Watchtower Review: Lions at Bills

From last week’s Watchtower:

The 26th-ranked Buffalo offense has been averaging just 18.8 points per game, by far the worst Chan Gailey offense we’ve looked at. The Lions, ranked 23rd, are allowing 22.4 points a game. In theory, we should split the difference here—but applying a moderate systemic advantage, I’ll project the Bills to score 13-16 points. I’m not even going to attempt YpA and/or YpC, given how all over the map those numbers are this time, but I have high confidence in this scoring projection.

Good.  Yes.  Well done, data. 

So what’s going to happen when the 7th-ranked Lions offense comes to town? Since most of those points were scored with Shaun Hill at the helm, there shouldn’t be any dropoff from the usual rate of production. Even if there is . . . well, we’re talking a team that averages 25 points a game going up against the worst defense in the NFL. Even if we presume there is no systemic advantage, the Lions should score 30-35 points. Due to the total lack of systemic historical data, I have low confidence in this projection.

Somehow, the tenor of the national conversation surrounding the Bills-Lions game has become “Oh, sweet, the Bills will get a chance to get off the schneid! They pretty good for 0-8; they just almost beat the Bears, you know.” But the numbers just don’t support it. This is one of the best offenses in the NFL going against, by far, the worst—and on the other side, a mediocre offense against a mediocre defense. The Lions have a clear upper hand in this game, and mostly likely will win, 30-14. Hey, twenty-five fell demons of meadow grazing and road defeats! We are apex predators; you lose.

. . . sigh.

Frankly, I've already beaten this to death, so I won’t be long.  The Lions came out with a one-armed quarterback who couldn’t take too many snaps from under center.  Their game plan?  Run it down their throats, minimize risk, and play a low-variance game where their superior talent and execution will bring home the W.

Problems: the out-of-the-shotgun running game wasn’t working, at all (see Tom Kowalski’s play-by-play film breakdown of the Lions’ running game).  Shaun Hill couldn’t throw it downfield, and wasn’t throwing short passes with any accuracy either.  Shaun Hill was physically incapable of opening it up, and Drew Stanton hadn’t practiced all week.  The Bills came to play as if their lives depended on it, and the Lions came to play as if victory was inevitable.  Finally, when all that registered, and the Lions realized they had to flip the switch or lose, Hill’s rustiness, the rain, and some flat-out concentration lapses neutralized the Lions’ downfield attack.  Even then, converted on fourth down multiple times to score the needed touchdown . . . except, of course, Hill’s hand-slip & subsequent airmailing of the game-typing two-point conversion.  Right.

Outside of marking the Lions’ offensive projection way down (way, way, WAY down) for Hill’s rust, there’s really no way I could account for this—I had no reason to believe Jahvid Best would be completely ineffective against a run defense allowing 4.87 YpC, and no reason to believe that the Lions wouldn’t be able to go to the air if the running game wasn’t working.  Poor showing, lads.

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Three Cups Deep, Lions at Bills: Blaming Jim Schwartz

"It was real frustrating, especially coming in here feeling that we were the better team. That’s definitely the way we felt"

--Calvin Johnson, as quoted on Twitter by the Freep's Dave Birkett

The headline on Tom Kowalski’s Lions grades is “Continuing discipline problems reflects on coaching staff.”  Is it true?  Well, the Lions took their more-talented team into Ralph Wilson Stadium, and they got kicked in the nuts.  Their offense made the worst defense in the NFL look like the ‘85 Bears, and their defense made Fred Jackson look like Steven Jackson.  So what killed the Lions yesterday, so the common wisdom goes, is coaching.

Penalties.  Personnel.  Alignments.  Clock management.  Communication breakdowns.  Special teams lapses.  Coaching.

There’s no question, in terms of talent and production, that the Lions have been much better than the Bills over the course of the season.  As I discussed in the Watchtower, the Lions have been one of the most potent offenses in the NFL, while the Bills’ defense has been of a similar caliber to the 2008 Lions—dead last, and completely helpless against the run.  So, when one team has more talented players than their opponent, but loses . . . it must be coaching, right?

Right.  The Lions didn’t put their best team on the field today.  They came out thinking they could put it in the cooler.  They started Shaun Hill at quarterback, knowing he could barely play, refusing to let him throw downfield, and assuming Jahvid Best would slice through the Bills like butter.  When it didn’t work, they didn’t have a healthy, prepared arm to turn to—and Stefan Logan couldn’t quite bail them out with a return TD, try as he might.  The coaching staff elected to coast rather than attack, to not-lose rather than to win, and the result was Bills owning a lead and the momentum.  Blame Jim Schwartz for that.

