East Coast Offense: Results Matter

This article is part of our East Coast Offense series.

Results Matter

I got into a Twitter debate last night about whether Tom Brady has had a substantially better career than Peyton Manning, and it was essentially a referendum on results vs. stats. Manning's career yards-per-attempt (YPA) is higher, but Brady's won four Super Bowls. From the stats side, you could argue Brady was lucky - the timing of his good and bad games were such that his worst didn't happen to come in January. Maybe he had a stinker or two spread out in different Octobers or Novembers, but there weren't many disasters in the playoffs. After all, the stats that indicate future performance (how we typically measure skill) favor Manning, and the sequence of when someone has his good or bad games might just be luck. If Brady's four rings were mostly based on the timing of his good performances, and timing were considered luck, then Manning has had the better career.

The problem with this line of argument (even if we were to concede its controversial premises) is it puts the cart before the horse. A major reason we look at performance indicators like YPA is to get a sense of what's likely to happen in the future. If superior YPA is correlated with winning, then we'll take the player with the better YPA because he's more likely to win. But once a player has already won four Super Bowls, it makes little sense to look back and say the indicators weren't in his favor. The event is already over! We don't need indicators of what's likely to happen because it's already happened. That's not to say Terry Bradshaw was better than Manning (their eras were so different, it's hard to compare, and team context matters a lot), but that indicator stats only tell you the likelihood of something before the fact. If a quarterback is more efficient overall, it's likely his team will score more points. If his team scores more points, it's likely it'll win. If his team often wins, it'll have a good chance to make the playoffs, etc.

But what a QB does on his average pass isn't the same thing as what his particular results are throughout each stage of this process. If most of the YPA comes against the worst teams, if he struggles in the red zone relative to his efficiency elsewhere, if his playoff performance, even adjusting for tougher competition, is worse than his regular-season one, then what he's done on average - while perhaps a good predictor generally of what's likely to happen - did not turn out to be a good predictor in his particular case. It's irrelevant to say someone with indicator stats like his typically will perform better than he has in the playoffs because we already know he has done poorly.

Indicators tell us what usually happens. They instruct us probabilistically on what to expect. But when the improbable happens, it is absurd to reject reality in favor of what some metric told us was likely to happen and did not in fact occur.

Similarly, the 2007 Giants, based on most advanced stats, had somewhere between a 10 and 20 percent chance to beat the 18-0 Patriots in the Super Bowl. But once the event was over, and the Giants won, to say they were lucky - they hit their 1-in-7 long shot - reduces a game of skill to a game of chance. Yes, you can model a game of skill with games of chance, and such models might even be helpful for prediction, but the model is not the reality. Once the game takes place, the model for it can be thrown out. But you'll see people clinging to the model and arguing the Patriots should have won based on Weeks 1-20 even though reality didn't go that way in Week 21.

I want to distinguish the Manning and Giants Super Bowl examples from those where bad bounces carried the day, and the model was, in fact, more or less correct. If one team is projected to win by 10, and they lose by 20 despite outgaining the other 2:1, and the loss was due to a bad snap on a punt, three lost fumbles, and two fumbles by the winning team that it recoved, then it's fair to chalk up the loss to luck. But when the Giants played the Patriots essentially even, or when Manning has a total no-show against the Seahawks in the Super Bowl, that's not what's going on. (Admittedly drawing the line between bad bounces and bad play is sometimes tricky.)

The bottom line - yesterday's indicators disappear into the present result. What was likely to happen matters only to the point of the event, and then it's gone. For one to argue that so-and-so's YPA or net-points-on-the-season meant things should have gone differently is to insist that reality should comport with one's theory of it. But it does not.

Incidentally, the debate reminds me of a hypothetical we had in law school where we were asked to assess the culpability of a person who with malice shoots at someone and, through his own ineptitude, misses. Why should that person get a lesser charge (attempted murder) than someone who actually murdered someone when the intent was exactly the same? Who cares about the result, it's all about process, right?

Most of us agreed with this. Then the next hypothetical was a person jamming pins into a voodoo doll of someone he wanted to kill. Should that person be charged with attempted murder, or even murder itself, given his malicious intent? The point of the hypothetical is while intent (process) is certainly important, results also matter.

Week 9 Observations

• The Chargers scored 13 points on offense at home against the Bears.

•Alshon Jeffery is a good bet the lead the NFL in targets the rest of the way. He's a top-five WR and could be No. 1 overall from Weeks 10-17.

•Jeremy Langford looked great both as a receiver and runner, albeit against one of the softest run defenses in the league. The Bears don't need to rush Matt Forte back.

•Danny Woodhead ran a 4.33 40, and it shows on the field. He's so much quicker than Melvin Gordon.

• The Giants won ugly, with their longest play from scrimmage a 24-yard pass to Odell Beckham. He saw 17 targets, but managed only 105 yards and didn't score. No one else did much, and the Giants' four-headed monster at running back is among the most useless in the league for fantasy purposes.

•Jason Pierre-Paul returned and looked pretty good, generating a few pressures. Can Giants fans give me a high-three? Too soon, I know.

• I actually cheered out loud when the Giants scored a meaningless defensive TD on a busted lateral during the last play of the game. I didn't have the Giants defense anywhere, they had already covered the spread, but it was great anyway. Some people on Twitter pointed out it swung bets on the total from under to over. Talk about a horrible beat.

