Drew's 177 rushing yards were the most by any running back with just eight carries in a game since 1960 (and probably ever). In fact, no one with fewer than 13 carries in a game has rushed for as many yards in the last 50+ years. The table below shows the most yards gained on the ground in a game from 1960 to 2008, for X number of carries:
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First, a big thank you to Peter R. Wolfe for making all college game scores available and to Neil for handling these duties for me last weekend. Another week, and another Texas/Florida tie on top. Behind them, Cincinnati is right on Alabama's tails for #3, thanks to the Bearcats' SRS-leading margin of victory score (Texas and Boise State rank ahead of Cincinnati in raw margin of victory, but the Bearcats rank first here thanks to winning all but one game by double digits). Oregon jumps into the top five after dethroning the Trojans; no doubt the list below won't be the only set of rankings that has Oregon ahead of Boise State, despite the Broncos' lopsided victory over the Ducks in the season opener. As for Iowa, the Hawkeyes didn't earn any style points this weekend when they entered the fourth quarter trailing by ten, at home, to Indiana, the worst team in the Big 10. But in the end, they ran their record to a FBS-best 9-0.

This is an older video from The Onion, but still funny, especially since here at PFR we tend to recognize the presence of randomness in the game more than the average fan...

(Of course, it bears mentioning that nowadays the Jags are having a different kind of existential crisis -- as in, will the team be based in Jacksonville much longer, given flagging ticket sales and the lure of Los Angeles as a relocation destination?)

Here's a Sporcle quiz for all of the college football fans out there: Can you name the Top 4 finishers in the Heisman Trophy balloting for every season of this decade?

Courtesy of Matt Knobbe and the Tecmo Super Bowl Repository, here's your Tecmo Super Bowl Game of the Week for Week 8, featuring the Minnesota Vikings and the Green Bay Packers. The highlights:

(How did we do this? Matt and the other dedicated folks at the Knobbe.org message board have spent a lot of time over the years updating this classic Nintendo football game, including the introduction of a 32-team ROM a few seasons ago. Sounds complicated, but don't worry, it's easy for you to enjoy the fruits of their labor: just get yourself an NES emulator, download the 2009 version of Tecmo here, and play to your heart's content. And be sure to check back at Matt's site for roster updates and more Tecmo-related goodness all season long.)

This is the third installment in a series of posts looking at similar historical teams through six games. The first installment looked at teams with at least 3 wins among those who did not have a bye in the first six weeks. The second post looked at the teams with losing record who played six games through the first six weeks. This one finishes up with the twelve teams who played their sixth game last weekend.

I don't know that this is rocket science, but when a team gets off to a 6-0 start and sets a record for most points scored in the first six games of a season, they are going to compare favorably to some other really good teams that continued to be good. The Saints have the highest expected win total of any of the 32 teams in this study. The Cowboys have a large number of teams that went on huge winning streaks over the second half of the season in their group.

Overall, my playoff odds calculation turned out to be pretty reasonable. The sum of the odds for AFC teams equaled exactly 6.00 teams making the playoffs. The sum of the odds in the NFC teams was slightly high (6.20), but this is explained by so many bad teams playing their seventh game last week, so the "through six games" record is slightly over .500. Also, I'm not taking into account that the NFC has several teams logjammed at 4-2 right now, so it's going to take slightly more wins than average to make the NFC Playoffs. So feel free to tick off a percent or two for the NFC teams and their playoff odds.

Teams are listed in descending order of playoff chances.
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This is a pretty cool post by Bob Sturm of D Magazine, looking at the Dallas Cowboys' offensive personnel groups and how each did in the Falcons game, complete with video clips.

(Hat tip to Bill Barnwell and FO.)

User-created Sporcle quizzes rock! This one comes courtesy of mkgrenwel, who would like to know: Can you name the NFL Teams' Starting QBs from 2005-09?

Bear with me while I throw two crazy SRS variations out there at you...

First: In the wake of Super Bowl XLII (while I was still weeping, if I recall correctly), Chase wrote this super-philosophical post about there not being a greatest team ever -- that the '07 Patriots might have been the GOAT early in the season when they were blowing the doors off of everybody, but by the time the Giants faced them in SBXLII, that team no longer resembled the team that was being billed as the most dominant ever a few months before. Likewise, the Giants were playing really well by the time January and February rolled around, and were far superior to the sorta mediocre version that trotted out on the field early in the season. So according to Chase's logic, it wasn't like you could really pinpoint "The 2007 Patriots" or "The 2007 Giants", because those two teams didn't actually exist.

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In Peyton Manning's impressive career, his 2004 campaign stands out above all the rest -- that year, he broke Dan Marino's 20-year-old record for TD passes in a season (a record since eclipsed by Tom Brady), and led the league in yards per attempt, passer rating, and net yards (pass yards minus sacks) per dropback. According to Chase's yards above average metric, Manning's 2004 ranks as the 2nd-best season by a quarterback in NFL history.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because Manning '09 is nipping at Manning '04's heels. Following the Colts' 42-6 demolition of the Rams (a game in which he could have had his 6th straight 300-yard game to open the season had the Colts not called off the passing attack for sportsmanship reasons), Manning's current 6-game numbers trail only his 2004 stats in terms of sheer aerial greatness:

In terms of career 6-game starts, Manning's '09 ranks 1st in completion %, 1st in Y/A, 2nd in yards, 2nd in TD, 2nd in passer rating, and 2nd in adjusted YPA. What's even more amazing is that this a 33-year-old Manning we're seeing carve up defenses, not a 28-year-old one. It's going to be entertaining to watch Manning attack opponents -- and his 2004 numbers -- over the course of this season.