Normally I gainsay this with, “No, the players play the game.”  At first blush, that argument can certainly be deployed.  The receivers dropped many passes, the tackling was atrocious, and the intensity was completely absent from the opening gun.  The players were not up for this game.  The players thought they had it in the bag.  Incredibly, after last week’s humiliating loss, they were overconfident.  They thought they had it.  They thought they couldn’t lose.  They were wrong.

"I thought we were going to run all over them . . . It's just frustrating.  It's frustrating to work on it all week. We think it's there, we see it's there, and it's just unfortunate because we get behind and we have to go to the pass. We can't stick with the run, and that kills us."

--Rob Sims, via Dave Birkett's Freep.com article

Here, then, is confirmation: the players thought they had it in the bag because the coaches told them they had it in the bag.  The game plan from the beginning was to play a low-variance game: run, run, run, rely on the disparity in talent, rely on the gap in execution.  Don’t start Drew because you don’t want a gambler.  Do start Shaun because you know he won’t kill you with the big mistake.  Don’t push it downfield in the cold and the rain, don’t try to blow them out.  Just grind it out, run it over them, collect the W and move on.

The only problem with this approach is that the Bills “blew their wad” in this game, as someone told me the Lions did last week.  They knew this was their chance to make a statement, and they made it—as the Lions very nearly did last week.  But the Lions that battered and bloodied one of the toughest teams in the NFL last week didn’t make the trip.  The Lions we saw in Buffalo were hung over, lackadasical, incomprehensibly overconfident.  It seems as though they were told all they had to do was show up—and that’s all they did.

The execution, then, is on the coaches too.  Here’s the kicker though: so what.  Jim Schwartz is learning, too.  He has a roster full of talent, but most of it is very young, very inexperienced talent.  He can’t just tell Gosder Cherilus, “HEY KNOCK IT OFF WITH THE STUPID PENALTIES,” and expect Gosder to reply “Oh okay, thanks Coach,” then stop committing stupid penalties.  It’s not like Schwartz can bench him, either—Jason Fox was a healthy scratch—and if he did, the dropoff in play would hurt much more than a dumb hold at a bad time. 

Here is the reality of the situation: every coach makes mistakes.  Every coach makes good-at-the-time decisions that, in hindsight, backfire.  Every coach has wins slip from their grasp.  The coach that doesn’t make questionable decisions flatly doesn’t exist—even Bill Belicheck, the reigning Smartest Coach In Football, routinely makes mistakes, and sometimes they even seem to cost his team games.  But the Patriots are nothing without Belicheck calling the shots, and I personally don’t believe there are any other coaches who’d have gotten this team as far, as fast, as sustainably, as the man I call The Grandmaster has.

He just hasn't yet gotten them to the point where they can take games off on the road and win.

Technorati Tags: nfl,detroit lions,buffalo bills,jim schwartz

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Gameday Post: Lions at Bills

I’m going to give this paragraph over to my man Neil at Armchair Linebacker, because he’s already said what I meant to say, only better, so I won’t bother repeating him:

On Sunday, the Detroit Lions, my favorite professional football team, will descend upon Buffalo will furious vengeance in their hearts. They will devour the souls of the living and gnaw upon the bones of the wicked dead. There is no joy in any of this, no beautiful glimpse of the future. The future is irrelevant. So is the past. There is only now, there is only today, and today there is no choice but to win, to crush, kill, destroy.

Well said.

Saturday morning, I was stopping in to a convenience store on my way to get McDonald’s breakfast.  Near the door, I met eyes with a man in his, say, late 50s/early 60s.  He saw my Lions hat, and a serious look crossed his face.  He nodded with great import, and slowly said “ . . . that’s a good-lookin’ hat.”

I’m not sure I can accurately convey just how important this seemed to both of us at the time—it was a very real, very palpable bond we shared just then, if only for a second.  Being a Lions fan is still, at this instant, an underground thing.  It’s still, for right now, something you do in private, or risk being ostracized.  On the rare occasion you see someone else bold enough to brand themselves with the Honolulu Blue . . . you recognize it.

Today, though, the Lions have a chance to take a big step towards Lions fandom being part of a normal Michigander’s daily routine—and the chance is a great one, indeed.  The Lions can win on the road, for the first time in forever.  They can beat last season’s win total.  They can properly round the corner from one of the toughest first-half schedules in the NFL, to one of the easiest second-half schedules in the NFL.

They can do what decent teams do, which is beat terrible teams on the road.  If they do it emphatically enough, they can even, finally, separate themselves from the dregs of the NFL—both in the national NFL hivemind, as well as in the standings.  I think they can do it, and I think they will do it.

. . . frankly, they’d better do it.  Don’t forget to join me live, via Ustream, at 11:00 pm EST for the Fireside Chat podcast, so we can discuss it either way.

