Playoff Stakes

With three weeks left to go in the NFL regular season, we have reached the crucial stretch where the final spots in the playoffs are decided. After last night’s game four teams have clinched a playoff spot (the Rams, Chiefs, Chargers, and Saints), while the Bills, Jaguars, Jets, Raiders, Cardinals, and 49ers have been eliminated. Astonishingly, that means there are still 22 teams competing for the final eight playoff spots. Most of them will go home disappointed in three weeks’ time, while the others will stay alive for the ultimate prize.

Or will they? The common belief is that the NFL playoffs are a total crapshoot, a single elimination tournaments where a team just needs to get hot at the right time to run off a winning streak and claim the title. We saw this for three straight years at the beginning of the decade, when a pair of four seeds and a six seed were crowned champions. All you need is another Eli Manning or Joe Flacco type run, and your team can go from scraping into the playoffs to hoisting the Lombardi trophy.

Of course, Baltimore’s Super Bowl title was six years ago, and since then things have swung in a different direction. Over the past five years in the playoffs home teams are a combined 35-15 (not counting the rather meaningless designation of home versus away in the Super Bowl). Nine out of the ten Super Bowl participants over that stretch have been the team with the best record in their conference that year. The only time a top seed fell before the Super Bowl was Dallas in 2016, and in that case the NFC was represented by the lowly second seeded Falcons.

That’s right. Each of the past five Super Bowl winners had home field advantage up to that point, and every runner up had earned at the very least a first round bye. The NFL playoffs have been shockingly devoid of upsets (discounting whatever you thought of the wounded but still top ranked Eagles a year ago), and right now it seems like the league has swung towards the best teams winning on any given day.

There are 26 teams left alive right now, but how many of them have realistic Super Bowl hopes? The four I mentioned as already clinching a playoff spot. The Patriots, because they’re the Patriots. I suppose I’ll throw the Bears in there as well, since they did just beat the Rams, though things will undoubtedly go different if that game is replayed in Los Angeles. And I guess I’ll grab Houston as well in the AFC. Not that I think they have a chance to actually win, but they did just lose their first game since September.

On the other side, I won’t waste time talking about the teams with less than a five percent chance of making the playoffs (according to 538’s playoff probabilities). The Falcons, Bengals, Giants, Browns, Buccaneers, Packers, Lions, and Broncos are all but dead at this point, and right now they should be focusing on getting quality tape put together so they have something to show heading into next season. I’m also going to exclude the Redskins, even though they mathematically still have a 10 percent chance of making the playoffs, because with Mark Sanchez and Josh Johnson at quarterback they are more or less dead in the water.

That still leaves ten teams fighting for five chances, most of which will end up wiped off the board quickly when the actual playoffs roll around. So the question remains, what is the point of this? What do they have to gain, lose, or prove over the final three weeks and their abbreviated playoff runs, assuming the goal is to come back in the next few years with an actual chance at winning the Super Bowl?

(Yes, I am aware that me writing this just about guarantees that one of these teams will break the trend. No, I don’t need to hear snide comments when it happens.)

Dallas Cowboys

We’ll start with a team that has more or less already locked up a playoff spot. A few weeks ago that statement would have seemed absurd, but the Cowboys turned it on just as the Redskins and the Eagles fell to pieces. Most of the credit has gone to the acquisition of Amari Cooper, but the biggest factor has been the performance of their defense, led by young linebackers Jaylon Smith and Leighton Vander Esch.

This team has turned around, but the problems that plagued them early in the season are still lurking beneath the surface. We don’t know if Dak Prescott is the long term answer at quarterback, and he will enter 2019 on the last year of his contract. Jason Garrett is still a problem at head coach, and his continued presence may depend on how they finish 2018. If they continue strong into the playoffs, he will likely be back. But if they limp down the stretch and put up little fight in an early round exit, the Cowboys may come to the correct conclusion that it is time to move on.

