The Broncos choose a Quarterback

I know it will come to a shock to some of my (alleged) readers, but there's a lot I don't know about football, even compared to other moderately interested amateurs. Surely I can't compare to guys who make the game their whole career.

But I need to say I was surprised to learn that the Broncos have picked Kyle Orton as their starting QB. What's really gob-smacking about this is that with Chris Simms was his only serious competition for the position.

On the theory that perhaps I was misremembering how unremarkable Orton's and Simms's careers have been, I took a look at some of their numbers. For comparison, I included numbers for Brian Griese, Jake Plummer and Jay Cutler while they played for the Broncos. Here's a summary of what I came up with:

Player	GS	Win%	Cmp%	TD	Int	TD/Int	TD/GS
Jake Plummer	54	72.2%	59.1%	71	47	1.51	1.31
Jay Cutler	37	45.9%	62.5%	54	37	1.46	1.46
Brian Griese	51	52.9%	62.3%	71	52	1.37	1.39
Kyle Orton	33	63.6%	55.3%	30	27	1.11	0.91
Chris Simms	15	46.7%	59.1%	12	17	0.71	0.80

The Bad News

Neither Orton or Simms seem to be anywhere close to the quality that even Brian Griese demonstrated (at least when he was healthy and playing for the Broncos). Orton's winning percentage looks pretty good, but you have to remember he was playing with the benefit of that dominating Bears' defense. He's sure not going to win 10 games this year if he stays on the same touchdown and interception pace shown above.

If Orton and Simms tank, or get injured, the only other quarter back the Broncos have on their roster is their 6th-round draft pick, Tom Branstater.

Is There Any Good News?

The Bears haven't had the most amazing receiver corps for their quarterbacks to throw to; they've been a defense plus running game team for a long time. Kyle Orton's numbers almost have to improve just by having some decent receivers to throw to. Whether they improve enough for him to keep the starting QB job is another question.

Or maybe the Blue Fairy will visit Chris Simms and turn him into a real quarterback...

NFL: A weird thing about tie games

Starting with the 1974 season, the NFL has had sudden-death overtime for regular season games. A very interesting statistic emerges if ties are categorized as either 'early season' (weeks 1-8) and 'late season' (week 9 on).

Late Season Ties

Late season ties are pretty rare, but seem to happen fairly consistently at about once every five seasons:

1. 1978 Week 13: Vikings 10, Packers 10
2. 1984 Week 10: Eagles 23, Lions 23
3. 1989 Week 11: Chiefs 10, Browns 10
4. 1997 Week 12: Eagles 10, Ravens 10
5. 1997 Week 13: Giants 7, Redskins 7
6. 2002 Week 10: Falcons 34, Steelers 34
7. 2008 Week 11: Eagles 13, Bengals 13

That's 7 late season ties over 35 seasons which gives an average of 0.2 ties per season, or one every five.

Early Season Ties

From 1974 to 1988 (15 seasons), there were 9 early season ties:

1. 1974 Week 2: Steelers 35, Broncos 35
2. 1976 Week 2: Rams 10, Vikings 10
3. 1980 Week 6: Packers 14, Buccaneers 14
4. 1981 Week 5: Jets 28, Dolphins 28
5. 1982 Week 7: Packers 20, Colts 20
6. 1983 Week 8: Giants 20, Cardinals 20
7. 1986 Week 7: 49ers 10, Falcons 10
8. 1987 Week 2: Broncos 17, Packers 17
9. 1988 Week 5: Chiefs 17, Jets 17

From 1989 to present, there have been no early-season ties. None.

What Happened Since 1988?

... that's a good question, with no obvious answer. There's no obvious commonalities in the teams that had early season ties. They range from the very bad (the 82 Colts finished 0-8-1) to the very good (the 74 Steelers finished 10-3-1, and went on to win the Super Bowl). There are games featuring two weak teams (in 1980, the Packers and Buccaneers both finished 5-10-1) and two good teams (in 1976, the Rams and Vikings both won their respective divisions, and the Vikings advanced to the Super Bowl (losing, of course, to the Raiders)).

FSPI is 1 year old today...

First real post...

