2008 NFL Predictions

Back when I didn't take this blog seriously, I tossed out some predictions for the 2006 NFL season. My next post -- eight months later -- reviewed those predictions, which, like most NFL predictions, were extremely hit and miss. But hey, when everyone else is tossing out half-educated guesses, why shouldn't I join in and contribute to the noise (and bandwidth usage)? So, here are my 2008 NFL predictions, which I'll revisit in five months after the Super Bowl so you can all laugh at how crazy I was.

Remember: Each year, about four of the eight division winners fail to repeat. Any season prediction that says seven out of eight division winners will repeat is a) cowardly and b) probably wrong. Thus, I am contractually bound to name at least four new division winners on the season. Three were fairly easy for me. The fourth was a tough one and will probably be wrong, but nothing ventured...

y-Division Winner
x-Wild Card

AFC East
1. New England-y
2. Buffalo
3. NY Jets
4. Miami

Tough to go against the Patriots. They could lose four games off their 2007 win total and still finish win the best record in the AFC. The Bills and Jets will make some noise, but they're not ready for prime time just yet. The less said about the Dolphins, the better, though there is some hope for the future with the young players they're stockpiling.

AFC North
1. Cleveland-y
2. Pittsburgh
3. Cincinnati
4. Baltimore

I'm not enamored with Cleveland, especially their offense, but I'll go with them anyway because I think they have better line play (offensive and defensive) than Pittsburgh, a team in a bit of a transitional period as they try to rebuild their offensive line. Cincinnati will continue to be an enigma, looking great one week and lousy the next and probably finishing 7-9 or 8-8. Baltimore lost its HOF offensive tackle and will be starting either a rookie (Joe Flacco) or second-year fifth-round pick (Troy Smith) at QB. Not good.

AFC South
1. Indianapolis-y
2. Houston-x
3. Jacksonville
4. Tennessee

As with New England, I can't go against Indianapolis, though I think it's possible they only win 10-11 games this year. And here's my first big surprise. Houston goes to the playoffs, largely on the strength of their young defense, led by Mario Williams, DeMeco Ryans, and Amobi Okoye. Jacksonville is probably the most overrated team in football -- David Garrard is good, but nobody actually consistently throws fewer than 1% of their passes for interceptions. That's going to have to balance out. And speaking of QBs and interceptions, Vince Young is like Michael Vick without the passing skills, and that's not very good.

AFC West
1. Denver-y
2. San Diego-x
3. Kansas City
4. Oakland

Here's my "division winner I'm changing because I have to, not because I want to" pick. With all the injuries they've suffered, not the least of which is Shawne Merriman, I think the Chargers slip a little this year. Oakland and KC aren't ready to compete (though with their stellar draft, I think the Chiefs are closer than a lot of people thing), so I'll go with Denver, which is probably as crazy a choice as the Houston pick.

NFC East
1. Dallas-y
2. Philadelphia-x
3. NY Giants
4. Washington

I don't think Dallas is a 13-3 team, but the rest of the division doesn't do anything for me. I'll give Philly and Donovan McNabb one more chance at greatness in the playoffs, though. I think everyone agrees that the Giants were a bit of a fluke last year, and with their losses on the defensive line, they'll be lucky to break .500. Todd Collins somehow captured lightning in a bottle and got the Redskins to the playoffs. They'll be lucky to avoid double-digit losses this year.

NFC North
1. Minnesota-y
2. Green Bay-x
3. Detroit
4. Chicago

Minnesota was the busiest team in the offseason and, with the losses suffered by the rest of the division, could have the easiest road in their division of all the teams. I think Aaron Rodgers will be decent, and the Packers' running game and defense will keep them solidly in the mix all year and probably lead to 9 or 10 wins and a playoff spot. Detroit's got some nice weapons on offense (Calvin Johnson and Roy Williams), but they won't get to 10 wins (sorry, Jon Kitna). Chicago could be a trainwreck; they have Devin Hester and Brian Urlacher and...uh...anyone?

