Football Bytes: Let’s Overreact to Week 1 NFL QBs! (From Previous Seasons, That Is)
Football Bytes: Let’s Overreact to Week 1 NFL QBs! (From Previous Seasons, That Is)
Plus, Elo Rating movers and shakers, and Blake Grupe's kicking game for the ages.
Welcome to Football Bytes — a new spin-off of my baseball column that I’m experimenting with, in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various football spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Football Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🏈 (Retro-) Overreaction Season
The couple of days right after the end of NFL Week 1 — and right before additional datapoints start coming in from Thursday of Week 2 — is one of my favorite times of the season. That’s because we have finally seen actual football action… yet we still don’t really know that much yet, at least not more than we did in preseason.
This combination traditionally tends to lead to wild overreactions off of Week 1 samples, which are always fun. Maybe Tampa Bay’s Baker Mayfield (who ranked second among QBs in EPA value last week) and New Orleans’ Derek Carr really can be among the league’s elite quarterbacks! Perhaps Sam Darnold really is Minnesota’s answer under center, and perhaps Jayden Daniels and Anthony Richardson are breakout superstars! And maybe Caleb Williams, Bryce Young, Bo Nix and Will Levis are all busts!
Some of those conclusions might come true. But most are just making too much out of 1 game — because it’s all we’ve got.
So with that in mind, I thought it would be fun to go back and look at the Week 1 QB (over-) reactions we might have had — based on opening-game EPA versus an average starter — in seasons since 1970,1 and whether they tend to come true or not over the rest of the year.
(Feel free to explore the chart below by mousing over all the little datapoints.)
While Week 1 might give us clues about where the league as a whole is heading, it is pretty all over the place when it comes to telling us how individual quarterbacks will do going forward. (See above.) Some of this is due to differences in opening-game schedule strength, something this method can’t account for. But a lot of it is because plenty of QBs can get hot — or cold — for a single game without it being indicative of their true talent.
My favorite cases like this are the ones in which a quarterback defies their previous track record in Week 1, raising fans’ hopes. Sometimes it works out: Ron Jaworski had been a serviceable but kind of middling QB for the Eagles throughout the late 1970s, but a big opening week in 1980 (281 yards, 3 TDs, 0 INTs) predicted the best year of his career — and a Super Bowl appearance.
Other times? Not so much. Neil O’Donnell tantalized Jet fans with 270 yards, 5 TDs and 0 INTs in Week 1 of the ‘97 season, only to post painfully mediocre numbers the rest of the year. And who could forget our featured image above, Cade McNown of the Chicago Bears? McNown had been subpar in 1999, but seemed to be turning a new page in 2000 with a stellar 377 yards of total offense and 3 total TDs despite losing to the Vikings. But it didn’t translate to much over the rest of the season, and McNown had played his last NFL game by season’s end.
The other end of the spectrum is equally fascinating. Uncharacteristically bad openers, such as Aaron Rodgers’ clunker versus the Saints in 2021, can end up being completely out of line with the rest of a QB’s season — Rodgers recovered to win his second consecutive MVP that year. Or they can be a sign of very bad things to come, as in the case of Carson Wentz in 2020: A weak performance against the Football Team to begin the year predicted his subsequent final fall from Philly grace.
Does that mean there’s no hope left for the likes of Deshaun Watson, Daniel Jones or Bryce Young? Not necessarily. Sometimes a bad day is just a bad day (even if that group has piled up plenty of those in recent years). And on the flip-side, Darnold probably isn’t destined to suddenly cash in on his Jets-era potential after it lay dormant for years. At least one of these eyebrow-raising performances might stick all season, but good luck identifying which one it is right now.
🏈 Movers and Shakers
One of my favorite things to track is how a team’s Elo rating has changed over time, to get a sense for who is on fire 🔥 and who is ice-cold 🧊. (And, early in the schedule, who the ratings were just flat-out wrong about.) Here’s a look at that in Week 1 of the NFL season:
🏈 Grupe Effort
New Orleans Saints kicker Blake Grupe isn’t exactly a household name. (Unless you are in a fantasy league where kicking points are wildly overpowered, like my friend
.) But on Sunday, he sneakily had one of the most ridiculous kicking games in Week 1 history.In the first quarter of the Saints’ blowout over Carolina, Grupe nailed a 57-yard FG to give New Orleans a 10-0 lead. Then he came out in the second and hit a 44-yarder and then a 52-yarder. Finally, he finished things off with a 39-yard FG in the fourth, making him 4-for-4 on the day.
That was already pretty impressive; he had the second-highest average distance per FG (48.0 yards) for any kicker who was perfect in at least 4 attempts in Week 1 since 1991 — trailing only Dallas’ Brandon Aubrey, who went 4-for-4 with an average of 48.3 this week as well. But what sets Grupe apart is that he also went 5-for-5 on New Orleans’ extra points, meaning he converted 357 yards of total kicks on his perfect kicking day — by far the most on record (since 1991) in a Week 1, and the second-most in a perfect kicking game overall:
Filed under: NFL, Football Bytes
Estimating EPA for seasons before 2006.