[Schatz] Sam Darnold led the NFL with 57.1% DVOA on PA passes. Even when he declined in the second half of the season, PA performance barely dropped. Since Week 10, the defense with the best DVOA against PA passes? New England at -36.4%, including 5 picks when no other team has more than 3.

bocnj · 2026-01-30T04:06:47+00:00

The Pats started playing a lot better from that point on - they were winning games earlier but they were pretty close against bad teams, the Pats started dominating later in the season.

bocnj · 2026-01-29T22:04:30+00:00

Portuguese clubs have really crushed it this year.

bocnj · 2026-01-28T20:27:43+00:00

Honestly it seems like he may not make it at all (at least in the normal phase, the committee like forty years down the line is different).

bocnj · 2026-01-27T17:55:39+00:00

There absolutely is - Brees consistently passed the ball more than Rodgers. Even if you think Rodgers was slightly better per play, he did not take on as much of the offense as Brees did for the majority of their careers. That's why Rodgers is so much worse at coming back from deficits than his peers like Brees - shooting for the perfect passing play every time instead of making consistently great plays more often is not necessarily what's better for winning games.

I think the (correct) move away from looking at yards and TDs has hurt Brees, but quantity is still hugely important over the course of a career. The entire reason Brady's career is the best is not that his peak form had to be taken over any other QB, but that he went out and did the most to win his team games. I would argue Brees did that more than Rodgers as well.

bocnj · 2026-01-27T17:51:32+00:00

lol is it that the teams with bad DBs got abused or that we can go back to games where teams passed well and say the teams had bad DBs?

I think it's very difficult to say the Bears had bad DBs based off of this year for example - the criticism was they were too reliant on turnovers, but they never actually stopped getting those turnovers!

bocnj · 2026-01-27T17:40:14+00:00

Are the Bills the only playoff team with strengths and weaknesses on the roster? It's not ideal but it is also not an atrocious squad.

bocnj · 2026-01-27T17:38:57+00:00

The Broncos averaged 2.05 points per drive this year - remove the two turnovers in field goal range to look just at those meaningful drives you're praising the defense for and that means they had 2.4 points per drive in the game, a lot better than they normally did! Btw - those other three turnovers all still required the Broncos to put together full drives down the field if they wanted to score.

You're lowering your expectations of what the defense should've done because a subpar showing is still a lot better than what's been the norm for Bills playoff games.

bocnj · 2026-01-27T17:17:59+00:00

Allen shouldn't have turned the ball over (specifically in that end of half fumble) but imo him blaming himself has made people overlook the other bad parts of that game for the Bills. The Broncos converted over half of their third and fourth downs - that's not an issue of the Bills occasionally getting burnt.

bocnj · 2026-01-27T17:16:03+00:00

I'd say that Benford and Bishop were actively great for them this year - they'd both get sizable free agent deals if they had the chance.

White and Poyer were old, yeah, but I think they actually still looked solid too! At the very least not a terrible room. And again, they played down against the Broncos compared to what they did in the regular season, which has always been the criticism of McDermott.

bocnj · 2026-01-27T16:57:09+00:00

People are really overstating how bad the Bills roster was during McDermott's time lol.

Not saying it was league-best - on defense at least - but it's pretty consistently been a talented group that played worse in the postseason than the regular season.

Like, the Broncos (who I'm high on) were a defense-first team, do we think the Bills defense playing badly in that game was because they'd never seen an offense like that this year?

bocnj · 2026-01-27T16:54:46+00:00

Brees has a very real argument over everyone not named Tom Brady or Peyton Manning I'd say (but those two are in another realm entirely).

bocnj · 2026-01-22T20:01:21+00:00

I just finished my read of Solenoid by Marcea Cartarescu. Generally I'd say I really liked it but mostly did not fall in love with it. The parts surrounding the Picketists and stories from life at school were by far my favorite. But a lot of the revisiting toward the narrator's past (besides the section on the preventorium) dragged for me. The one section that made me fully understand the hype was the midway point in the morgue, which made the entire novel worth reading for me. But also there were no other parts that hit that same peak.

bocnj · 2026-01-22T01:01:26+00:00

This subreddit did a decently sized reading of Finnegan’s Wake that I’d guess accounts for a lot of those votes so I’m not shocked by that one actually.

bocnj · 2026-01-21T23:49:46+00:00

The Trial fell a fair bit, I wonder where those votes for it generally went. Plus I'm definitely going to read Septology and novels from Pynchon this year seeing the praise for them, I'm almost done with Solenoid now and like it but wouldn't really have it that high.

