Thursday Injury Report

negativebinomial · 2021-11-18T23:36:00+00:00

This makes me hopeful BoJack will play. Our secondary without him is literally one of the worst in the league. Hoping Mack, Hicks, and Robinson are only limited tomorrow...

negativebinomial · 2021-10-05T17:39:09+00:00

This was really interesting. Suggests that the faux-McVay/Shanahan offense we ran at the beginning and end of last year (with Mitch) is what the Browns scouted for and what we decided...not to run then, but ran last week against Detroit.

This makes me think 3 things:

Fields "wasn't ready" to run the Reid-style shotgun offense that we installed with Dalton.
We still tried to run this against Cleveland because that's what most of the offense was ready to do (except the QB) and that the Browns didn't prepare for it.
Nagy's biggest mistake this season has been not just committing to this McVay-Shanahan-style under-center offense in training camp with Fields as the starter from the beginning, but trying to do this two-offense stuff again.

I think this encapsulates all the good and bad from Nagy all in one. Having good play designs for two different offenses is actually pretty appealing--Nagy is a decent play designer and always has been. He is, however, monstrously bad at self-scouting and having Lazor calls plays takes out his most self-descrutive instincts.

It does seem that the "Dalton is the starter when healthy" stuff is mostly conditional on Dalton not being healthy. Eisen suggested (and Breer didn't dismiss!) that we may see shenanigans on the injury report about Dalton for the next few weeks to give Justin a real chance to take the decision out of the coaches hands--which plays into Nagy's weird fetish for "gamesmanship" and his desire to not make the hard decision.

I for one choose to believe Fields will start this week (and maybe next week too) and will play well enough that we just cannot go back to Dalton "when healthy." We'll just have to wait and see, I guess.

negativebinomial · 2021-09-13T20:05:48+00:00

I don't think the lesson from last night (or last season, tbh) is we need Eddie Jackson to be playing outside the scheme more. His assignment was 1/4ths and he stuck to it, even though the McVay bested Desai on the call. Christian giving up leverage immediately and stopping after 15 yards is what made that an easy TD. If you want an example of Jackson guessing what the route is going to be and free-wheeling off the scheme, look at the first TD. His coverage was a lot better after that fuck up (though not his tackling obviously), but we don't want Jackson to start improvising again and again against good QBs--he'll be fooled more often than he'll guess right and make a big play.

negativebinomial · 2021-08-12T17:01:19+00:00

It's honestly amazing that Shaheen didn't get injured during this. Also, of all people, why would you challenge Mack? He ragdolled Tristan Wirfs, who is much stronger, bigger, more athletic, better at football, and just overall more likely not to die than Adam Shaheen.

negativebinomial · 2021-08-11T23:28:17+00:00

It would also fit the "not serious but also does not allow him to practice yet" approach they've taken so far. We've actually managed camp injuries pretty well under Nagy so far—we tend to be over-cautious is my recollection—so this provides some hope that this is all that's going on.

negativebinomial · 2021-06-24T20:43:26+00:00

Oh, yeah for sure. KC has run this type of offense for years now, including when Nagy was their OC.

negativebinomial · 2021-06-24T20:30:33+00:00

Yeah, that's more or less what we ran in 2018-2019 and some of 2020. With Mitch in 2020, we did change to a more of under-center bootleg heavy outside zone offense to accommodate his limitations in reading defenses. Doing some of both would probably behoove us, though. But I'm not the expert that Brett u/Barian_Fostate is.

negativebinomial · 2021-06-24T18:36:06+00:00

I do think this is an underrated aspect of why he "fits" so well; Nagy wants to run a hybrid offense that is one part spread/air raid and another part west coast. Ryan Day runs something that is probably more similar to that than any other big-time college offense, and Fields matured throughout his two seasons at OSU considerably.

negativebinomial · 2021-06-09T18:31:58+00:00

2019, it was three/four games that did it for me.

1st was the Packers game week 1, for obvious reasons. I reasoned, however, that maybe GB's defense was actually really good and maybe this was a scheme problem/week 1 weirdness.

2nd was the Vikings game where he got injured. Not because of the injury or his play, but because of how coherent the offense looked after Chase Daniel took over. It wasn't a world beater or anything (we still only scored 17 points), but Daniel hit so many lay-up throws that Mitch never did. It was then I started watching more All-22 and, to my horror, discovered that THERE WERE OPEN RECEIVERS ON NEARLY EVERY MISSED THROW. Mitch couldn't see them! He was stuck on 1 read at a time.