NFC South
1. New Orleans-y
2. Tampa Bay
3. Carolina
4. Atlanta

If Reggie Bush stays healthy, New Orleans could have the most potent offense in the league this side of New England. He's not an every-down back, but his receiving skills make him a dangerous weapon. I'll probably get ripped for this (again), but I just can't believe in Tampa Bay. How old is Jeff Garcia? 38? Truthfully, I think Carolina could be worse than Atlanta. Jake Delhomme started off nice last year before being lost for the season, but he's not a 111.8-rating kind of guy. If Julius Peppers doesn't rebound from his lousy 2007, it could be another long year for Panther fans. At least Atlanta knows they're rebuilding, though they'll be lucky to win five games.

NFC West
1. Seattle-y
2. Arizona
3. St. Louis
4. San Francisco

You don't know how badly I want to pick against Seattle. Can Julius Jones really be the answer at RB? And Bobby Engram and Nate Burleson are your top WRs? But I've given up trying to believe in Arizona until they definitively show me they can get it done. They might go 8-8, they might go 4-12, they might go 12-4. I think all are equally likely, but I'm just not going to jump on their train. A full year of Steven Jackson will do much to cure the Rams' ills. JT O'Sullivan will probably put up nice numbers in San Francisco, now that he's got Mike Martz running the offense, but ask Jon Kitna how that worked in Detroit.

And now we come to the final part: my predictions for conference champions and the Super Bowl winner. More than a few pundits are picking you-know-who to win the NFC and even the Super Bowl; ESPN's Mike Greenberg picked a Minnesota/Jacksonville Super Bowl, with Minnesota proving triumphant (though, you know, that would be a rather boring game, with probably about 75% running plays and no passes deeper than 15 yards).

Me? I just have trouble doing it. I know I put $10 on the Vikings to win the Super Bowl. And maybe this news, on the eve of the new season's start, is some kind of omen. But...but...if I make that prediction, and they fall short, I'll feel disappointed (and feel like a homer). The pressure, the pressure....

AFC Champion: New England
NFC Champion: Minnesota

Super Bowl Winner: New England

There. I feel better now. Or maybe worse. I'll let you know in February.

Total vs. Average, Part II

Last Friday, I suggested that teams with great running games don't typically have good passing games and that teams with great passing games don't typically have good running games, despite the commonly held belief that good passing opens up the ground game and good running opens up the passing game. To some extent, this is true, but if, say, Adrian Peterson has a great season in 2008, very little of that will likely be attributable to the improved Vikings' pass offense. After all, with a horrible passing offense in 2007, the team still ran for 2,634 yards and averaged 5.3 yards per carry. Bernard Berrian can't make that any better, can he?

My thoughts than went to the notion that a good rushing team might have good passing rate stats while a good passing team might have good rushing rate stats. In other words, high rushing totals begets high average yards per passing attempt, while high passing totals begets high average yards per rush. This is because a team that's good in one aspect of offense won't rack up big numbers in the other aspect but when they do use it, they might catch the opponents off-guard and have fair success.

I tried out my theory against team stats for 2007 and here's what I came up with:

Team	PassYds	RushAvg	RushYds	PassAvg
Arizona Cardinals	5	30	29	10
Atlanta Falcons	18	20	26	21
Baltimore Ravens	23	17	16	29
Buffalo Bills	30	18	15	22
Carolina Panthers	29	15	14	31
Chicago Bears	15	32	30	23
Cincinnati Bengals	7	28	24	7
Cleveland Browns	12	6	10	12
Dallas Cowboys	4	10	17	2
Denver Broncos	13	5	9	8
Detroit Lions	9	19	31	15
Green Bay Packers	2	12	21	3
Houston Texans	11	24	22	6
Indianapolis Colts	6	22	18	4
Jacksonville Jaguars	17	3	2	5
Kansas City Chiefs	20	31	32	27
Miami Dolphins	24	16	23	30
Minnesota Vikings	28	1	1	19
New England Patriots	1	14	13	1
New Orleans Saints	3	29	28	14
New York Giants	21	4	4	26
New York Jets	25	23	19	24
Oakland Raiders	31	13	6	25
Philadelphia Eagles	10	2	8	17
Pittsburgh Steelers	22	7	3	9
San Diego Chargers	26	8	7	18
San Francisco 49ers	32	11	27	32
Seattle Seahawks	8	26	20	13
St. Louis Rams	19	25	25	28
Tampa Bay Buccaneers	16	9	11	11
Tennessee Titans	27	21	5	20
Washington Redskins	14	27	12	16

