Prediction Review: What I Got Wrong

On Tuesday I looked back at the predictions I made prior to the season, identifying which of my expectations actually came to pass. It was a short and rather uninteresting post, digging through the scraps for anything remotely accurate. Today’s post was a lot easier to write, encompassing a small portion of the things I was wrong about this season.

Playoffs

I’m happy to say that I won’t have to spend much time on the AFC. I slipped up giving Denver the top overall seed and projecting them to make it to the Super Bowl, but until injuries derailed Peyton Manning this was very much a possibility. The only other glaring error I made was in choosing the Dolphins as the second wild card team over the Bengals. Miami disappointed down the stretch for the second year in a row, and Cincinnati managed to hold together better than I expected despite the loss of their two coordinators. Both teams are on opposite tracks however, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my prediction comes true a year down the road.

The NFC is a different story. I picked the Saints to finish in the top seed and to advance to the playoffs, a horrid error that I will address farther down. They were only one of the four teams that I predicted to make the playoffs that failed to do so. The other division winner I got wrong was Philadelphia, a ten win team that just missed out on the playoffs. I picked them over the other three teams in the NFC East because I thought they would have the best defense, a defense that turned out even better than I expected. But their offense was a major letdown, hurt by injuries along the line and at quarterback. Some early season luck kept them in the race, but by the end of the season it was very clear that they were the second best team in their division.

My two wild card picks were utter disasters in San Francisco and Chicago. Both teams were hurt early by injuries, and both teams were destroyed late by off the field turmoil. Neither team was as bad as their performance suggested, but they were still probably not playoff worthy teams. 

The two teams that made it in their place were two I expected to take a major step back this season. Arizona succeeded where I thought they would fail thanks to a brilliant coaching job by head coach Bruce Arians and defensive coordinator Todd Bowles, now the head coach of the Jets. Preseason injuries left me concerned that their defense wouldn’t be able to hold up, and this unit suffered only more injuries as the year went on. But they kept playing through, and even their disaster at quarterback couldn’t stop them from making it into the playoffs. Their season just goes to show how valuable coaching can be in the NFL. Teams like Chicago faced adversity and crumbled beneath it. The Cardinals seemed to grow stronger with each new obstacle thrown in front of them.

The final team to make the NFC playoffs was one I was really, really wrong about. I picked the Lions to finish last in the NFC North and to not even sniff the postseason. I expected their offense to fall off with the acquisition of head coach Jim Caldwell, and I wasn’t totally wrong. But their defense was a revelation, finally putting together the pieces of the dominant defensive line they’ve built over the past five seasons. How Teryl Austin isn’t a head coach is beyond me, but he’ll have his work cut out for him next year with the likely loss of Ndamukong Suh and the possible departure of Nick Fairley. He got excellent production out of the back seven, but it will be a different matter next season without the monsters controlling the game up front.

Coach Firings

Of the eight coaches I predicted would be fired, four remain with their teams. I touched on Marvin Lewis and Tom Coughlin earlier this week. They were risky choices that didn’t up panning out, but I wasn’t wrong in predicting anything other than how the people running the teams would respond. Both coaches could easily be out of a job now, and I don’t think either will hang around much longer.

The other two I missed were vastly different cases. I thought Jeff Fisher might lose his job in St Louis, but I wasn’t particularly surprised that they ended up sticking with him. His greatest skill is the ability to just hang around, miring in mediocrity not quite bad enough to earn the wrath of the fans or ownership. I don’t know when he’ll leave St Louis. I don’t know if he’ll leave St Louis. He’s like some unkillable movie monster, coming back year after year to lead his team to a 7-9 record.

The other coach I predicted would be fired was Jason Garrett, and I was not alone in this prediction. Everyone expected a miserable season from Dallas, and everyone expected Jerry Jones would let Garrett leave when his contract expired at the end of the year. But the Cowboys surprised everyone by winning the division on the strength of one of the best offenses in the league. The offensive success wasn’t a surprise, but the competence they found on defense was what I didn’t see coming. I expected this team to miss the playoffs thanks to a historically bad defense, and if I’d been told they would be just slightly below average I would have called them making the playoffs and Garrett keeping his job. The credit really goes to defensive coordinator Rod Marinelli, but Garrett deserves some recognition for making the smart decision to promote him this past offseason.

