Lets Talk About The Weirdly Off-Base World Of NFL Analysis
Coverage of the NFL is weird, relying more than any other sport on resilient, season-long narratives that seem to persist until the moment they are violently cast off their pedestal, only to be resurrected the second they seem even remotely reasonable again. Most fans tune-in because they want to see their team talked about, then roll their eyes when the pro NFL analysts whiff on easily available information.
The world of the NFL analyst is so resistant to change it begs questioning if they research their topics ahead of time at all. Take ESPN’s Matthew Berry this week, knocking Cam Newton’s fantasy value. That’s fine, he doesn’t have to like Cam as a Fantasy QB and there are good reasons not to — uncertainty about his ability to transition to a new offense with limited preseason time, uncertainty about the productivity around him, uncertainty about his long-term health. I’m not here to attack the man for his opinions, just his blatant disregard for, well, everything else that’s been discussed around Newton this off-season.
To illustrate this we have to dig into counter analysis. Berry asserts that Cam’s value as a fantasy QB is limited by the Panthers’ decision to not run him as much, suggesting that Cam lacks the ability to pass his way to relevance in a more suitable scheme. Meanwhile his two most productive seasons rushing and passing (ignoring TD to INT ratio and focusing on net yardage), years one and two, were when the offense was run by Rob Chudzinski and Cam ran a more varied passing attack while escaping the pocket more. That last bit is important, because it’s something Cam has done less of thanks to the design of the offense in recent years.
Chudzinski’s offense while in Carolina might be best described as a bog-standard NFL passing attack with Zone Read concepts frankensteined into it. The Chud era Panthers just plain passed more, with Newton logging career highs in attempts, completions, average yards per attempt, and average yards per completion in his rookie season. More importantly, however, the offense simplified Newton’s reads, allowing a younger and less experienced QB the opportunity to make plays with his legs when coverage won the downfield fights. None of this information is secret, and arguably it should be easier for analysts with massive stores of information and exceptional resources to recognize — and yet this information appears only sparingly in coverage of the NFL and its teams.
Chudzinski’s evolution of the Panthers offense netted him an ill-fated stint as head coach of the Browns and thus entered Mike Shula, and Air Coryell–a devilishly complex passing attack focused on forcing the ball deep down the field. With Air Coryell came the “Inaccurate Cam” narrative, the idea that Newton, while physically talented, just lacks the passing skill necessary to be a great QB without running. While much can be said about Air Coryell, it’s best point of comparison in the sporting world is Steph Curry’s Golden State Warriors. It’s the type of offense that, when played well and by the right combination of players, produces MVP level results; and that falls to pieces the second it catches a thread on anything. The 2015 Panthers nearly went undefeated, the 2016 Panthers imploded like a nuclear reactor.
The problem for the 2016 Panthers, however, wasn’t that Newton was less accurate. While as a baseline he was less accurate both with and without pressure than anyone else in the league, that doesn’t tell the tale of the gargantuan QB in the context of the offense he runs or the state of his team. All that information is out there, though, and should be used as a lens when examining Newton — or any other passer.
Air Coryell asks a QB to essentially shoot three-pointers for the whole game, completing high degree-of-difficulty downfield throws in an attempt to overwhelm an opposing defense. It’s the epitome of go big or go home. The routes are slow to develop, but hit hard and go for big gains. Because of the length of the routes however, a significant portion of Newton’s game has been eliminated as the Panthers have transitioned from mixed concept offense to a more traditional Air Coryell passing attack. Newton has had to stay in the pocket, because the scheme combined with Carolina’s behemoth wide receivers is slow, and Newton stuck in the pocket loses a dimension. His runs become more predictable, they’re planned instead of improvised, and he’s under threat of becoming a tackling dummy if all the pieces don’t work.
Last season, behind a ravaged offensive line that struggled to block long enough to support Air Coryell’s deep drops and bracketed by receivers that struggled to gain separation, the wheels came off–and Cam’s numbers reflected the fact that he was asked not to escape his deflating pockets in favor of forcing the ball to receivers that had less than a yard of separation a whopping 25 percent of the time. Cam was basically asked to run a pick-and-pop, long-ball offense with a hand in his face all season. No one else was even close.
More than two-thirds of Newton’s passes traveled five yards or more through the air, a stat that already heavily outpaces the rest of the league and seems outright galling considering the Panthers’ offensive line was so injured that they started a guy who had been mowing lawns at Center for most of the year, and literally ran out of Tackles to put on the field. Considering how terrible Newton’s line was, and the offense asking him to ignore one of his most valuable traits, it would be easy to write Newton off as simply put in a bad spot during his terrible passing performance last year, but even that falls short of painting the whole picture.
Despite receivers that couldn’t operate in the short game and a line that couldn’t block for the deep game, Newton still excelled in all the ranges where his receivers weren’t at an extreme disadvantage — or where the team simply didn’t operate. The Panthers barely threw behind the line at all, and logged less passes to all RBs — the players most likely to catch the ball in that space — last year than rookie Christian McCaffrey alone had in his best year of college ball. In the two passing categories beyond five yards and at or below 20, Newton ranked in the top five passers in the league in terms of accuracy. Even behind a terrible offensive line, and playing nearly a quarter of the season with badly injured shoulder, Newton still ranked in the top 10 when asked to throw the ball more than 20 yards down field.
More in-depth anaylsis simply doesn’t support Cam being a sub-par passer in terms of capability, instead pointing to a deadly cocktail of receivers that lack elite skills and a scheme that was vulnerable to poor offensive line play. Couple that information with the team’s plan to move to a quicker passing attack that is likely to offer Newton more opportunities to escape the pocket, and it stands to reason that less designed runs for Cam doesn’t mean he’ll be commensurately less productive as a runner. Berry’s line of reasoning for avoiding Cam just doesn’t make sense by any decent measure.
This type of sticky narrative isn’t limited to Newton by any means; statistical simplicity has a habit of burying many a good player in the NFL these days, and elevating many a mediocre one. The problem largely boils down to the NFL world’s depth of stat keeping not maintaining pace with a sports viewership that demands immediate, definitive answers to who or what is better rather than discussion of the merits of the game’s various elements.
The NFL has remained exceptionally insular to the hawkish stat examination other sports enjoy. Even the NFL’s own statisticians have relegated detailed stats to blurbs made to fill the downtime during live games and as fodder for two to three minute segments used to prop up coverage, founded on snap judgments, of a league that operates, in any meaningful capacity, for just half of the year. It reeks of a, frankly, lazy approach to analysis. One that’s willing to consistently accept and posit theories based on simple, generalized information.
Stats are a great tool for fighting sport’s biggest addiction, cliche. Analysis of the NFL, and evaluations of the men who play in it, has, however, remained largely the same since I learned what stats were in the first place. Trapped in a “First Take” addled world of boring hot takes that feeds on the average fan’s inbred narcissism. It’s a shame that almost no one who is paid to dig around in the NFL’s numbers seems to care about going more than surface deep, because that’s the only way any of this stops.