This chart probably needs a little explanation. (Gee, ya think?) The categories, across the top, are team passing yards (discounting sacks), team yards per rush, team rushing yards, and team average yards per pass attempt. The numbers are each team's rank in that particular category.

The colors are meant to show the correlation between the two (potentially) like categories. For the total pass/rush avg. combo, red indicates the team was in the top half (1-16) in league rank for 2007. Orange signifies bottom half (17-32). For the total rush/pass avg. combo, green is top half, blue is bottom half. In theory, like colors should be next to each other in the chart: red-red and orange-orange in the left half and green-green/blue-blue in the right half.

At a glance, the matches seem iffy at best. Here's the breakdown:

Red-red: 7
Orange-orange: 7
Mix: 18

Green-Green: 7
Blue-Blue: 7
Mix: 18

Well, that's rather disappointing. All the trouble of a color-coded chart, and that's what I end up with? Maybe it's just that, for the teams that were best in rushing or passing, that success came because of the ineptness of the other side of the ball -- that certainly was the case with the Vikings -- and nothing was going to bring that part of the team "up to speed."

Still, it's worth noting that the concept that one part of the offense being very good will have a profound effect on the other is probably still overexaggerated. Of the top 12 rushing teams last year, only Philadelphia -- at #10 -- had a top-10 passing attack. Similarly, of the top 10 passing teams, it was Philly again that was the only team with a top-10 rushing game (#8), and they were only barely in the top 10. The New England Patriots, for all their offensive fireworks and big leads, only ranked #13 overall in rushing (and #14 in yards per carry).

So if you're thinking Tarvaris Jackson makes a great sleeper pick in fantasy football this year, don't hold your breath. If he does improvem it will be because of his continued maturity and experience and the addition of Bernard Berrian. It won't be because Adrian Peterson and Chester Taylor are making it significantly easier to pass. And I'm sure as heck not drafting Laurence Maroney in the first round again this year...

The parity question

Last week, two SN bloggers posted their disparate opinions on parity in Major League Baseball. bartolis argued that MLB wasn't nearly as lopsided as most people think, while ES46NE10 took the opposite stance. In fact, the argument bartolis made was that MLB has more parity than the NFL. Naturally, as a fan of a long-perceived "small-market" baseball team which has, nevertheless, performed very well in recent years, I'm intrigued by the chance to do a little more research into this point.

The crux of the pro-parity argument seems to be that, from 1993 to 2007, a span of 15 years:

23 different MLB teams were among the final 4 playoff teams.
23 different NFL teams were among the final 4 playoff teams.

But is that in itself an endorsement of parity? Is "Final Four" status an indication that all is well and good? ES46NE10 counters with:

The answer lies in the bottom feeders - the NFL's parity is such that every year since 1993, 30 of the 32 teams have had a legitimate shot at making the playoffs, and with the NFL's "Any Given Sunday" mentality, actually riding that playoff appearance into a Super Bowl appearance and maybe even a victory.

I think, though, that, while "legitimate shots" are nice, and it's true that virtually any NFL team -- and an increasing number of MLB teams -- have a chance of winning it all every year, the championships, at least in MLB, still go to the teams with the highest payrolls.