Three weeks ago, I asked the question "what quarterback rate stats stay most consistent when a quarterback changes teams?" Today I'm going to follow up with what happens when the opposite occurs, and a team changes quarterbacks (through ineffectiveness, injury, or because the team "needs a change" because the defense is giving up 30 points a game). I pulled all teams that had two quarterbacks each throw 200 or more passes, since the merger, and just like last time, used the advanced passing rating in each of five categories (completion percentage, yards per attempt, touchdown percentage, interception percentage, and sack percentage) to compare. There are 73 pairs of quarterbacks who qualify, ranging from notable names like DeBerg and Montana for the 1980 San Fransisco 49ers, to notorious names like the Craig Whelihan/Ryan Leaf pairing for the 1998 Chargers. One pair of quarterbacks, Jay Schroeder and Steve Beuerlein, appear on the list twice, for different franchises, six years apart.

Some teams' numbers stayed fairly consistent when they changed, like when the 1995 Saint Louis Rams used Rypien in place of Chris Miller, or when the 1998 Giants exchanged Kent Graham for Danny Kanell. Other switches resulted in wild swings in performance, like when a young Dave Krieg replaced Jim Zorn for the 1983 Seahawks, or an elderly Dave Krieg replaced a struggling Scott Mitchell for the 1994 Lions.

Running the correlation coefficients for this group was a little dicey. I'll go ahead and report the numbers, since I used it in the last post. But unlke before, where I'm comparing what the exact same quarterbacks did a year later, here, I had to decide which quarterbacks to include in group 1, and which in group 2. I settled on putting the first quarterback to play that season in the first slot. Here are the correlation coefficients between starter A (first QB to play) and starter B for this group of two quarterback teams.

Yards Per Attempt:  +0.26
Completion Percentage: +0.25
Touchdown Percentage: +0.07
Sack Percentage:  +0.00
Interception Percentage: -0.08

There were enough cases where the backup played significantly worse or better than the original starter that the correlations among the group are not high. YPA and completion percentage do remain most constant. Sack percentage and Interception percentage are the least consistent.

Next, the absolute value differences between the two quarterbacks' advanced passing score, sorted from smallest difference to largest.

Yards Per Attempt:  16.90
Completion Percentage: 17.00
Touchdown Percentage: 18.40
Interception Percentage: 19.90
Sack Percentage:  20.00

Same story here, yards per attempt and completion percentage have the smallest change; interceptions and sacks the largest. Next, just like last time, I computed the ordinal rankings for each team to see what category was the least and most consistent.

Completion Percentage: 2.89
Yards Per Attempt:  2.92
Touchdown Percentage: 2.94
Sack Percentage:  3.01
Interception Percentage: 3.25

Same story here. Finally, I looked at the total change in a quarterback's performance with a new team (as measured by the sum of the absolute value differences in each category), and divided the change in each category by the overall change to assign a percentage of change. This last summary lists the number of times that each category represented 20% or less of the total change in a team's performance after a quarterback change.

Yards Per Attempt:  48 of 73
Completion Percentage: 40 of 73
Touchdown Percentage: 40 of 73
Sack Percentage:  39 of 73
Interception Percentage: 37 of 73

Yards per attempt stands out here. Again, sack and interception percentage were the least consistent and accounted for the most change in performance.

Several commenters had excellent points in the previous post. So let me say that I'm not at this point measuring the exact contribution of the quarterback versus that of his offensive line or skill position players in terms of percentages. That's above and beyond the scope of what these numbers show. What they do show, though, is some general information about the relative effects of luck or other factors, such as game situation. Let's do some general summarizing of the information from this and the previous post.

Yards per attempt and Completion Percentage are both somewhat consistent when a team changes quarterbacks, and are also somewhat consistent when a quarterback changes teams. This tells me that with a large enough sample size of throws, luck plays a much smaller role in these two stats. The quarterback himself has something to do with both of these, and the teammates (and I'll lump things like offensive scheme and playcalling here as well) have something to do with these two. Is it 30/70? 40/60? I don't think we can answer that from just this information.

Touchdown percentage is somewhat inconsistent when a team changes quarterbacks, and also somewhat inconsistent when a quarterback changes teams. Interception percentage even moreso. It is the most inconsistent both when a team changes quarterbacks and a quarterback changes teams. This tells me that luck and game context play a large role in determining touchdown rates, and an even larger role in interception rates. What percentage of the remainder belongs to the quarterback versus his teammates? Again, that's beyond the scope of what I've looked at so far.

Which brings us to sack rate. It is one of the most consistent things when a quarterback changes teams. It is one of the least consistent things when a team changes quarterbacks. This tells me that the quarterback plays a larger role than people think in determining a team's sack rate. Again, I don't know what exact percentage is attributable to the quarterback versus the line, and I certainly don't think the line is irrelevant in determining a quarterback taking hits. I just think we measure line play by the wrong stat if we focus solely on sack rate. Sack rate does seem to have a lot to do with a quarterback's style, decision making, and willingness (or unwillingness) to gamble with a throw before ready. A quarterback with a tendency to take fewer sacks is going to get rid of the ball; it's his yards per attempt and completion percentage that are going to reflect whether the line did a good job. Was he throwing the ball when he wanted to, or before he wanted to?

To me, it makes sense that sack rate would most belong to the quarterback. It is the simplest statistic, and the one that the quarterback can exercise the most control over. It is simply "to release the ball, or not release the ball". What happens after the releasing of the ball brings in a lot of other factors--teammates, the opponent, luck.

With Chase on vacation, I thought I'd lend a helping hand by calculating this week's college SRS ratings (for a very thorough explanation of the method we're using, go here first). As you can see, we have a new #1 team in the rankings:

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