Seattle Seahawks

Seattle has also more or less locked up their place in the postseason after shutting down Minnesota on Monday night. Bouncing back after disassembling the core that won them a Super Bowl, they have rebuilt themselves around a dangerous pass rush and a versatile rushing attack. Their offensive line has improved significantly with the absence of coach Tom Cable, and life has gotten much easier for Russell Wilson after he was forced to single handedly keep the offense afloat last season.

Still, this team needs to prove that they have what it takes to compete at the level they were at three years ago. They’ve won so far by controlling games on the ground against mediocre opponents, but once they reach the postseason they will face a much different challenge. Can their young secondary hold up against a top notch quarterback? Can their offense function if they fall behind and can’t trust their running game and defense? Seattle is a good team, but they have yet to prove themselves against any real challenge.

Pittsburgh Steelers

Three straight embarrassing losses have turned the Steelers from AFC contenders into a team fighting for their playoff lives. Despite outplaying their opponents in each of these games, the Steelers lost in the last minute against teams they should have beaten. Most of the blame for this is deservedly falling on the coaching staff. I’ve been a defender of Mike Tomlin for years, but his in-game performance this year has been brutal to witness.

The Steelers haven’t fired a coach in 50 years, but with games remaining against both the Patriots and the Saints they have a very difficult path to the playoffs, and if they fall short thanks to their second half collapse they are going to need to look long and hard at the leadership of this team. The Steelers have been built to compete for a championship for several years now, and they seem to fall short for the same reasons every year. At a certain point when a team is making the same mistakes over and over, a drastic change might need to be made, and Tomlin needs a strong finish to the season to prove that he is still the guy they have believed he is for the past decade.

Minnesota Vikings

The final few games will be a referendum on Kirk Cousins. This offense has fallen apart over the past few weeks, and most of the blame deserves to go to the quarterback. But how much of this is his fault, and how much is the situation he finds himself in? After firing offensive coordinator John DeFillipo this week, the final three regular season games will give them a chance to evaluate Kevin Stefanski, a respected assistant who was considered a hot coordinator prospect even before his promotion this week. Any tick up in performance will likely be credited to him, and will give them some clarity on that side of the ball headed into the offseason.

This is a team built around a three year window that lines up with the contract they signed with Cousins. They are going to have to decide this offseason how aggressively they want to pursue this window. How much future flexibility are they willing to sacrifice for a roster built around a quarterback who likely isn’t championship caliber? Do they perhaps surrender future draft picks to try to improve the offensive line in front of him, or do they keep those in their back pocket, in case they have to look at adding someone from a 2020 quarterback class that is looking promising?

Baltimore Ravens

Baltimore is at a crucial turning point. For years they have floated around the middle of the league thanks to a strong defense that carried a mediocre offense, and now they are faced with a choice of either trying to maintain that strategy or tear it down and start all over. The Lamar Jackson era is under way, and this offseason will give them a chance to go all in on building around his unique talents, if they choose to take it. A playoff berth will likely mean more of the same from them, but if they falter over the final three games, I could see their new front office deciding to start from scratch, including parting ways with long time coach John Harbaugh.

Tennessee Titans

Somehow we are almost through the fourth season of Marcus Mariota and we still don’t know whether he is the long term answer for Tennessee. They have failed at every attempt to build talent around him on offense, and yet they will undoubtedly try again this offseason, as they bring him back on the expensive fifth year option of his contract. They should have spent this year experimenting with everything they could manage on offense, to see what works and what doesn’t, and the fact that they haven’t is an indictment of their realistic goals. This team won a playoff game a year ago, but they should have known from the start of the season that they weren’t ready to compete in the AFC. The first year of the Mike Vrabel era has been mostly wasted, and they should do what they can over the final few weeks to see what if anything they can learn to help their offense in the future.