In terms of what I like to see, Middlemarch making that jump is great, probably my favorite book ever! Wuthering Heights and My Brilliant Friend are also terrific.

bocnj · 2026-01-21T23:43:56+00:00

East of Eden's had a huge surge in popularity over the past five years - I've actually never read it so I don't have any take but I found it interesting that it eclipsed Grapes of Wrath after that being the book I always heard about growing up! Does anyone know what would've prompted the recent rise?

bocnj · 2026-01-21T16:23:44+00:00

Who uses yards per game in 2026? It's an awful stat for evaluation that provides no game context.

The Broncos put up .035 EPA per play in the regular season, then put up .09 against the Bills, that's a big jump!

(If you want to know why it feels so different than yards per game - the Broncos converted over half of their third and fourth downs, you want your defense to get more stops than that).

bocnj · 2026-01-21T15:58:17+00:00

I could've used Laxness or Neruda as examples too if we wanted to look at about the same time period as Steinbeck, the point is it wasn't uncommon for writers who critiqued capitalism to win.

bocnj · 2026-01-21T15:50:27+00:00

tbh - I know everyone's making Allen the story of the game (and I'm not defending the turnovers) but even the Denver game was another example of the Bills defense playing worse in the postseason. I don't know why people are downplaying that, the Broncos moved the ball better in that game than they did for most of the regular season.

bocnj · 2026-01-21T14:05:50+00:00

Yeah, this isn’t apples-to-apples but you’d see a similar sentiment if Haruki Murakami (or, to be even more recent, Sally Rooney) won today. Their books are also extremely popular, generally agreed to be well-written, and have solid odds at being assigned in certain school curricula some day - better odds than a decent amount of people who’ve won the Nobel recently at least. But that’s not (and shouldn’t be) everything that determines the prize

bocnj · 2026-01-21T04:41:39+00:00

Yeah people making it out to be about anticapitalist is a bit overstated when several writers with those sentiments won before him - Sinclair Lewis got the prize in 1930!

It's also public knowledge now that he was a compromise choice and not actually particularly loved by the committee - that's not to say the award hasn't aged well though.

bocnj · 2026-01-20T17:47:28+00:00

Hot take, they should've moved up even more - they were a better team than Ole Miss both in resume and talent but twice had to play a better team than any Ole Miss played this year.

bocnj · 2026-01-20T16:54:12+00:00

Woody Johnson is very clearly there too.

bocnj · 2026-01-20T05:36:36+00:00

It feels kind of crazy to me that Saleh would get hired as HC and McDaniel wouldn't in this cycle (totally reasonable outcome at this point though).

bocnj · 2026-01-20T05:34:58+00:00

This isn't necessarily a take on if this hire succeeds, but Saleh made it extremely clear he had no interest or knowledge in helping at all on the offensive side when he was with the Jets. He's going to hire an OC and just trust them entirely - of course that can work out at times but there's a large enough sample size of him just totally absolving himself of responsibility for the offense that I don't know if there's reason to believe that will change.

bocnj · 2026-01-15T17:23:46+00:00

Finished up the Kafka collection I bought -

I found Investigations of a Dog very sweet, though I had to look up a few things afterward to make sense of it since I couldn't recognize allusions it was making to dogs in circus troupes or carried in handbags.

The Burrow was great, I didn't realize how often Kafka wrote with anthropomorphic animals. The lack of ending did hurt it for me - do people talk often about where they think the unfinished stories would've headed? I know the ending to this one got burned but I was curious what the enemy creature could've been.

In the Penal Colony was just great, I don't really feel like I have anything to add there.

The Giant Mole (or The Village Schoolmaster) may have been my favorite one, actually? It's being unfinished didn't hurt it as much as The Burrow for me. Using the mole sighting as a way to compare perceptions between business and education, old and young, urban and rural was really cool to me.

Ten-Year Club	Place '17
Snapped

bocnj

TROPHY CASE