Football Bytes: The Detroit Lions Are on the Hunt for History
Plus, the most important games left in the 2024 regular season.
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!
🏈 The Lions Are Roaring
Perhaps a bit lost in the conversation around the Kansas City Chiefs’ undefeated start — and their subsequent loss to the Buffalo Bills, in what we can all hope is a playoff preview — is the fact that the Detroit Lions, and not the Chiefs or Bills (or Eagles, Vikings or Ravens, etc.), are by far the best team in the NFL this season.
Detroit has been so good that, following their 52-6 destruction of Jacksonville on Sunday, the Lions’ current Simple Rating System (SRS) score of +16.0 is not only the best in the NFL, but it’s at least double that of every other team except for Buffalo (who are still pretty far back, at +9.2):
How good is a +16.0 SRS? Since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970,1 only two teams — the 2007 New England Patriots and the 1991 Washington Redskins — finished the season with a higher mark than the Lions have right now. Even the fabled 1985 Chicago Bears rank slightly lower!
Of course, it’s important to remember that we’re comparing a little over a half-season of Detroit football in 2024 with entire seasons from the past. It’s likely that the Lions’ performance will regress to the mean some before the end of the season, potentially knocking their place in history down a few pegs.
While we don’t have SRS ratings through each week of each season historically, we do have PPG differential — and the Lions’ +15.9 margin per game falls from No. 6 since 1970, if we compare it with full seasons from the past, to No. 11 if we just look at teams through their 10th game of the regular season.
(The 2006 Bears weren’t quite who we thought they were through 10 games, for instance.)
And that’s without even accounting for a franchise’s long-term track record, which is what systems like the Elo ratings aim to do. By Elo, the Lions are slight Super Bowl favorites (at 20 percent), but they are in a de facto tie with the Chiefs and Bills for the highest rating in the league, as both of those AFC rivals have been better than Detroit for a longer period of time.
However, there is little statistical doubt that this is the greatest Detroit Lions team of all time. With that huge blowout over Jacksonville, the 2024 edition pulled ahead of the 1954 Bobby Layne-led Lions for the highest peak Elo rating (1704) in the history of the franchise:
Last year’s Lions just missed the list, peaking at an Elo of 1613 after beating Tampa Bay in the Divisional playoffs. But this season, Detroit has achieved a new level of dominance across multiple different measures. Let’s see how far they can end up going.
🏈 Circle Your Calendars
As the 2024 NFL schedule approaches its final third, it’s time to revisit an old favorite of a conceit that I used earlier in the season: Looking at the most important games left on the calendar.
There are myriad ways to measure this. But my preferred method looks at the potential swing (for good or bad) in a team’s playoff odds — according to Elo’s simulations — depending on whether they win or lose, as weighted by how likely each outcome is.2
So for instance, Sunday afternoon’s game between the Cardinals and Seahawks has some serious playoff implications for both teams — and for Arizona in particular. If the Cardinals win, their playoff odds rise from 47.3% to 71.8%; if they lose, that figure falls to 30.1%. Since Arizona has a 41.2% chance of winning, the average absolute weighted change in their playoff odds is +/- 20.2%, the highest for any team in Week 12:
Here’s a table of all remaining 2024 regular-season games by that measure:
Of course, that’s just one way of looking at it. We could also look at the total absolute swing across both teams in a game depending on the outcome, weighted by the likelihood of those outcomes, to better capture the overall effect of a game on each participant:
From this perspective, Week 12’s Cardinals-Seahawks tilt is the second-most important remaining game on the calendar, trailing only Week 15’s matchup between the Broncos and Colts. The NFC West also just generally makes up a disproportionate number of the most crucial matchups from here on, which makes sense given that every team in that division is sandwiched between 25% and 50% playoff odds.
There are still other ways to calculate playoff leverage, including this cool approach we used to do at FiveThirtyEight that accounts for a game’s effect on teams who aren’t even playing in that matchup… but that’s another approach for another day. For now, get your 🍿 popcorn ready 🍿 for Seattle-Arizona and all of the other games this week that are guaranteed to move the playoff needle for the teams involved.