Indianapolis Colts

The Colts have come on strong as the season has progressed thanks to a developing young core. This is a roster in the midst of a total overhaul, and the final few games will give them a chance to evaluate where they are at. Obviously players like Quenton Nelson and Darius Leonard are going to be stars for years to come, but it’s worth seeing what other young pieces are going to stick around. Do they have something real in Marlon Mack and Eric Ebron, or are their strong 2018 seasons just flashes in the pan, likely to regress if the Colts don’t find more capable replacements?

Miami Dolphins

This team does not seem like they should be as good as their record. The Dolphins have managed explosive gains in the passing game all year long, and they have generated a lot of turnovers from the back end of their defense, but outside of that this team is fairly mediocre. All the advanced metrics scream for regression next year, and the final stretch of games will determine whether they delude themselves into believing they are capable of more heading into next year. If they finish strong and scratch their way into the playoffs, they could make the mistake of investing big in a core that isn’t really competitive. If however the regression catches up to them before the season ends, they may enter the offseason with a full understanding of how much work remains ahead of them to fix this roster.

Philadelphia Eagles

With Carson Wentz likely done for the year and the secondary still in shambles, it’s difficult to see any upside for the defending Super Bowl champions. The playoffs will be a difficult reach, and even if they do make it they will face a much more difficult road this year than last, when they had the comfort of a first round bye and two games at home. So for a team that succeeded last year mostly through creativity, they might as well get weird down the stretch. Mix up their coverages, see if their young cornerbacks can do any better in a different scheme. Dig deep into their bench, and figure out if they have anyone else capable of contributing towards what will hopefully be a bounceback 2019.

Carolina Panthers

A promising start to the season has fallen to pieces in front of the Panthers, and now they face a sharp uphill road to the playoffs, likely needing to win out even with two of their final three against the Saints. Their offense has gone belly up after an explosive start to the season, and over their remaining games they need to identify what the issue is. Is it just an injury to Cam Newton that has sapped his accuracy and effectiveness? Or have teams caught onto the changes in scheme Norv Turner made in his year off from football? The playoffs are likely out of reach, but they can come up with a plan for the offseason that will prevent the same sort of collapse from happening next year.

The US Government isn't the Only Place that Spends too Much on Defense

Defense wins championships. It’s an adage almost as old as the game of football itself, and one most reasonable fans have long since grown sick of. The basic idea is that while offense produces all the stats and all the stars, ultimately the defensive side of the ball is just as, if not more, important to actually winning football games.

This belief has become even harder to back up as league rules and schemes have shifted more heavily in favor of the offense over the past twenty years. But it saw a resurgence last year, as scoring fell across the league and the final four was represented by teams quarterbacked by Case Keenum, Nick Foles, and Blake Bortles, with Foles’s Eagles ultimately winning the Super Bowl.

Less than a year later, it is becoming increasingly clear how much of an outlier the 2017 season was. Scoring has leapt again across the league to the highest level in history, and the teams at the top of the league are the teams that can score a lot of points. The three highest scoring teams in the league are the Rams, Chiefs, and Saints, who also happen to be the teams with the three best records in the league.

More glaring is what happened to the teams that were in the championship round a year ago. The Vikings, Eagles, and Jaguars were a sign of the resurgence of defense, and a year later they are three of the most disappointing teams in the league. Minnesota is clinging desperately to a playoff spot, while both Philadelphia and Jacksonville are on the outside looking in. All three teams returned essentially the same core on the defensive side of the ball, and two of the three are still playing defense at a high level, with Minnesota and Jacksonville still in the top 10 of defensive DVOA. And yet, they haven’t won games in the way they did a season ago.

This inconsistency among defensive teams is hardly a revelation. A couple years ago I looked at offensive and defensive performance from year to year, and I found that offensive DVOA was more than twice as sticky as defensive from one year to the next. And since then we have only gotten more anecdotal evidence, perhaps as best explained by the past three years of the New York Giants.

