Football Bytes: The 49ers *Are* Fine, but Will They *Be* Fine?
Plus, Aaron Rodgers, Robert Saleh and the Jets being the Jets.
Welcome to Football Bytes — a 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!
🏈 Purdy’s Playoff Push
Coming off of a three-year stretch in which they won 41 total games between the regular season and playoffs — second only to Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs (at 46) — the San Francisco 49ers were once again predicted to be among the Super Bowl favorites for 2024. But amidst injuries to Christian McCaffrey, George Kittle, Deebo Samuel and Dre Greenlaw (among others, a list that now includes Fred Warner and Charvarius Ward), the Niners have fallen to 2-3 to start the season, putting their streak of three consecutive playoff appearances at risk already.
A 2-3 record may not seem that bad, but early-season NFL games are more important than we tend to think. Under the old 16-game, 12-team playoff format that was in place from 1990 through 2020, teams who started 2-3 made the playoffs less than 25 percent of the time. That ratio has improved in the three seasons since the regular-season schedule and the playoffs were expanded, but it still sits at just 38 percent over that span:
Another data point along those lines: Even after taking into account the specifics of the Niners’ track record and schedule strength, my Elo forecast deems them more likely to miss the playoffs (52.8 percent) than to make it in (47.2 percent) heading into Thursday night’s matchup with the Seahawks.
While it’s not exactly in “must-win” territory, San Francisco already has a lot of postseason leverage riding on that game. Their playoff odds would rise to 64 percent with a victory — or fall to 33 percent with a defeat, putting them even deeper into unlikely-playoff-bid territory on our chart above.
Certainly, the injuries have taken their toll on the 49ers. The team’s metrics are down from last season, whether we look at schedule-adjusted offense, defense, scoring margin or even the play of QB Brock Purdy — forever the bellwether of this current Niners iteration. But while San Francisco is not as good as it was a year ago, it still ranks among the better teams in the league:
San Francisco’s numbers remain just fine — if not quite as otherworldly — in 2024, despite the 2-3 record, because the losses have been close. The team’s widest margin of defeat was 6 points on the road in Week 2 against a Minnesota team that has proven to be a lot better than anyone imagined. The other two defeats were by 3 points (at the Rams in Week 3) and 1 point (at home against the Cardinals last week).
The way those losses went down didn’t exactly represent the finest moments for Purdy, Kyle Shanahan, Jordan Mason or anyone else involved — the Niners blew double-digit leads in the fourth quarter against both L.A. and Arizona, practically gift-wrapping the opposition those games. Taking winnable contests against beatable teams and dropping them into the “L” column is a good recipe to be underwater in the playoff odds, no matter how good you are on paper.
But at the same time, the Niners are a lot closer to a “defending NFC champ” level than their 2-3 record would indicate — and with a trio of games against tough opponents (Seahawks, Chiefs, Cowboys) coming up, San Francisco will get some good chances to gauge exactly where they belong before their bye week.
🏈 Rodgers Shows His Age (And Then Some)
Going into the 2024 season, I was a bit surprised there were experts and observers who were still bullish on Aaron Rodgers’ potential with the Jets this year:
I had already written a version of that piece a whole year earlier, but basically the upshot was that few QBs in NFL history have ever been functional at an age with “4” as the leading digit — he is currently 40, and turns 41 in December — and this was without even considering that Rodgers was now coming off a major injury as well. If he was merely an average QB the last time we really saw him (as a Packer in 2022), it probably stood to reason that a version 2 years older, with an increased injury load, playing for a Jets franchise where QBs do worse than elsewhere, would probably not be good in 2024.
And that has been true. Rodgers ranks 29th among qualified QBs in EPA per play and 48th overall in QB Points Above Replacement per 17 team games. I had thought he might be just okay relative to other 40-to-41-year-olds,1 who mostly were productive part-timers or Vinny Testaverde-style compilers with a few Tom Brady/Drew Brees/Warren Moon/Brett Favre-type ageless wonders mixed in. But Rodgers is currently on pace for the worst PAR per 17 of any NFL QB at age 40 or 41 since the merger:
Rodgers will probably pick it up as the season goes on, and hopefully creep that number more toward the replacement level — elevating New York’s offense in the process.
However, it was more than a little ironic on Tuesday to see Jets coach Robert Saleh get fired five games into the season, despite the unit with his defensive fingerprints on it playing well — New York is No. 9 in SRS defense — and the team clearly being held back on offense (where they rank 20th in SRS) by Rodgers’ poor quarterbacking. My former colleague
did a better job of unloading on Rodgers and Jets owner Woody Johnson over this than I ever could, so I’ll just invite you all to read what he wrote here:
But Rodgers also serves as a great cautionary tale against the temptation to engage in magical thinking. If, in order for your plans to work out, you need something or someone to be an outlier of an exception to the overall trend of history, your plans are probably just not going to work out — something the Jets are experiencing (though not necessarily learning from) right now.
Filed under: NFL, Football Bytes
The 40-versus-41 factor for Rodgers has caused me problems in the past, since PFR considers 2024 to be his “age-41” season (despite the vast majority of the season happening when he was 40) because they cut off a player’s age for a season on Dec. 31 — unlike their other sites, which generally measure season-ages in the middle of the schedule.
For this story, I looked at the median age for a QB across all of his appearances, rounding up to the nearest integer when necessary. So Rodgers is “40” by that standard this season, though I also included the 41-year-olds to be fair.