• The Bucs targeted Mike Evans a whopping 19 times, and while he went 8-for-152, it could have been much more but for a few bad drops.

• The Saints defense is terrible. Marcus Mariota, coming off a two-game layoff and missing his top receiver, passed for 371 yards, four TDs and no picks. Granted, one long TD was pure luck, a pass that should have been intercepted that bounced into Delanie Walker's hands, but even without that Mariota had a big day. That followed Eli Manning's six TD day last week. Cornerback Brandon Browner is like one of those hacks you dread playing against in pick-up hoops. How do you call fouls when every play is a foul? He gets flagged more than anyone in the NFL.

• That defense is a great tailwind for Drew Brees, however. Coming off his 511-yard, seven-TD game, he posted another 387 yards, three TDs and a rushing score. Brees spreads the ball around so much, his main receivers lack upside, though.

•Antonio Brown had 23 targets, 17 catches and 306 yards from scrimmage today. But with Ben Roethlisberger likely out for the foreseeable future, he's not a top-five receiver going forward.

•DeAngelo Williams had 235 yards from scrimmage, and he and Brown destroyed the all-time record for YFS for two players on the same team in one game (h/t Scott Pianowski). Roethlisberger's injury is likely a big blow to his value too.

•Derek Carr had only 6.8 YPA, but another 300 yards, four TDs and only one pick. He has arrived, and the case for ranking the Eli Mannings and Matt Ryans ahead of him is getting awfully flimsy.

• Instead of going to Oakland for his career to die, Michael Crabtree has been resurrected. He and Amari Cooper are essentially co-No. 1 WRs in a top-12 offense.

•Sam Bradford played well, but the Eagles did most of their damage on the ground – at least until the game-winning pass to Jordan Matthews in overtime.

• It's almost as if Chip Kelly has only one plan, and that's to exhaust the opposing defense with his team's pace. If it works, the Eagles roll late in games. If it doesn't, they struggle. It also necessitates a lot of running plays which more reliably wear defenders down. Otherwise, it's hard to identify anything special.

•Dez Bryant is more or less back. It's too bad he had to create his own points catching a hail mary, but he'll get his targets. And Tony Romo should be back in Week 11. I'm not sure whether Cole Beasley's breakout is something on which the Cowboys will build.

•Darren McFadden had 27 more carries and took a lot of hits, but didn't look worse for the wear. Once Romo comes back, this could be a top-five offense and McFadden its feature back.

•Sammy Watkins caught all eight of his targets for 168 yards, including a beautiful 68-yard touchdown catch on the full run. He's a top-20 WR going forward, and the upside is top-10.

• I didn't watch much of the 49ers-Falcons, but I caught the mind-boggling decision by Dan Quinn to kick a field goal down four *at the one-yard-line* with three minutes and two timeouts left. Essentially Quinn decided that: (1) making the chip shot; (2) forcing the Niners to have a three-and-out; (3) driving back into field-goal range; and (4) making a second field goal was more likely than scoring a one-yard touchdown. And that's not even considering the Niners would start at their own 1-yard line in the event the Falcons failed on fourth down.

•Devonta Freeman managed only 12 yards on 12 carries, but his 67 receiving yards and a score paid the bills. Freeman, Julio Jones (17 targets) and, to a lesser extent, tight end Jacob Tamme, are the only relevant players in the Falcons offense. No team in the league has its entire offensive output so densely concentrated.

• For all of Andrew Luck's garbage-time heavy performances this year, his modest 252 yards and two TDs (7.0 YPA) against the Broncos elite defense was his best. Luck also had 34 yards on the ground, didn't throw an interception and took only one sack. Unfortunately, he's out indefinitely with a abdominal and kidney injuries.

• Apparently the Broncos signed Vernon Davis to motivate Owen Daniels. Otherwise, Denver's output was meager as usual, and the team has no running game whatsoever. At this point, I'd put C.J. Anderson ahead of Ronnie Hillman, but it might not matter much.

• Carolina was up 37-14 with nine minutes left in the game, and somehow Green Bay had the ball at their four-yard line down eight with two minutes left. The same thing happened against the Colts last week, and the Panthers needed overtime to win that one.

•Aaron Rodgers and Cam Newton had monster fantasy games, and it coincided with Davante Adams and Devin Funchess, two preseason risers when their teammates got hurt, finally becoming relevant.

• When Eddie Lacy struggled early last year, I compared him to Trent Richardson. By midseason, when he was playing well, I caught a lot of grief for that. Is it reasonable yet to ask for an apology? Apparently, he injured his groin during the game, but we're in Week 9, he plays with an elite QB, and he's been virtually worthless all year.

• I laid the points with the Pats for the first time in a while, and I have to say it felt good to be rooting for them to pull away rather than the underdog to keep it close. The Redskins actually might have covered had they not dropped at least seven passes (it was at six when I saw another drop and stopped counting.) Dion Lewis got hurt, and while he's been great, I'd be shocked if it slows down this juggernaut.

• I called former referee turned penalty commentator Mike Carey "master of the obvious" on Twitter, but Yahoo!'s Andy Behrens rightly pointed out "master" was inapt. So we'll go with "Student of the Obvious."