07-18-2023, 08:27 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-24-2023, 09:27 AM by H0PPY75. Edited 2 times in total.)
Hi everyone! I'm very sorry about releasing this so late, I've been having a very tough time irl recently and it's been a struggle to keep on top of things consistently. However I am fully committed to releasing this article each season, because maintaining EPA in this league is very important to me! Anyways, please enjoy the article and all the charts. Also please keep in mind that much of this was written in a sleep-deprived stupor. I'm sorry about that.
Season 42
(As with other charts to come, the x-axis and y-axis are not to scale.)
***Please remember that a positive EPA/play is good for an offense, and bad for a defense. Conversely, a negative EPA/play is good for a defense, and bad for an offense.***
It looks like the best overall teams this season are New York, Cape Town, Arizona, and Baltimore. Those four teams have, according to EPA, both the best offenses and defenses in the league (except for Cape Town whose defense is about on par with the good defenses in Austin and Berlin). The worst teams by record this season, New Orleans and Chicago, both have this futility reflected in EPA, with Chicago suffering a defense that was approximately as bad as the rancid tanking Honolulu defenses of S38 and S39. Colorado and San Jose round out the bottom four teams in the league. Orange County had a pretty miserable time moving the ball this season, but enjoyed an above average defense. Had they had the kind of luck that Honolulu had they could have been a playoff team, but instead they are (not) picking in the top 3. Speaking of Honolulu, they're firmly the worst playoff team this season, and are the easiest prediction to lose in the first round, especially to New York who has been phenomenal. In the NSFC, the two teams that came close to the playoffs but fell short, Yellowknife and Sarasota, were very similar in having fantastic, top-6 offenses but defenses bad enough to be on par with Colorado's. I recall that merely three seasons ago in S39 Yellowknife put up one of the greatest defensive seasons of all time, but sadly they have fallen far. The Copperheads would have been out of place in the playoffs among Arizona and New York had they made it, but not as out of place as Honolulu, who achieved what we might call a Mickey Mouse playoff spot. Expect a first round exit, just as you expected a first round exit for the Otters in S40.
Oh God, oh fuck. What's happening in Chicago? Why does their defense make the average running back look like prime Barry Sanders on steroids against them? Maybe NFSC running backs should get a penalty in awards this season for being allowed to get carries against Chicago twice in a season. Overall, though, it looks like running the ball continues to be very efficient around the league, given that literally every team enjoyed a positive EPA/rush, and only Cape Town and Arizona had a negative EPA/play on defense (remember that negative on defense is good). Sadly it looks like Colorado has the least efficient running season overall, which reflects their very low TPE at RB for the time being.
I have to say, given how skewed the rushing EPA chart was towards positive offense, positive defense, it's very pleasing to see the passing chart so balanced. what's interesting is that there seems to be a mild correlation between good passing defenses and good passing offenses. New York, for instance, enjoys extremely good passing efficiency but is also extremely good against the pass, while NOLA and CHI are very bad in the passing game, both on offense and defense. However there are no teams that have a good passing offense and a bad passing defense, or vise-versa—or at least no teams that fit that profile so extremely. I don't believe there's any meaning behind this correlation, except that perhaps the teams who have their quarterback and receivers at their peak will try to make sure their defense is in order, while teams without a good passing corps is less likely to be concerned with their passing defense, as they're not needing to win straight away. This is the top-tier analysis you're getting from me today. I'm sorry, I'm writing this on maybe two hours sleep in the last 48 hours.
Playoff Predictions
EPA firmly favors 4 of the playoff teams this season: NYS, AZ, CTC, and BAL. Who wins among those teams is hard to determine in a vacuum, so really it may be best to defer to home-field advantage in that case. However I'll take a shot at subverting that if I can. That means that New York over Honolulu is an easy choice, and that Cape Town over Berlin should be a good option as well. Now, in terms of safe predicting, I feel like voting for the 1-seed is almost always the correct move, as you have no guarantee that the 2/3 seed is even playing in the Championship game. So the smart TPE is going towards the one-seed. But I'm here for hot takes, so I'll say this: Baltimore and Cape Town are the two most efficient running teams in the league this season. We can assume that both teams will make ample usage of their RBs in their game. However, Cape Town has the best running defense in the league, while Baltimore has a fairly middling one. So we can expect Cape Town to have a meaningful edge in that respect. With the hypothetical Arizona/New York game, it's very hard to meaningfully separate them. Thus it is only wise to take the home team, Arizona, here. New York will enjoy an advantage in the passing game but Arizona has a similar advantage in the running game. In a Crash/Outlaws Ultimus we'd have to vote for Arizona because there's a very good chance that Cape Town won't even make the Ultimus, while Arizona has what is probably just better than a 50/50. So you can model your playoff predictions like this, if you like:
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(Rather than re-write this portion, I'll just add this part on. Honolulu beat New York, and Berlin beat Cape Town, so my predictions are utterly ruined. Whoops!)