During the 2016 offseason the Giants went all out in free agency on the defensive side of the ball, signing Janoris Jenkins, Damon Harrison, and Olivier Vernon to massive long term deals. And in the immediate aftermath, it looked like this was an absolutely brilliant decision. New York’s defense leapt to the top of the league in 2016, carrying the team to a playoff berth. Even after a first round exit, they were feeling pretty good about where their team was at, with the core of an elite defense locked up for years to come.

Since then they have won a total of seven games. Not only has their record fallen off a cliff, their defense has as well. After finishing second in defensive DVOA in 2016, they have been in the bottom ten each of the past two years, and they have already started carving up the expensive core of their defense to start over. The one year jump in defensive performance was not sustainable, and their record has reflected that.

The Giants were the clearest example of the pitfalls of investing heavily on the defensive side of the ball, at least until this year. We have a new contender now in Jacksonville, a team that dedicated incredible resources in both the draft and free agency towards building their defense. A year ago this allowed them to cover the blemishes at quarterback, getting out to early leads and salting the game away with an aggressive ball-hawking defense and a physical running game. In 2018 however, the turnovers haven’t been quite as present on defense, they haven’t had the same luck jumping out to early leads, and they have been forced to rely more on Blake Bortles, with predictably disastrous results.

It is still possible to win games through a strong defense and running game. We saw an example of this early in the year, when the Washington Redskins jumped to the head of the NFC East on the back of Adrian Peterson and an emerging defensive line. Before the injury to Alex Smith they were 6-3, and in those nine games they did not experience a single lead change. When they scored first, they held on to the lead until the end of the game. When the other team scored first, they were unable to come back.

Playing this style gives an incredibly small margin of error, which is why it is unsurprising when situations reverse from one year to the next. It’s typical to look for regression by teams that outperform in tight contests (such as Minnesota last year), but for a team like Jacksonville even blowout victories can easily be swung the other way by a change in circumstances early in the game. Playing with a lead and playing from behind are very different situations, even in the first half when there should be plenty of time to overcome any deficit.

The volatility of investing in the defensive side of the ball can be both a positive and a negative thing. For a team looking for a jump like the 2016 Giants or the 2017 Jaguars, it’s  easier to turn things around by loading up on talent defensively. But these jumps are often followed up by equally drastic falls, and investing in offense provides a much longer competitive window.

This is my intuition, and I wanted to find some way to quantify the concept of investment. There are two major ways that teams invest in players, either through the draft or with big contracts handed out to veterans. (They also invest in trades, but these are rarer and more complicated to track and quantify, so I ignored them).

I calculated the percentage of investment towards offense and defense for both of these categories. For the draft I looked at the last four years—the length of rookie contracts—and I calculated the total draft value given to each side of the ball using Chase Stuart’s draft value model. For spending I looked at a team’s entire roster and took the sum of the average annual value for each player’s contracts (using this rather than cap hit, because contracts are often structured with weird spikes and drops in cap value).

This provided the following table of percentage invested on the offensive side of the ball. A higher number means more investment in offense, while a lower number shows a team has been defense focused in building their roster.

	Draft	Money	Average
LAR	85%	47%	66%
SEA	53%	65%	59%
NYG	56%	57%	57%
IND	45%	68%	57%
CLE	49%	63%	56%
PHI	55%	56%	56%
OAK	40%	70%	55%
BAL	56%	52%	54%
ARI	54%	53%	53%
HOU	62%	44%	53%
DET	55%	50%	53%
TAM	53%	52%	52%
CIN	55%	48%	51%
TEN	60%	43%	51%
LAC	46%	56%	51%
CHI	56%	46%	51%
CAR	50%	49%	50%
NWE	46%	53%	50%
WAS	45%	54%	50%
ATL	30%	65%	47%
MIN	47%	47%	47%
DAL	37%	57%	47%
PIT	36%	58%	47%
DEN	54%	38%	46%
NYJ	43%	49%	46%
KAN	40%	51%	46%
GNB	25%	66%	45%
NOR	33%	57%	45%
MIA	48%	41%	45%
SFO	35%	52%	44%
BUF	41%	44%	43%
JAX	41%	41%	41%

The names at the very top and very bottom of the list immediately jump out. I’ve already discussed the Jaguars at length, and it isn’t a surprise to see them leading the field in defensive investment. Even after handing out big contracts this offseason to Andrew Norwell, Donte Moncrief, and Bortles, the sheer amount they’ve given to Malik Jackson, Calais Campbell, and AJ Bouye over the past few years continues to drag them down.