Again, as a fan of the Twins, who made the playoffs for four out of the five years from 2002 to 2006, I often thought, "Man, this is a good team, but they lack X," where X was "another starting pitcher," "a right fielder," "another lefty in the bullpen" or whatever. And, with their meager payroll, wouldn't it have been nice if they could have added a premiere free agent at their position of need, someone who would have cost about $15 million/year, filled a great need, and might have pushed them into the top half of league salaries? In fact, adding $15 million to the Twins' total salaries from 2002-2006 gives them the following rankings in MLB team salaries:

2002: 14th
2003: 16th
2004: 13th
2005: 15th
2006: 15th

Not exactly the Yankees or Dodgers, eh? Still, with their scouting, talent development, coaching -- and that little extra bit of cash, they might have done better then three first-round exits and an ALCS loss in four playoff years. It might have been nice, as a fan of the team, to see a level playing field. I'm sure A's fans can sympathize.

But what about the teams that actually did win the championships? I'll limit the span of my research from 1995 onward, since in 1993 (remember, there was no World Series in 1994), player salaries had not yet rocketed into the stratosphere. Since then, here are the MLB salary rankings of the World Series champions:

1995: 3 (Braves)
1996: 2 (Yankees)
1997: 8 (Marlins)
1998: 2 (Yankees)
1999: 1 (Yankees)
2000: 1 (Yankees)
2001: 8 (Diamondbacks)
2002: 15 (Angels)
2003: 24 (Marlins)
2004: 2 (Red Sox)
2005: 14 (White Sox)
2006: 10 (Cardinals)
2007: 2 (Red Sox)

Over those 13 years, that gives an average salary rank of 7.1. And if you think it's the Yankees' 20th-century WS wins that are skewing the data -- well, you're partially right. The average of the WS winners from 2001 on are 10.7, still putting the average World Series winner in about the top third of salaries.

Then we come to the 2003 Florida Marlins, who won it all with just a $49 million payroll, toppling the $153 million Yankees in the process. Yes, it can happen. But even with such disparity and low expectations (the Marlins had 79, 76, and 79 wins the previous three seasons and were an OK-but-not-great 91-71 in 2003) and a little luck, the underdog can win, at least occasionally. But was it really that absurd that a team with the 24th highest payroll should win it all? Even .500 basketball teams occasionally win the NBA draft lottery, after all.

To test this, I created a spreadsheet to pick one random number from 1 to 30. There were 30 chances it would pick number 1, 29 chances to pick 2, 28 chances to pick 3, and so on, down to a 1 in 455 (1+2+3+...+29+30) chance of picking #30. This was meant to crudely represent the notion that the team with the highest payroll (represented by the 1's) would have the best chance of winning the championship, followed by the #2 team, the #3 team, and so on. Still, it's possible that the #24 team (or #17 or #29) can still win.

Running this test a thousand times (don't worry, it wasn't nearly as time-consuming as it sounds), I get an average result of 10.9. Technically, this doesn't prove anything regarding baseball, but it does show that, given the small sample size we're using (13 seasons, or 7 post-Yankee seasons), the unlikely teams can still win occasionally, and this year's Marlins seem to be on the same track. Over the long run, though, the teams with the most chances to win -- most often represented by higher salaries -- will tend to dominate. Re-run the 2003 season a thousand times, and I'd bet the Marlins -- who had the seventh-best record in all of baseball, and were within five wins of six other teams -- win it all less than 10% of the time.

Yes, better front offices, managers, scouting departments, and the like can close the salary gap very well when there's a monetary imbalance. But why should teams be required to play the game with fewer resources? If you're a good Monopoly player, do you offer to start with only $1,000 instead of $1,500? If you're a good chess player, do you start with two fewer pieces? Of course not. Everyone starts with equal resources and it's up to the skill of the players (and some luck, in many cases) to determine a winner. Talent, not money, should determine who wins and loses. It would be just as ludicrous for the Yankees to be able to give MLB $1 million during an inning to get four outs.

