Advanced stats love the Cowboys offense, but it’s not enough to keep them in the top tier of the NFL heading into Week 13
The Cowboys attempt to slay the behemoth that is the 2019 New England Patriots defense was denied by miserable weather, but they’re still hanging around the top teams in the league in many advanced statistical categories.
Even after a dismal 9-point day in Foxborough, the offense remains better than every team not named the Baltimore Ravens in the NFL by most expected points models.
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.
This week, the power ranks look a bit different than previous iterations because this time they include opponent adjustments. We all know the Patriots have an elite defense, but it’s worth factoring in the fact that they’ve played one of the easiest schedules in the NFL up to this point in the season. When we factor these in, a new AFC team takes over the top spot, while another gets nothing but a precipitous fall.
For the first time since Week 2, New England falls out of the number one spot, in both raw EPA rank and opponent adjusted rank. If you squint hard enough (and ignore San Francisco and Baltimore’s huge days) you can see it as a consolation prize for the Cowboys. At least they knocked the top team down a peg.
The Ravens, the analytical darlings of the NFL, have taken over as the best team in the league by EPA. They’ve now defeated the two reigning conference champions by a combined score of 82-26. If you’ve watched any of their past five games, you don’t need more advanced stats to tell you how good they are. Just know that the stats do back it up.
The Chiefs leap-frogged over Dallas and Minnesota after applying opponent adjustments. Their four losses have all come against teams ranked in the top half of the league by adjusted EPA differential. Patrick Mahomes and the passing offense that lit the world on fire in 2018 has shown very little regression and still ranks third in the NFL behind Baltimore and Dallas.
If we exclude scrambles, the best passing offense in the league by total EPA is the Dallas Cowboys. No player in football has put his team in better position to score this season than Dak Prescott. Even after a poor game in even poorer weather, Prescott and the Cowboys remain an elite passing attack in 2019.
The biggest loser in these new and improved ranks is the Buffalo Bills. The Bills, ranked 10th last week by raw EPA differential, fell all the way to 22nd this week with opponent adjustments added. They would have been 26th had they not come away with a double-digit victory over Denver. While Buffalo still holds an 8-3 record and a two game lead in the wild card race, they’re not yet a shoe-in for the playoffs. After the Thanksgiving game against Dallas, they’ll face Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and New England, the toughest four game stretch of their season by far.
The teams with the biggest bumps in EPA differential by adding opponent adjustments are the Arizona Cardinals and the Cleveland Browns. The Cardinals two tight games against San Francisco were undoubtedly helpful, while the Browns got a big boost from beating the Ravens.
Let’s dig a bit deeper into how offenses are faring after Week 12 by splitting their total EPA into passing and rushing EPA.
Arizona sticks out as the second best rushing team by EPA, but don’t let it get lost that this team is also above average in the passing game, if only just barely. On the other side, the Steelers jump out as one of the worst offenses in the NFL in both passing and rushing. That Pittsburgh defense deserves a ton of credit for keeping their mediocre offense in the playoff hunt.
Baltimore is playing another sport (QB scrambles are included in dropback EPA here), but Dallas comes real close to catching their passing production while also maintaining above average rushing success. They may only have a one-game lead in the division, but the reason they are still heavily favored (65% vs Philadelphia’s 35% chances to win NFC East) is quite visible here. They’re the class of the NFC East.
The Cowboys will look to prove that they belong in the discussion of NFC contenders against the perhaps overrated, yet still 8-3 Bills on Thursday. Philadelphia gets the first of an extremely soft final five games when they head to Miami on Sunday, making a Dallas win all the more important in this close divisional race.
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