...and I'm still here. I've done (almost) nothing to get ready for next season. Lots of time, yet though.

NFL Wrapup: APR vs. the Line

Back in week 6, I noticed that it seemed like often on the split picks, it was the APR taking the road team, and the Line taking the home team. On further review, I was right. Here's how the APR vs. Line split picks break down for the 2008 season.

APR Takes the Home Team

There were 5 games where APR picked the home team and the Line picked the road team. APR was 4-1 in these picks (missing only Colts @ Vikings in week 2).

In this and following tables, the winning team is shown in bold.

Week	Visitor	Home
2	Colts (line)	@ Vikings (APR, SRS)
2	Chargers (Line)	@ Broncos (APR, SRS)
3	Panthers (Line)	@ Vikings (APR, SRS)
4	Eagles (SRS, Line)	@ Bears (APR)
6	Cowboys (SRS, Line)	@ Cardinals (APR)

Beware of drawing conclusions from such a small sample. Note that four of these were very close games—only Panthers @ Vikings was decided by more than 6 points. And Chargers @ Broncos was the infamous "Ed Hochuli 'no fumble' game".

APR Takes the Road Team

There were 48 of these games, and APR was 22-26 in these picks. I'm not going to go through all 48 games, but there are a few worth mentioning.

• The NFC South was 27-5 at home, and 13-19 on the road:

  Week	Visitor	Home
  2	Falcons (APR, SRS)	@ Buccaneers (Line)
  6	Panthers (APR, SRS)	@ Buccaneers (Line)
  14	Falcons (APR, SRS)	@ Saints (Line)
  14	Buccaneers (APR, SRS)	@ Panthers (Line)
  2	Saints (APR, SRS)	@ Redskins (Line)
  2	Bears (APR, SRS)	@ Panthers (Line)
  5	Buccaneers (APR, SRS)	@ Broncos (Line)
  8	Buccaneers (APR, SRS)	@ Cowboys (Line)
  12	Packers (APR, SRS)	@ Saints
  15	Saints (APR, SRS)	@ Bears (Line)

• Jet lag is a bummer:

  Week	Visitor	Home
  3	Cardinals (APR, SRS)	@ Redskins (Line)
  4	Cardinals (APR, SRS)	@ Jets (Line)
  5	Bills (APR, SRS)	@ Cardinals (Line)
  7	Broncos (APR, SRS)	@ Patriots (Line)
  17	Redskins (APR, SRS)	@ 49ers (Line)

• The Ravens had some issues on the road agains good teams:

  Week	Visitor	Home
  4	Ravens (APR, SRS)	@ Steelers (Line)
  6	Ravens (APR, SRS)	@ Colts (Line)
  11	Ravens (APR)	@ Giants (SRS, Line)

Conclusions:

This is more evidence that APR doesn't pick the home team often enough. I think the answer might be to separate the power indexes into "home" and "visitor" power. Clearly there are some teams that just do much better at home than on the road.

And I see browsing the current standings, there are a handful of teams (Dolphins, Patriots, Bills, Browns, Jaguars, and Raiders) that actually had better road records than home records.

That's a touchdown

Two feet down, controlling the ball, in the endzone.

From this article, with more pictures that show Holmes maintaining possession as he goes down.

Too bad Francisco didn't try to strip the ball out—it looks like he had a decent chance to knock it out of Holmes' hands, if he had tried.