True, there are no such salary imbalances in the NFL to explain why teams like the Lions and Cardinals continue to struggle every year. But what if the Patriots, for example, had been required to play $15 million below the salary cap this decade? They'd still have the same excellent coaching staff, would still have drafted Tom Brady, and would still have cheated :) And, in all likelihood, they would have still been a very good team and maybe even gone deep in the playoffs. But there probably wouldn't be any talk of crowning them the team of the decade. Instead, they'd be more like the Minnesota Twins of the NFL -- very good, but lacking the resources to get over that final hump.

The worst running games in NFL history

Since my posts about the worst teams in NFL history seemed so popular, I thought I'd try and revisit the topic. But since I've already covered some of the worst teams ever, I didn't think I could top my previous efforts. Instead, considering that the Vikings had the best running game in the NFL last season, I thought I'd go in the opposite direction and try to find some of the worst rushing teams in NFL history. They say that today is the era of the passer in the NFL, and, consequently, the earlier days were dominated by the running game. If that's true, then these teams need a history lesson.

* The NFL Record and Fact Book lists the 1940 Philadelphia Eagles as having the fewest rushing yards ever in a season for an NFL team, and it's hard to argue with that. In the Eagles' eighth season, they managed a paltry 298 yards on the ground all season. Adrian Peterson alone rushed for just two yards less than that in one game in 2007. True, the season was only 11 games back then (and the Eagles went 1-10), but that still averages out to just 27 yards per game.

There might be a catch, though. Note that quarterback Davey O'Brien is listed has having 100 carries for -180 yards. Since sacks wouldn't become an official statistic for another 40 years, I'm guessing that his sack yardage is counted among that negative yardage. Even so, there are probably some legitimate runs in there, and, if you removed all of O'Brien's negative yardage, you'd have just 478 total rushing yards for the team. My Record and Fact Book lists the 1946 Detroit Lions and the 1944 Boston Yanks as #2 and #3 in fewest rushing yards for a season, with 467 and 471 respectively, and that's including negative rushing yardage for likely sacks. I think that cements the 1940 Eagles as the worst rushing team of all time. If only Donovan McNabb had been born 60 years earlier (and, being black, allowed to play in the league).

* The last team to rush for less than 1,000 yards in a non-strike year? You have to go all the way back to the AFL and the 1963 New York Jets, who managed a paltry 978 yards on the ground (while giving up 2,129). Even for the pass-happy AFL, this is the only team in the league's history with such an anemic rushing game. Fullback Mark Smolinski led the team with 561 of his career 1,323 rushing yards, and his reasonable 3.7-yard average would make you think they should have given him the ball more. Then again, when you have a quarterback named Dick Wood on your team, you probably want him going long...

...to the tight end...

...as long as it isn't man-to-man...

...OK, I'll stop now.

* When I got my first Strat-O-Matic football set in the late '80s, it included cards from the 1986 season. A friend and I took five teams each and played a kind of mini-season. I took the Jets, Bears, Bengals, Giants, and the New England Patriots, just because the Patriots had been so bad for so long (by my reckoning), I wanted to see if I could win with them. And the '86 Patriots were a pretty good team overall, winning their division at 11-5 and making the playoffs.

Then I took at look at the team's running back cards. Here were the average yards per carry for each of the team's backs:

Craig James: 2.8
Robert Weathers: 2.8
Tony Collins: 2.6
Reggie Dupard: 2.6
Mosi Tatupu: 2.4

I passed a lot with that team. When I did run, it came as such a surprise to Ted (my opponent) that he would likely be in some sort of prevent, three-man rush, six DB defense -- and I'd get maybe four or five yards. With a good roll.

As a whole, the 1986 Patriots only managed 2.9 yards per carry, and that's including quarterback Tony Eason's 4.9 average on 39 runs. All this came just a year after the Pats' 1985 Super Bowl run, where James and Collins average 4.7 and 4.0 yards per carry on the season. Maybe they were still sore from the pounding the Bears gave them in Super Bowl XX.