The Little Engine That Couldn't

First of all, thanks to Jonah Keri of the great Baseball Prospectus
Link
for starting an impromptu Breakfast Table heavy on the World Series but with a fair share of football, too. That table is posted here.
Link


Yes, one day I'll learn to do these links better.

Well I went and shined the spotlight on YPA this week and look what happened. Somewhere, Chris Liss at RotoWire is laughing.

Actually, he says you can't system bet NFL games. By that, I think he means to say, "You can't bet NFL games." He also says that YPA's impact on a game is a big "duh" and that we might as well say whoever scores the most points is going to win. But I spit rasberries at that argument until I hear YPA mentioned as the key to winning even one time by a network TV announcer. Furthermore, this isn't like saying the team with the most yards wins because there are many times when the team with the better YPA has less passing yards than the opposition.

So where did we go wrong? I say we because I didn't necessarily lose these bets. YPA did. (You like that? The first rule of being a tout is to torture logic and reason so that your wrong plays are actually still right plays; but never, of course, vice versa.)

Perhaps I should look only a team's YPA differential (see below blog postings for a definition) only for ranking purposes. The matchup should be decided by how teams rank against their opponent that week. This makes sense. Why didn't I think of it before? I was looking for a simple, one-step approach to everything -- rankings, predictions, etc. And, in truth, it doesn't change things much at all.

For example, in the Lions vs. Giants, you had a team in the low 20s in YPA on both sides of the ball (Lions) going up against a team in the top 10 on both sides (Giants). The Giants were also the home team. How can you argue against predicting a passing-game, YPA rout in the Giants favor. Of course, the Lions out YPA'ed the Giants 8.2 to 6.4 and the rest is history.

Note that just because the picks lost doesn't mean that YPA wasn't the determinative factor in these games. The teams that won the battle of YPA yesterday were 10-3 straight up (that's a bad week for YPA, which usually predicts a winner 80 percent of the time). Against the spread, YPA winners were 8-4-1. (This seems too good to be true, checking last week.... 11-3 against the spread last week, too. Wow.) I'm confident that our challenge is merely to identify the team that is going to win the YPA battle.

The Jets predictably lost yesterday. You can't keep the passing offense in mothballs all year and then just pull it out when you need it. I thought it was downright miraculous that they only gave up one TD to Brady and Co. The Jets secondary is poor and they rely on their pass rush to bail them out. The problem is that teams can always keep your pass rush at bay if they just devote the proper manpower to stopping it. So, sooner or later, your corners get exposed. To see the value of a real shut-down corner, look no further than Denver, which is now a YPA defensive leader solely on the strength of CB Champ Bailey, who cuts the field in half for the defense. And Denver is doing this despite losing their best pass rusher, Trevor Pryce.

I'll do more about football after I write my "By The Numbers" column (why I call it that is anyone's guess as my clients don't call it anything, as far as I can tell). As for the Series, I'm not getting excited about the history-in-the-making in Boston until the Sox win a road game. Remember, this is a team that won the first two games in the '86 Series on the road before losing in seven to the Mets.