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The Watchtower: Lions at BIlls

There aren’t 25 bison in that picture, but let’s pretend there are. Twenty-five horned, furry demons, each representing a road defeat.  The herd has been rolling the Lions for years now, and now they have to take a stand.  The 0-8 Buffalo Bills are the best chance the Lions will have all season to break the streak.  It’s now, or never.

Chan Gailey vs. Gunther Cunningham

Chan	Ornk	PgG	YpA	YpC	Gun	Drnk	PpG	DYpA	DYpC	PTS	ΔPTS	YpA	ΔYpA	YpC	ΔYpC
PIT	11th	21.5	6.23	4.38	KCC	11th	18.8	6.60	3.78	17	-20.9%	10.65	70.9%	3.06	-30.1%
PIT	7th	23.2	6.57	4.33	KCC	1st	14.5	6.43	3.92	10	-56.9%	4.81	-26.8%	6.17	42.5%
DAL	9th	23.8	7.25	4.04	KCC	22nd	22.7	6.23	3.81	17	-28.6%	5.69	-21.5%	3.12	-22.8%
MIA	8th	21.5	6.97	3.52	TEN	25th	24.2	7.31	3.53	24	11.6%	11.25	61.4%	2.48	-29.5%
BUF	26th	18.8	5.70	4.3	DET	23rd	22.4	7.13	4.79

You may notice a few tweaks in the format.  Team Coached, Rank, PpG, YpA, YpC for offense, then the same for defense.  Then Real Points, Delta-Points, indicating the percentage away the season mean, YpA, Delta-YpA, YpC, and Delta-YpC.  The idea here is to see, at a glance, that in their four meetings as coordinators and/or head coaches, Gunther Cunningham’s defenses allowed Chan Gailey’s offenses to score 20.9% below, 56.9% below, 28.6% below, and 11.6% above their season averages on the year.

. . . but I’m getting ahead of myself.  From 1974 to 1993, Chan Gailey bounced around both the college and NFL ranks.  He served as an assistant, coordinator, or head coach for six different teams, which includes multiple positions (or multiple stints) at Troy State, Air Force, and with the Denver Broncos under Dan Reeves.  It wasn’t until he got a gig as the Steelers’ wide receivers coach in 1994 that his career in the NFL took off.  Under OC Ray Erhardt, the Steelers pounded the run game.  But Cohwer wanted to open it up a bit—and that philosophical dispute led to Erhardt’s ouster after the ‘95 season.  Bill Cowher gave Gailey the reigns—and a directive to score points.

That Gailey did.  The Steelers were ranked 11th and 7th in the NFL in scoring during his two years as offensive coordinator, and Gunther faced him with his fearsome Chiefs D both times.  In the first meeting, the 21.5 PpG Steelers performed to expectations when facing the 11th-ranked defense, scoring 17 points.  They were much more effective through the air then typical (70.9% better!), but could only muster 3.06 yards per carry.

In the 1997 matchup, both units were better.  Gailey’s Steelers were racking up 23.2 PpG, but the Chiefs were only allowing 14.5.  The Chiefs put the clamps on even better than expected, though, allowing the Steelers just 10 points (56.9% below their average).  Oddly, they allowed 6.17 yards per carry on the ground, but held the Steelers to a meager 4.81 yards per attempt.  This jibes with something we’ve seen before from offenses that like to spread it out against Gunther’s D: when he lets them run wild but stops the pass, they can’t score for beans.

Chan's success with the Steelers’ offense got him his first crack at the Big Chair in the NFL, with the Dallas Cowboys.  With Dallas’ vaunted skill position trio of Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and Michael Irvin, Chan’s offense scored 23.8 PpG, good for 9th in the NFL.  With a very robust 7.25 YpA, and a very Emmitt-like 4.04 YpC, Dallas’ offense had plenty of teeth.  The Chiefs were significantly down that year, dropping from the #1 scoring defense in the NFL to only the 22nd-best.  They were allowing points at a 22.7 PpG clip—and yet, they held the ‘boys to just 17 points; an extremely impressive performance.  Interestingly, YpA and YpC were both depressed by just over 20%.

In the final matchup, we have what’s likely to be the best test. It’s a recent Chan Gailey offense versus a Schwartz/Cunningham defense—unfortunately, it’s an 8th-ranked Dolphins offense versus a 25th-ranked Titans D.  The ‘fins were scoring 21.5 points per game, while the Titans were allowing a significant 24.2.  Expectations would be that Miami would score well above their average—and they did exceed their average, but not by much.  They put up 24 offensive points, exactly matching the Titans’ average on the season (remember, Miami was a well-above-average offense!).  This time, it’s more like the first meeting, where the offense went wild through the air, but did nothing on the ground.