There were a few coach firings I didn’t see coming. John Fox caught everyone out of nowhere, and before the year no one expected Chicago and San Francisco to be as miserable as they were. Just missing the playoffs for these two teams probably wouldn’t have been enough to cost Marc Trestman and Jim Harbaugh their jobs. They needed true years from hell in order to justify these firings, and that was what they got. I still don’t agree with either decision, but I at least see the logic in them. That wasn’t something I would have expected at the beginning of the year.

Awards

Yeah, this was ugly. I predicted seven awards and didn’t come particularly close to getting any of them right. I did mention Aaron Rodgers as a contender for MVP and Offensive Player of the Year, including him among Drew Brees and Peyton Manning as the top contenders. Rodgers was the one I didn’t give the award to, choosing Brees as MVP and Manning as Offensive Player of the Year. Both of these quarterbacks had very good seasons, but the struggles of the Saints and Manning’s injury issues ruined any chance of them claiming these awards.

I was also wrong with my projection of Comeback Player of the Year. This is a difficult award to predict, requiring a lot of guesswork about how players will recover from injuries. I chose Geno Atkins over Julio Jones because I thought it would be easier to return at a position like defensive tackle than at wide receiver. I was wrong. Atkins was a shell of his former self for most of the season, while Jones was arguably the top receiver in the league.

There were a few other awards I got wrong, and they will be addressed later on. There is just one more I need to talk about here, and that is Defensive Rookie of the Year. I selected Ryan Shazier, a freak athlete who was slated to start in Pittsburgh from day one. He did, and he showed a lot of potential before suffering an injury in Week Three. When he came back late in the year he had trouble readjusting to a starting role, and his rookie year has to be considered a lost season. It would have been smarter to go with someone like Aaron Donald or Khalil Mack, both of whom I was high on prior to the season. But I thought that Shazier playing middle linebacker in Pittsburgh would draw more attention than those other two. Had he stayed healthy, this might have happened.

Team Specific

Tennessee: “(Bishop) Sankey is a reasonable pick for Offensive Rookie of the Year.”

I didn’t pick Sankey to win Offensive Rookie of the Year, but I thought he would be in the running. Coming out of college I saw an elusive and versatile running back with little in his way of claiming the starting role for the Titans. I expected him to contribute both as a runner and a receiver, and I expected him to pile up yards from scrimmage. But he never really found his way in Tennessee, stuck in a running back quagmire with Shonn Greene and Dexter McCluster. He ended up leading the team in rushing yards but still finished only twelfth among rookies in yards from scrimmage, never sniffing contention for the award.

Detroit: “(Eric) Ebron has the skills and the talent to make him a perfect fit for their offensive system.”

I still love Ebron’s talent, and I think he will eventually be a fantastic player. But his rookie year did very little to impress. Even as Detroit’s offense struggled he couldn’t find his way onto the field, and when he was on the field he had issues with blocking (as expected) and drops (less expected.) He ended the year with only 25 receptions for 248 yards and a single touchdown. Part of the blame has to go to head coach Jim Caldwell, who managed to kill one of the league’s most dangerous offenses even more effectively than he did Baltimore’s in 2013. It will take Ebron some time and possibly a coaching change, but his pure ability will emerge sooner or later.

New England: “Maybe the decline of age that everyone has been expecting from Peyton Manning has caught Tom Brady first.”

Right around Week Four this seemed like a good prediction. A few months later, Tom Brady is playing in his sixth Super Bowl while Peyton Manning is mulling retirement. Brady still isn’t putting up the earth shattering numbers he had three or four years ago, and I still think it has to do with something more than just the receiving talent that surrounds him. Age is slowly catching up with him, but he and the Patriots coaching staff are smart enough to know how to minimize his shortcomings, something the Broncos couldn’t figure out how to do when Manning suffered his injuries.

Baltimore: “Most of those players are gone now—Suggs and Ngata are still around, but they are shells of their former selves—and they’ve had little success finding their replacements up front.