Individual Charts
As with every season, the QB EPA/pass is a re-formatting of team EPA/pass, because nearly every team only has a single QB. With that in mind, it's very impressive that Blaine Falco managed to thwomp the competition in EPA/pass by such a huge margin. Truly it was a fantastic season for the Silverbacks QB. I am also quite proud of Wolfie McDummy Jr, who managed a positive season in S42, somehow, despite throwing a sizable quantity of interceptions returned for touchdowns.
This is my time to remind everyone of a bug that exists in my code. Should a player be traded mid-season, my chart will only count the player's time in their second team for EPA. However, it will still count the total number of attempts/targets in terms of qualifying that player to appear on the chart, so occasionally you'll have players showing extreme outlier EPA numbers, because the sample size is very low. There's no good way for me to fix this within the code with the tools I have available, but I can at least make manual calculations and tell you each player's actual EPA/play, should the chart be inaccurate. Among RBs, the Archipelago/Tolliver trade needs to be addressed:
Money Tolliver's actual EPA/rush: 0.1751286 (the chart is very unkind to him, in fact he is top-3 this season!)
Kumquat Archipelago's actual EPA/rush: 0.08530571084 (the chart is slightly over-valuing Archipelago)
Okay, here's a good example of what I was talking about. Eeeeeeee phenssta was traded to Cape Town and decided to be the most efficient receiver in the league for a couple weeks. So while he didn't have a ton of targets in this time, he is still put on the chart because we count the targets from his time in Colorado as well. Surely, with the Dumbest Dog throwing him the ball, he could not have been very successful. Let's do the calculations: phenssta's actual EPA/target is 0.5970916923. That's much much lower than the aberration in the chart, but it's still incredibly good, and leads all WRs in efficiency for the season. In fact, I think it's the best efficiency by a wide receiver since Luke Quick's monstrously efficient S37, just barely beating out Stinkwaters' S39 campaign. Meanwhile we also have to recalculate Erwin Kemp's efficiency: his actual EPA/target is 0.07370209091, which is sadly a bit unspectacular. Finally we have to calculate Frost's Calhoun's actual EPA/target, which is 0.1034731679—a tiny bit better than what he has on the chart! Overall I think this season was quite a bit better for wide receivers than last season, and there will be quite a bit of competition for All-Pro, which is nice!
Last season I mentioned that the days of Hogmally/Salem dominance was over. However when it came time for all-pro voting, they combined to win 1st-team all pro and 2nd-team all-pro, and the decision between the two came down to a tiebreaker. So clearly I was wrong. It's a good reminder that EPA/target is a bit finicky and should not be trusted so much. This season they'll probably combine for those two awards again, but they don't quite stand out in efficiency again (at least going by EPA/target). Simmons II leads the pack, but also just barely cracked my minimum threshold to appear on the chart. If I'm being honest I should probably drastically increase that threshold, but because this is a sim league for fun I don't want to leave anyone with significant usage off a chart, even if their presence makes my data very noisy.
Once again we have the Tolliver/Archipelago trade mucking things up. Surely Archipelago's receiving efficiency was not that good all season. Let's recalculate: it's 0.5286092667 EPA/target. Well, fuck. That's even better. It's fucking phenomenal. That's top-5 among wide receivers for the season, as a running back. Even if he was playing at wide receiver all season it'd be a remarkably efficient season. Excellent work! Sadly Tolliver is not so lucky. In Yellowknife he enjoyed great receiving efficiency, but in Baltimore he actually did so poorly that his receiving efficiency on the season was -0.08743832558 EPA/target. Not great, sadly! I imagine that Yellowknife is probably running strats/formations that let their wide receivers get plenty of receiving yards, because that team consistently produces great receiving RBs, and now we have evidence that RBs do better in the receiving game in Yellowknife.
Okay! Once again thanks for reading! Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the playoffs!
~Jenni