Given the data above, I’m more than comfortable proclaiming that given greater, equal, or lesser talent, Gunther Cunningham’s hyperaggressive defenses disproportionately depress the scoring output of Chan Gailey offenses.  There is no consistent mechanism in terms of run/pass disruption—and typical depression mechanisms like sacks or turnovers aren’t the causes either (they’re not on the chart this time, but trust me, those numbers weren’t exceptional).

The 26th-ranked Buffalo offense has been averaging just 18.8 points per game, by far the worst Chan Gailey offense we’ve looked at.  The Lions, ranked 23rd, are allowing 22.4 points a game.  In theory, we should split the difference here—but applying a moderate systemic advantage, I’ll project the Bills to score 13-16 points.  I’m not even going to attempt YpA and/or YpC, given how all over the map those numbers are this time, but I have high confidence in this scoring projection.

Mitigating/Aggravating Factors:

Even if I’m wrong about the systemic advantage for Gunther, we’re still looking at 17-20 points—not enough to overcome our next matchup.

Scott Linehan vs. George Edwards

Lin

Ornk

PgG

YpA

YpC

GE

Drnk

PpG

DYpA

DYpC

PTS

ΔPTS

YpA

ΔYpA

YpC

ΔYpC

DET

7th

25.4

5.52

3.50

BUF

32nd

29.1

6.94

4.84

Here’s a problem.  Except for two years in Washington around the turn of the century, Bills defensive coordinator George Edwards hasn’t been a defensive coordinator before.  Since Linehan didn’t face off against Edwards in either of those years, we have no data to go on, save for this season’s averages.  The only real “coaching tree” substitute we can look at is Dom Capers, for whom Edwards was the linebackers coach in Miami.  From a Capers-y Watchtower:

. . . As we've seen with Gregg Williams and Dick LeBeau, Scott Linehan's balanced, conventional offense is disproportionately successful against an aggressive, blitzing 3-4.

I can’t at all be sure that this applies to Edwards’ flavor of 3-4.  In terms of pass rush, they don’t seem effective; they’re 25th-ranked in sacks.  But, they’ve faced fewer pass attempts than anyone but the Broncos, meaning their pass rush rate is closer to middle-of-the-pack.  They’ve faced so few pass attempts because A) they’re usually playing from behind, and B) they’re terrible against the run.  Buffalo’s faced more rushing attempts than anyone else—295 in just 8 games.  That’s 36 rushing attempts per game.  Despite every team attempting to put it in the cooler via the run, the Bill are still allowing a walloping 4.84 YpC.  This still isn’t as bad as the 2008 Lions, but it’s not much better.

So what’s going to happen when the 7th-ranked Lions offense comes to town?  Since most of those points were scored with Shaun Hill at the helm, there shouldn’t be any dropoff from the usual rate of production.  Even if there is . . . well, we’re talking a team that averages 25 points a game going up against the worst defense in the NFL.  Even if we presume there is no systemic advantage, the Lions should score 30-35 points.  Due to the total lack of systemic historical data, I have low confidence in this projection.

Mitigating/Aggravating Factors:

If Shaun Hill’s performance is limited by his injury—or if the playbook has been cut down because he can’t take snaps under center—then this number could very well fall.  However, I see a big, big day for Jahvid Best against this defense, and at least a just-plain-old-big day for the passing game.  Unless there is some serious defensive/special teams scoring for the Bills, the Lions should get an early lead and hold it.

Conclusion:

Somehow, the tenor of the national conversation surrounding the Bills-Lions game has become “Oh, sweet, the Bills will get a chance to get off the schneid!  They pretty good for 0-8; they just almost beat the Bears, you know.”  But the numbers just don’t support it.  This is one of the best offenses in the NFL going against, by far, the worst—and on the other side, a mediocre offense against a mediocre defense.  The Lions have a clear upper hand in this game, and mostly likely will win, 30-14.  Hey, twenty-five fell demons of meadow grazing and road defeats!  We are apex predators; you lose.

Technorati Tags: nfl,detroit lions,buffalo bills,jim schwartz,chan gailey,scott linehan,gunther cunningham,george edwards

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Gameday Post, 2010 Preseason: Bills vs. Lions

One last time, one last tune-up, one last chance for those on the bubble.  One last game-that’s-not-a-game, one last test-that’s-not-a-test, one last dress rehearsal before the curtain goes up on 2010.  I posted the picture above from last season’s tilt with the Bills as a a warning, a preventative talisman—in case Matthew Stafford does get on the field, that picture above is exactly what must never happen.

Everything else is a bonus.  Please, gather and discuss in the comments below.

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