NFL Super Bowl Power Rankings

2008 Navigation Links
Read this for a description of APR

Rank	Team	W-L	Power Index	This week
1 (-)	Pittsburgh Steelers	15-4	1.5362 (LW × 1.002)	won by 4 at Cardinals
2 (-)	Baltimore Ravens	13-6	1.5309 (LW × 0.999)	Bye
3 (-)	Philadelphia Eagles	11-7-1	1.4612 (LW × 0.997)	Bye
4 (-)	Indianapolis Colts	12-5	1.4342 (LW × 1.000)	Bye
5 (-)	New England Patriots	11-5	1.4269 (LW × 0.997)	Bye
6 (-)	New York Giants	12-5	1.4198 (LW × 0.997)	Bye
7 (-)	Tennessee Titans	13-4	1.4131 (LW × 1.000)	Bye
8 (-)	San Diego Chargers	9-9	1.3751 (LW × 0.999)	Bye
9 (-)	Arizona Cardinals	12-8	1.3571 (LW × 0.991)	lost by 4 vs Steelers
10 (-)	Atlanta Falcons	11-6	1.3556 (LW × 0.997)	Bye
11 (-)	Minnesota Vikings	10-7	1.3392 (LW × 0.997)	Bye
12 (-)	Carolina Panthers	12-5	1.3301 (LW × 0.997)	Bye
13 (-)	Miami Dolphins	11-6	1.3008 (LW × 0.998)	Bye
14 (-)	Dallas Cowboys	9-7	1.2975 (LW × 0.998)	Bye
15 (-)	Houston Texans	8-8	1.2948 (LW × 0.999)	Bye
16 (-)	New Orleans Saints	8-8	1.2843 (LW × 0.998)	Bye
17 (-)	Chicago Bears	9-7	1.2516 (LW × 0.999)	Bye
18 (-)	New York Jets	9-7	1.2379 (LW × 0.998)	Bye
19 (-)	Washington Redskins	8-8	1.2322 (LW × 0.998)	Bye
20 (-)	San Francisco 49ers	7-9	1.2273 (LW × 0.997)	Bye
21 (-)	Green Bay Packers	6-10	1.2271 (LW × 0.999)	Bye
22 (-)	Tampa Bay Buccaneers	9-7	1.2219 (LW × 0.998)	Bye
23 (-)	Cincinnati Bengals	4-11-1	1.2063 (LW × 0.999)	Bye
24 (-)	Buffalo Bills	7-9	1.1896 (LW × 0.998)	Bye
25 (-)	Oakland Raiders	5-11	1.1895 (LW × 0.999)	Bye
26 (-)	Seattle Seahawks	4-12	1.1685 (LW × 0.996)	Bye
27 (-)	Jacksonville Jaguars	5-11	1.1580 (LW × 0.999)	Bye
28 (-)	Denver Broncos	8-8	1.1494 (LW × 0.999)	Bye
29 (-)	Cleveland Browns	4-12	1.1292 (LW × 0.999)	Bye
30 (-)	Kansas City Chiefs	2-14	1.0752 (LW × 0.999)	Bye
31 (-)	St. Louis Rams	2-14	1.0543 (LW × 0.997)	Bye
32 (-)	Detroit Lions	0-16	0.9981 (LW × 0.999)	Bye

Comments:

• Nobody moves. Which is at least moderately surprising, as it seems like there's almost always a couple teams close enough that even a tiny change in power index values is enough to shuffle them around.

• In spite of all the hand-wringing about weak teams getting into the playoffs, and regular season standings not meaning that much—that was a pretty good game, with the game undecided right until the last play.

  That's a lot more than you can say for some of those Super Bowls that were over by half time. For the one game of the year that's watched by more casual fans than any other, that's what you really want, isn't it—a game that holds your viewers until the end?

Epilogue

That's the end of the 2008 season, which means this is the last power ranking, too. I'll probably have at least one more Season Wrapup post in the next week or so, and there may be a few Historical Data posts over the off-season. But mostly, FSPI is going to be pretty quiet for the next seven months.

So... thanks for reading, and thanks to those who have encouraged me. See you in September!

NFL Super Bowl Pick Results

2008 Navigation Links

Read this for a description of APR.
Read this for a description of SRS.
Line picks counted correct when the favored team wins; they do not have to beat the spread to count as a win.

Pick results for the Super Bowl.

Steelers (APR, SRS, Line) @ Cardinals

The Cardinals really came close to winning that. Closer than they deserved, given how many penalty yards they had. That pick-6 at the end of the first half comes up huge... that's likely at least a 10-point swing to their favor if that pass had fallen incomplete.

On the Steelers side, Roethlisberger seemed to be an escape artist out there. There were a number of plays he seemed to be on the verge of going down, and then got the ball away.

Standings:

	This week	Overall
APR:	1-0	5-6
SRS:	1-0	5-6
Line:	1-0	5-6
Unanimous:	1-0	4-5

Final power rankings coming up.