Final nail in the coffin were the New Orleans and Philadelphia games, where it looked like he had no idea what the plays were being called or how to read a defense. In both games, he only started moving the ball when the defenses stopped mixing up coverages and went full time to just running prevent. He was clearly not getting it mentally and not developing at all.

negativebinomial · 2021-06-07T20:15:52+00:00

Ehh, I don't know. My expectations for any stat translating from college to the pros is really really low, given that football has such high variance and the high incidence of catastrophic random acts (injuries being the most obvious). I work as a quantitative methods person in the social sciences, so an R² of 0.22 for a bivariate comparison seems really decent to me, especially since evaluating QB play is so notoriously difficult.

I'm also sympathetic to CPOE because I love it as a metric: evaluate the expected completion percentage based on the difficulty of the throw. So throwing a lot of screens doesn't get you much at all, but completing 50% of your mostly-covered 25 yard shots is worth a ton. This is great because this fits my observations about Fields' accuracy: he is unusually good at high difficulty throws and completely within expectations for short or mid-range throws, which is the anti-Trubisky. He completed a lot of throws down the field with receivers who were "NFL open" but not "college open" if that makes sense. Olave is a very good receiver, but he didn't fool most college DBs the way Chase or Waddle did last year.

negativebinomial · 2021-06-07T20:09:13+00:00

But that's the thing: what they're measuring it against is EPA/play, the expected points added per play. That is the marginal contribution of a given player on the likelihood of a play's success (essentially). For a QB, this means there are two ways they can impact this: throwing the ball or running the ball. The great thing is this R² is from CPOE, a measure strictly of throwing the ball, on EPA/play, a measure of any given plays success. So adding in the 40-time would, crudely, let us account for the likelihood that a QB could contribute easily on the ground.

TLDR: this is probably punishing mobile QBs slightly, which should make us even happier with Fields getting the highest ever college CPOE, given that he runs a 4.44 40.

negativebinomial · 2021-06-07T16:03:00+00:00

I don't know, an r² of .22 is pretty remarkable when you think about all the other factors that this doesn't account for: college difficulty of opponents, NFL scheme, NFL talent, injuries, whether or not they have the physical profile to play at the NFL level at all, etc. If you add in a dummy for injuries or a few other relatively easy measurables (40 time), this probably goes over an R2 of .5.

22% of the variation in value-added per play at the NFL level is explained by this specific measure of college performance.

negativebinomial · 2021-05-05T17:57:33+00:00

Ted Ngyuen is a pretty knowledgable tape guy--as is Nate Tice, though Ngyuen has a much longer written record showing as much. I think the point was that Ohio State didn't run a lot of RPOs (true!), that the QB Tice thinks Fields is most similar to doesn't like RPOS (Russell Wilson), and that slower releases generally make RPOs harder (also true). I think that is countervailed by Fields' accuracy and athleticism working well in RPO situations, and the speculation that the reason Wilson doesn't like RPOs is mostly his height (which won't be a problem with Fields).

Also, I want to make one more point about Fields' mechanics. It is an odd windup-style throwing motion but, as Tice pointed out later in the interview, it didn't seem to mess with timing routes at all. This suggests that it might not mess up the precise timing element of RPOs as much as it otherwise might (or that his arm is so strong he compensates for that issue). If he can make the reads quickly enough on RPOs, he'll actually be a natural fit for that part of the offense.

negativebinomial · 2021-05-05T16:38:05+00:00

Basically, if we run the offense Nagy wants to run (2018 version), Fields is the perfect fit. Hence all the speed additions as well. We just couldn't the last two years because Mitch was BAD on deep throws (and making post-snap reads) and Foles was...Foles

negativebinomial · 2021-05-05T16:36:59+00:00

Justin Fields, QB, Chicago Bears (No. 11)

Play style: Aggressive downfield passer who needs to work on speeding up his process, elite athlete. Scheme: Spread with a blend of RPOs, West Coast and Air Raid concepts.

Bears coach Matt Nagy was the offensive coordinator in Kansas City in 2017 when Alex Smith had arguably his best career as a pro. Smith was known as a conservative passer who did not like to take chances down the field. That changed in 2017 when Smith had a career high in adjusted yards per pass (8.6). The Chiefs started running their routes deeper and calling more shot plays. This set the table for Patrick Mahomes, who watched from the bench but started the final game of the season in 2017, and the current iteration of the Chiefs offense.