By the end of the year Baltimore’s secondary was a disaster, but they still managed to make a short playoff run thanks to the strength of their front seven, which I thought would be the weakness of their defense. Both Suggs and Ngata had nice bounceback seasons, and they got better than expected contributions from young players like Pernell McPhee and CJ Mosley. But the best player in their front this year was Elvis Dumervil, someone I consistently underrate and occasionally even forget about. I didn’t think it was a huge deal when he escaped Denver and ended up in Baltimore a couple offseasons ago, but now I find myself wondering how the landscape of the league would be different if not for the bizarre technical difficulties that led to his release.

Seattle: “There have to be concerns about a running back in his late twenties who has taken as much of a pounding as (Marshawn) Lynch has.”

I thought Seattle’s running game would fall off this year like San Francisco’s did. Seattle had the best running offense in the league by DVOA. I’m so, so stupid.

The Saints

Now we come to it, the heart and soul of everything I was wrong about. When I made my prediction at the beginning of the year, I went all in on New Orleans. It wasn’t an actively conscious decision. I thought they would be very successful this year, and I thought that their success would lead to a playoff berth and awards recognition. When I got to the end of my predictions and looked over the choices I made, I realized that I had chosen the Saints for just about everything. I had no problem with this at the time.

Here is the list of everything I projected for the Saints, everything I got wrong: NFC South title, top overall seed in the NFC, berth in the Super Bowl, MVP for Drew Brees, Coach of the Year for Sean Payton, Offensive Rookie of the Year for Brandin Cooks, and—most wretchedly wrong of all—Defensive Player of the Year for Kenny Vaccaro.

Hindsight makes everyone look bad, but my prediction of the Saints season reached another level of idiocy and incompetence. The Saints finished the year 7-9, and none of their players or coaches will sniff an end of year award. It was a hellish season of misery for all their fans, but I think the greatest suffering was done by my predictions.

The dropoff in the team’s performance was shocking, but in retrospect it probably shouldn’t have been. The Saints have had a prolific offense ever since Brees and Payton arrived in town, and the issue over the years has always been on defense. Last season they put together a surprisingly strong performance on that side of the ball, and I expected them to only get better this year, an expectation I now realize was built on faulty logic. When units make as massive a jump as the Saints defense from 2012 to 2013, they usually regress the following year. And as I wrote about earlier this season, defensive performance is much less stable than offensive. The Saints defense was not as good as it looked last season, and it was not in position to take the next step I expected.

This led to the most glaring error among all my predictions. Defensive Player of the Year was one of the most difficult awards to predict, and in the end I made the completely wrong decision. I strongly considered going with JJ Watt but decided it was boring to just pick the league’s best defensive player to win the award. That’s mildly defendable, but the decision to choose Vaccaro over him is not. My profoundly stupid logic was that the award had been won the previous two seasons by a second year player taking a massive leap, and as I expected the Saints defense to improve drastically it seemed reasonable to choose Vaccaro as the player to do so this year. By the end of the season Vaccaro had been benched and Watt had run away with the award. When I make predictions next year, I’ll probably be smart enough just to choose the best player.

The other awards were bad as well, but they are at least slightly defensible. MVP is the one category that was somewhat close. If the rest of the team hadn’t been awful, Brees might have had a shot. He didn’t perform at the same high level he normally does, but his stats look worse than his performance because he was often forced to take risks he normally wouldn’t because of game situations. Better defensive performances would have allowed him to front run like other top quarterbacks, and his numbers would have come close to matching Rodgers’s

Sean Payton as Coach of the Year was kind of a throw in, an attempt to pick an award that can be pretty much random. The real mistake was choosing Brandin Cooks as Offensive Rookie of the Year. Everyone loved Cooks coming into this season, seeing his as the perfect situation for a rookie receiver. A great quarterback, a smart coach who has shown the ability to make the most out of unique players, and a skillset that transitions well to the league. But Cooks never really took off, struggling to find a role before going down to a season ending injury. The actual Offensive Rookie of the Year will likely be Odell Beckham, who I was plenty wrong about as well.

This is the incredible thing about sports. I know more about the NFL than any reasonable person should. I watch hundreds of hours of football every year, and I spend even more time reading other people’s commentary about it. Yet when I made my predictions for the upcoming season, the only thing they served to do was make me look stupid. I’m sure I’ll make more predictions next year, and I’m sure I’ll get plenty of them wrong as well. I can’t wait to see how the 2015 season proves that I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.