Cowboys once again face a tough defense, a formula that has not been kind to them in recent weeks.
The Cowboys get the extremely rare, Thursday-night-game-with-a-full-week-of-rest tonight. Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott will face a Bears defense that while not as historically good as it was a year ago, still ranks as a top-5 defense by most metrics. Which way will the chips fall in this one?
Last week, I discussed how we can use advanced stats, like expected points, to predict NFL games. Expected Points, the foundation of many analytical arguments, uses data from previous NFL seasons to determine how many points a team is likely to come away with on a given play based on down, distance, time remaining, and field position. The difference in expected points at the start of a play and expected points at the end is referred to as expected points added, or EPA.
A play with a positive EPA means it put the offense in a better position to score, while negative EPA implies the offense is in a worse position.
Adding in opponent adjustments, and slight modifications for starting quarterback, I shot out some predictions for every NFL game in Week 13. My model went 8-8. That’s not great, but this model can’t be the only one that didn’t predict all three of Miami, Washington, and Cincinnati would come away with a victory.
So let’s run it again for the NFC East in Week 14.
We’ve got some extremely heavy favorites (even more so than last week), so let’s go through this a bit.
First off, Dallas comes out as 8-point favorites over Chicago. The Cowboys offense has graded consistently well all season by most advanced metrics, including my own adjusted EPA, Football Outsiders’ DVOA, and Ben Baldwin’s EPA+CPOE metric that loved Dak Prescott so much he actually named it DAKOTA.
But the fact is that their last three losses have come against good defenses (Buffalo, New England, Minnesota) and they face another good defense tonight.
Chicago is one of just three teams (San Francisco, Pittsburgh being the others) that ranks in the top-10 in both pass and run defense.
While it’s encouraging that the Cowboys offense seems to continually grade well after adjusting for these tough defenses, the fact is it doesn’t matter unless they can actually win against a tough defense. On the bright side, Mitchell Trubisky has been frankly awful this season.
The only teams with a worse passing offense than the Bears are the four teams slated to pick at the top of the 2020 NFL draft and the New York Jets. This is a good chance for the Dallas defense to grow into form and ensure the offense doesn’t need to put up a ton of points.
Moving on to Sunday’s games, the Eagles are nearly double-digit favorites for the second week in a row. Last week they were 10-point favorites over Miami and still somehow lost. The reason that doesn’t change the line in Week 14 too much is because using the whole season is much more predictive than just using the previous game. Still, we’ve seen that being a huge favorite does not guarantee a win, so perhaps Eli Manning and company will take down Philadelphia and keep the division firmly in the hands of the Cowboys for another week.
And then there’s Washington. Washington won their third game of the year behind a ridiculously efficient game from Derrius Guice. That doesn’t change much for my model, which still doesn’t believe in Dwayne Haskins this year. His 13-of-25, 147-yard performance against the Panthers didn’t do much to change that. Meanwhile the Packers have the sixth-ranked offense by adjusted EPA, and a league-average defense that should be enough to hold down a Washington offense that grades out worse than every other team in the NFL save the New York Jets.
Of course, there is the small wrinkle that Green Bay has the worst run defense in the league by a pretty wide margin.
I can’t in good conscience predict an upset here (even Vegas has this as a 13-point spread) but if I were looking for a way for it to happen, it would be on the back of another big day from Guice.
The two teams with legitimate chances at winning the division are favored by a full touchdown once again in Week 14. While that didn’t work out at all last week, we should still be confident in not only Dallas’ ability to win this one, but the necessity of a win in order to maintain a division lead over the Eagles.
Cowboys by eight. Please feel free to roast me on twitter if I’m wrong again.