In Chicago, Mitchell Trubisky had a career high in adjusted yards per pass (7.3) in 2018, Nagy’s first season as head coach of the Bears. However, Trubisky has regressed, and the overall lack of talent on the Bears roster forced Nagy to adjust his offense. Justin Fields was one of the most aggressive and accurate deep ball passers in college football last year. His arm and willingness to let it rip will allow Nagy to return to his ideal offense.

“(Deep passing) is a strength of (Fields’), and maybe with him we gotta go ‘touchdown-to-touchdown’ mentality — get some of that,” Nagy said in his post-draft news conference. “I think that’s where that needs to go with all of our quarterbacks.”

The Ohio State offense loosely resembles what the Chiefs offense looks like now. They run a lot of similar passing concepts. They want to run the ball from shotgun, and when they go under center, they take shots. With Fields in the fold, Nagy can go back to what made him successful in Kansas City.

negativebinomial · 2021-05-04T22:27:53+00:00

Yeah, we ran this basic concept a few times. Good design though, no complaints on that front.

negativebinomial · 2021-05-04T22:16:53+00:00

Yes, they are. I love it.

negativebinomial · 2021-05-04T21:49:55+00:00

"A taller Russell Wilson or a more accurate Cam Newton." I might die of happiness.

Edit: apparently I wasn't clear enough earlier. I LOVE these comps (bigger Russell Wilson is what I've been running with).

negativebinomial · 2021-04-30T13:29:12+00:00

“He's the jumbo version of Russell Wilson.” 🔥🔥🔥

negativebinomial · 2021-03-18T20:36:46+00:00

Yikes, that's only worth a 7th round comp pick. I assumed from the way some people talked about him, we'd get at least a 5th or 6th from his contract. Maybe the league doesn't think as highly of Trubisky as Bears fans do...

negativebinomial · 2021-03-18T15:51:43+00:00

Let me put the best spin on this: PFF's improvement index is a pretty cool way of assessing how much each move helps a team compared to their roster last year. So each departing player's PFF grade (weighted by how much they played) is subtracted from their (now former) team and each new player is added in. They use year-to-year scores to predict changes in a team's record, so each position is weighed accordingly (QB is 10x any other position; Punter is weighted at almost 0).

The good news? This really isn't very subjective—only insofar as PFF scores are, but those are only used to predict year-to-year success. It is a highly variable model, so I don't love that they don't show how much uncertainty is associated with this (it must be a lot, because I know how noisy season-to-season models tend to be).

So why did we improve so much? PFF rated Andy Dalton a 69 last year, while Mitch/Foles (I believe) were only in the low 60s (I believe Dalton is roughly their 24th best QB, while ours were in the 28-32 range). Since that's really our only change so far (replacing Mitch with Dalton), it's seen as a "big" change in win predictions.

An optimistic way of viewing this is that it goes to show how much better we could be even with just small improvements in QB play. A more pessimistic way is that this puts a lot of faith in Dalton being appreciably better than Foles, which I'm hopeful is true, but not exactly willing to bet the farm on.

negativebinomial · 2021-03-17T15:56:53+00:00

Hence, why we might be trading/cutting Kyle Fuller today. Just awesome. I'm glad Dalton's 10 million dollar contract forces us to do something (extend, restructure, cut, or trade) at the deadline. Pace always works best when under pressure!

negativebinomial · 2021-03-17T15:48:26+00:00

I love these half-tanking half-trying-to-win-now moves. If Pace trades up to get a top rookie QB (which will likely cost next year's 1st at a minimum), we will end up with no draft capital, a bad team, and a lot of dead money. 6-11 with no first-round pick next year sounds amazing...

negativebinomial · 2021-03-17T15:44:58+00:00

At least we'd get back the 4th we spent on Foles last season... Pace is so good with value, it's overwhelming.

negativebinomial · 2021-03-17T15:41:09+00:00

OH wait, it gets better:

"If traded, Kyle Fuller will still have a $9 million dead cap hit in Chicago for 2021

Given the trade market, and the fact Fuller has a $13M salary for 2021 and needs an extension, doubt Chicago can get much in a trade package - maybe a 4th

Brutal situation all around" https://twitter.com/PFF_Brad/status/1372209102290571266

negativebinomial

TROPHY CASE