On the other side, it is equally unsurprising to see one of the league’s best offenses sitting at the top. The Rams have been extremely aggressive about paying talent on the offensive side of the ball, adding veterans Andrew Whitworth and Brandin Cooks, as well as giving a big extension to Todd Gurley. If anything this number actually undersells how heavily they have invested on that side of the ball, as it doesn’t include the first round pick they traded for Cooks or the premium they paid to move up and select Jared Goff (the same can also be said about Philadelphia, Kansas City, Houston, the Jets, and to a lesser extent Chicago).

Look deeper in the list and some other trends start to emerge. Seattle, Indianapolis, and Cleveland are all in the top five of offensive investment, and they have all exceeded expectations and taken major steps forward as the season has gone along. While at the bottom, teams like Buffalo, San Francisco, and Miami are fighting just to stay afloat with defense oriented teams. Buffalo in particular is utterly devoid of talent on the offensive side, and even after moving up into the top ten to draft Josh Allen they are facing a major uphill climb just to reach acceptable in that phase of the game.

There are a couple of notable exceptions that stand out at the bottom of the list. Both New Orleans and Pittsburgh are among the most defensive oriented spenders in the league, and both are also among the top teams in their respective conference. They are very similar stories to each other, teams led by Hall of Fame quarterbacks who have spent the past five years desperately trying to scrape together basic competence on the defensive side of the ball, with very mixed success. But the strength at quarterback has allowed them to elevate their offenses despite an absence of investment there, giving them a chance to win even while their roster construction leaves something to be desired.

Of course, having a Hall of Fame quarterback is easier said than done, and it is hardly a foolproof strategy. Green Bay is also in the bottom ten of offensive investment, and it has been glaringly obvious this year as they have been forced to turn to low drafted rookies just to keep their passing attack afloat. Where the Steelers and Saints have excelled finding star skill position players in the later rounds of the draft (JuJu Smith-Schuster, James Conner, Michael Thomas, and Alvin Kamara are all still on rookie contracts), the Packers have left their offense completely barren of talent to work with.

One of the more fascinating teams on this list is Chicago. At first glance you’d assume they would be in a similar position to Jacksonville last year or the Giants two seasons ago. They’ve run out to a surprise lead in the NFC North thanks to the best defense in football, the sort of performance that just screams regression for next year. They have spent top ten selections on Leonard Floyd and Roquan Smith in the past three years, and while this analysis doesn’t capture the massive package of draft picks they sent to the Raiders for Khalil Mack, it does include the record breaking contract they signed him to prior to the season.

And yet, the Bears sit squarely in the middle of the pack in terms of offensive investment. They have been just as dedicated to building that side of the ball, and while the results haven’t quite showed up yet, there is still a lot of potential in Mitchell Trubisky, Allen Robinson, and the other players on this unit. When things inevitably regress on their defense (notably, when Eddie Jackson stops scoring touchdowns in every game), there is a chance the offense can step forward and pick up the slack.

Am I certain this is going to happen? No, I’m not. Right now Chicago’s offense is merely average, and it is more difficult to take a jump on that side of the ball than on defense. There is still a very real chance that this season is a flash in the pan for them rather than the first sign of sustained success, and among the young teams at the top of the league I would take the futures of the Rams or the Chiefs over the Bears in a heartbeat, especially as they are left with little money and few draft picks to truly try to improve their offense. Only time will tell whether they can continue to win as a defense first team, or if they will fall back to Earth like so many others have done before them.