Filed under: NFL, Football Bytes
A good starting point for these schedule-adjusted metrics, because the two leagues didn’t play regular season games against each other before the merger, making it difficult to evaluate schedule strength across leagues
Ties are ignored for our purposes here.
I frequently (and recently regarding the NHL Capitals) speak here about how front office courage makes the difference in sports. Far too often, front offices are absurdly risk adverse, lack any creativity, rotely emulate whatever is trendy, and ultimately just try to stay within the herd and keep their jobs. This, despite the evidence that those courageous few that do break away from the herd are often the real winners.
Take the Detroit Lions.
Sure, the teeming millions have focused on how Dan Campbell was an unorthodox selection for head coach who was universally - and wrongly - panned by those same always behind the curve sports media industrial complex people. Or how the "awful" Jared Goff bridge quarterback deal with the Rams now looks a whole sweeter in Motor City than it did in 2022. Again, the Goff deal was universally viewed at the time as so awful that many in the media questioned the loyalties of new Detroit GM Brad Holmes. Could he be trying to help his old friend Les Snead and buddies in the LA front office win a Super Bowl by giving away Stafford? Well, no it turns out.
Those are easy to see. Observational layups. Instead, I want to focus on something more unusual. Something more indicative of real front office courage...the 2023 Draft. Detroit finished 2022 at 9-8 and missed the Playoffs for the 6th consecutive year. The Lions were interesting but there was nothing much to see here.
Surprisingly, they traded two highly performing assets - T.J. Hockenson and D'Andre Swift - for Draft capital. These were not two replacement level rotational players. To the contrary. They were two valuable young pieces on rookie deals in Ben Johnson's rapidly improving offense. A lot of articles were quickly penned around the question of "why the hell did Detroit just trade Hockenson and Swift?" and criticized Brad Holmes for apparently starting another disastrous rebuild.
What happened next was not just unexpected, but I believe historic…and led to where the Lions are today. Once again, the media ignored the story because nobody else in the herd was reporting on it.
Holmes immediately replaced Hockenson and Swift with two rookies - Jahmyr Gibbs and Sam LaPorta. In my more than 50 years of watching the NFL, I had never seen such transactions - trading away two higher level key young players and immediately replacing them with two untested Draft picks. Filling holes you just voluntarily made when you didn’t have to.
Both Gibbs and LaPorta were offensive players for an offense ranked 5th and not, as expected, defensive players for a 28th ranked defense. It was a daring but curious strategy to say the least for a team with many needs. In fact, the Gibbs selection was roundly criticized as a "way too early" pick at #12 when projected by the supposed Draft experts to be a later first round/early second round talent.
Despite team success in 2023, it was not entirely clear that Holmes' strategy had proven successful. Hockenson and Swift both had solid seasons. Gibbs and LaPorta had good ones too...but nothing to suggest that their additions were accretive to winning versus the other two players. That's now changed quite a bit this year.
While Swift remains solid, Hockenson has been hurt and both Gibbs and LaPorta now appear to have surpassed their predecessors in production while also being much cheaper. Whenever I catch a Lions game both Gibbs and LaPorta are portrayed as game changers for Detroit. Time has proven Brad Holmes and his unusual vision to be both bold and correct. His outstanding performance as GM goes way beyond these unusual transactions.
Yet, amidst all the Lions' success this year, here is what's bothersome to me. When it comes to Detroit leadership, all I hear about from the media is Dan Campbell and Ben Johnson. Nary a word about the real difference maker - Brad Holmes. Somehow, I know that if Howie Roseman, Brett Veach, Les Snead, or Brandon Beane made these same moves, we would hear about it ad nauseam as a purported "genius" playing strings like a virtuoso.
So why not Holmes?
It's an uncomfortable question and a profoundly disappointing one on so many dimensions if we're being honest with ourselves. It's time to take some of the focus off Campbell and Johnson and put it squarely on the guy who set the table for their dinner - Brad Holmes.
Thanks as always.