Welcome to Week 5 of Deconstructing the Vegas Betting Lines. The Week 1 article has all you need to know about methodology, but here are the Cliff’s Notes:
- We’re breaking the implied team total into four scoring types — passing, rushing, kicking, and defensive/special teams scores (i.e. returns and safeties).
- To do this, we’re leveraging the rates at which teams score their points and their opposing defenses concede them in each phase of the game.
- There are two calculation methods — one averages the offensive and defensive rates, and the other squares, combines, and square roots the differences of the rates from the league mean. The latter method uses the principles of standard deviation to emphasize rates further from the mean.
As with every analysis, it’s great to get more data each week. This week, we’ll use solely 2017 data for the first time this season. We’re heading into the middle part of the year, where this analysis can really provide an edge.
As always, consult the NFL homepage for more information on individual matchups that stand out. Let’s jump into the Week 5 deconstructions:
Passing Scoring and Notes
2016 League Average Pass TD Points Rate: 40.5 percent
2017 League Average Pass TD Points Rate: 40.6 percent
Note: Lines pulled from Sports Insights on October 7.
Aaron Rodgers and the Packers stand out well above the field. They’ve scored the second-highest percentage of points via passing touchdowns; their opponent, the Cowboys, have conceded them at a rate about nine percentage points above league average, sixth among defenses. Matthew Freedman has discussed why Rodgers is the lone top-tier quarterback this week, and Ian Hartitz explained why the Packers wide receivers are in a good spot facing the Cowboys secondary.
Jordy Nelson has always scored touchdowns at a high rate, 8.8 percent of his career targets. Thus far in 2017, he’s at 20.8 percent. Randall Cobb is a bargain on FanDuel relative to DraftKings and is my favorite option in the group. He had both a touchdown and a 36-yard reception called back on questionable offensive pass interference penalties back in Week 2 and then missed a game and a half to injury, so his year-to-date production isn’t a great representation of how he’s looked. All the passing game options are expected to carry decent-to-high ownership and Davante Adams seems likely to play having cleared the league’s concussion protocol.
The Giants continue to pop in this analysis, largely because they have posted just one rushing touchdown on the year (which came from Eli Manning last week). The Chargers have given up passing points at a rate slightly below league average and the Giants’ implied total isn’t anything to write home about, so you have to decide whether you buy into their early-season offensive scoring trends.
Miami is the low-total offense I’m interested in, as both their offense and the Titans’ defense have posted high rates of passing scoring. The Dolphins’ top three wide receivers — Jarvis Landry, DeVante Parker, and Kenny Stills — have all played 88 percent or more of the snaps in each of their three games. That’s an extreme trend; if we move the cutoff to 80 percent in each of the past three weeks, Dallas is still the only other team with three skill position players to hit the mark each week (Ezekiel Elliott, Dez Bryant, and Jason Witten). All three are in play against the Titans’ leaky secondary, with Kenny Stills looking like the cheap, low-owned option whose production hasn’t matched his playing time to date.
Rushing Scoring and Notes
2016 League Average Rush TD Points Rate: 22.7 percent
2017 League Average Rush TD Points Rate: 20.2 percent
Jacksonville and Pittsburgh carry the two highest rates of points conceded via rushing touchdowns, and they face off Sunday. Le’Veon Bell is expected to be chalky despite the high price tag, and deservedly so. Leonard Fournette is a tougher start, owing to the Jaguars’ low implied total. He has, though, scored in all four games this year, so predicting that streak to end against a defense that concedes so many rushing touchdowns is a risky proposition.
Carlos Hyde has been inefficient against the expected value of his workload, and he gets a plus matchup against a Colts defense allowing points on the ground at a rate 6.3 percentage points higher than league average. As measured by RotoViz’s expected points, his combined rushing and receiving workload is third in the league, behind only Todd Gurley‘s and Bell’s. The game total has been rising, and the 49ers are only 1.5-point road underdogs. Hyde has the fourth-highest ceiling projection in the Models.
Kicking and Defense/Special Teams Scoring and Notes
2016 League Average Kicking Points Rate: 31.5 percent
2017 League Average Kicking Points Rate: 34.1 percent
The kicker recommendations were a mixed bag last week. There were a couple strong lines and then a couple duds. Since we’re deconstructing the Vegas lines looking for how points will be scored, it’s not helpful when a team gets shutout, like Cody Parkey‘s Dolphins did in London.
That said, 12 of the 20 recommendations in this article across the first four weeks of the season have scored nine or more FanDuel points. More importantly, our data is getting stronger, and we are no longer relying on possibly outdated 2016 splits.
This week’s top plays are Greg Zuerlein, Randy Bullock, Jake Elliott, Robbie Gould, and Dan Bailey. It’s the first time we’ve recommended Zuerlein, Bullock, and Gould this year, and our ownership projections see them as the more contrarian plays in the group.
2016 League Average D/ST Points Rate: 4.3 percent
2017 League Average D/ST Points Rate: 4.7 percent
As always, the D/ST table is included mostly to be transparent with all the data. In my review of 2015 data, the subdivided defense/special teams scoring projections were the only scoring type to perform worse than the betting lines, and it was notably worse. The implication is that conceding or scoring D/ST touchdowns and safeties isn’t predictive of future performance, which is useful to know, since it’s possible that some teams have inflated over/unders and/or implied point totals if they have scored and/or conceded a high rate of points via defense/special teams.
In other words, it might be useful to fade a small degree of the implied totals for teams who grade highly here. Of course, the passing, rushing, and kicking projections in this column reflect relatively lower percentages for those teams that control for this.
Good luck this week, and be sure to use our Tools to research for yourself.
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Ben Gretch is the Senior Fantasy Analyst at RotoViz. He is the author of “2017 Will Not Look Like 2016 – Or Anything We’ve Seen Before” and the weekly column Stealing Signals.
News Updates
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