LBs data — are there obvious answers we’re missing?

In looking through some data and chatting about week 1 I happened to see a stat that showed CJ Mosley has scored over a point more in road games than home games over his whole career [admittedly just over 2 seasons!]. This got me thinking about whether there might be similar stats hiding in plain sight in the IDP world. SO this is the first in a series of experiments and dives into IDP big data.

I wanted to look at IDP LBs and determine if there is a difference in home vs road scoring. At the same time I wanted to check a few other variables. To do this I needed game-by-game individual player data rather than agglomerated season or team data. Clearly this means a lot of data work so the study is necessarily limited. I’ll try and go into much more detail in the offseason. The players I used in the study were:

· CJ Mosley

· Na’Vorro Bowman

· Luke Kuechly

· Thomas Davis

· D’Qwell Jackson

· Paul Posluszny

· Derrick Johnson

· Lawrence Timmons

· Patrick Willis

· Karlos Dansby

· Brian Cushing

· James Laurinaiitis

I wanted a combination of younger and older players who’d played in various schems but been successful and consistent enough to provide [hopefully] steady data rather than playing limited snaps and showing misleading results. I included every regular season career game which totalled 1,341 games.

For scoring purposes I used the following settings:

Solo tackles 2

Assisted tackles 1

Sacks 4

INTs 6

The first question was whether being at home or on the road affected scoring. I never thought there would be a difference until the Mosley data seemed to suggest one. The data looks like this:

LBs on the road score half a point more

LBs score about 0.5 points more on the road than they do at home. IDPGuru made an excellent point this could be to do with stat crews but I think it’s more to do with gamescript. Home teams are undeniably more likely to win, teams that win run the ball more as they kill the clock and that results in more tackle opportunities.

That’s interesting and plausible but I wanted to see how it applied to individual players. These two charts show the difference for each player in the study for road vs home games:

Kuechly is a REALLY good IDP

Broadly it follows the insight that road games add a little bit but of course on a granular level some players buck the trend. Notably Bowman and Posluszny have benefitted from home games. No doubt the home stat crews come into play here [remember Posuszny played years in Buffalo].

Obviously the discrepancy by players is very different too. Kuechly and Mosley have put up huge numbers but both are young and in their prime. Some of the older players overall numbers might be brought down a bit by their later seasons. As we’ve already seen most NFL defensive plays are made by younger men:

The NFL is a young man’s league

So I looked at LB points by age:

LBs age well. Like stinky cheese.

Actually average points per game increased with age. This was unexpected but is likely a function of me selecting players with very good careers. Unless a player is really good they’re generally out of the league by their late 20s. Still this shows that the LBs that do manage to hang around are productive later than the average figures show.

On the theme of longevity I wondered do LBs get better as the season progresses [as injuries for skill payers pile up and they tired and beaten up] or worse [as they themselves play through the pain]:

The penultimate game of the year is the highest scoring

How disappointing. It’s flat. With the possible exception that week 16 sees spikes in performance as teams struggle to make the playoffs [it shows up as game 15 in the chart as byes are not recorded] there’s nothing to see here. Move on.

Next I wondered do players score better against some teams than others? This is much more like it — the answer seems to be ‘yes’.

The Chiefs are LB heaven

Over the study [remember 1,300 games stretching back to 2004] the Chiefs, Bears and Giants have given opposing LBs several points more than the Packers, Broncos and Cowboys. Some of this is to do with stat crews but what we don’t see is consistently bad teams allowing more points. Cleveland, Jacksonville, Buffalo and Detroit are all middling teams here. The data is inconclusive but my takeout is that teams who operate a predominantly short passing offence tend to offer the best targets for LB IDPs. The teams that have been most ponderable include teams led by Alex Smith, Tom Brady and both Manning brothers. Traditionally low ADOT QBs.

Next I wanted to see if game outcome significantly changes production. This shows the average points in wins, losses and ties:

Ties result in huge IDP scores. Duh.

Unsurprisingly tied games [there were 3 in the study] offer more points because of the extra playing time. If you can predict ties and use that to your advantage you’re a better man than me Gunga-Din. Wins and losses are basically even so there’s no real advantage to be had.

So there you have it. Nothing conclusive enough that you can override all other considerations when selecting players but a few nuggets of interesting data:

· LBs on the road score slightly better than ones at home.

· Although most players in the NFL are made by young men the ones that stay in the league late are really good.

· Week 16 offers a fun little bump in IDP production.

· LBs playing against teams with a short passing offence are good picks.

· If you can pick games that will go to overtime you’re a fantasy god.

I hope that was helpful. I’ll be looking lots more into as much IDOP data as I possibly can so if there’s something you want to know, investigate let me know.

Thanks for reading

@TomDegenerate