Brandon Staley is a baller, and thinking the timeout blew the game is bozo energy. The play clock was at 4, he didn’t save any time. The raiders were already in field goal range, and would have faced KC with a tie. Any Raider talk of “playing for a tie” is intentionally divisive. The Raiders were absolutely not going to kneel out the clock with the ball already on our 40, with Carr in shotgun, sending Renfrow in motion. The run defense (Lynn/TT’s roster) lost us the game, as well as Houston and many others.
Regarding the 4th down, don’t be quick to point fingers when we subsequently go 6/6 on 4th down, and beat the Chiefs, Browns, Eagles, Steelers, and Bengals on 4th down conversions alone. Without Staley’s aggressiveness, we’re probably a 7-10 football team.
Staley is the new era. He’s not an old time boomer who takes 3 or punts on anything beyond 4th and 1, and that’s why we made it as far as we did. Let the man have an off-season to create a roster favorable to him, not Gus Bradley or Anthony Lynn. The future is bright. We’re equipped a QB on HOF trajectory, a solid supporting cast (albeit zero depth), the 17th pick, and $70 million to play with. The future is bright.
I wanted to start a discussion about if Staley met our expectations or not on the defensive side of the ball for this first year under him. The Chargers final DVOA ranking is 26th in the league. We were 31st in the league in points allowed, 30th in rushing yards allowed, and 4.6 yards allowed per carry which is 26th in the NFL. There were 25/32 teams with better all around defenses than us this year. Is this more a question of straight up bad players/depth or players being forced into a scheme that they just aren't good at or built for? If Staley had this knowledge of how badly our roster would mesh with his scheme then why did he implement it immediately? Did he just use this year as a feeling out process to see who he wanted to keep? Would our defense have performed better in a Gus Bradley scheme, especially considering a healthy Derwin all year? Quite frankly, our defensive performance this year was terrible. That's on Staley and Tom Telesco. I still support Staley and his plan for our future, but I'll be the first to say this year was a big disappointment on the defensive side and he deserves criticism for that. The scary thing is our defense was this bad with Bosa and Derwin playing all year.. just imagine if one of them had been injured. We'd have been the worst defense in the league. How can a defense with 3-4 pro bowlers play that bad? Most fans have positive things to say about the majority of our starters on defense and even some of the depth. Are we just all misevaluating how bad some of the players on our team really are? I understand we didn't have our full defense starters out there together much this year but the defensive core was there consistently every week with maybe 2-3 starters missing for an average game. Most other defenses deal with the same amount of defensive injuries just as much as we did this year. I just really don't feel like that is much of an excuse, especially when our 2 defensive anchors played all year. Btw, even with the good play of Hopkins and Roberts we are still ranked as the 28th best special teams
So I'm a Vikings fan. So you can trust that I am completely neutral when it comes to the Chargers.
I'm also a Data Scientist - I have been in the field for quite a few years now and have worked with some pretty big firms. That is just to say that, I work in Analytics. Not NFL analytics, but analytics as a whole. The applications of analytics are different across industries (i.e,. NFL v/s my job) but the concepts and fundamentals are the same.
Here's what everyone is forgetting when it comes down to analytics - it's not about succeeding on a given instance, it's about the eventual long term success. Think of it this way, we all know the probability of getting a head on a coin toss is 50%. That doesn't necessarily mean you will get 1 head out of two tosses. Or 2 out of 4. Or even 4 out of 8. But the higher that denominator goes, the likely you are to actually being at 50%. So when you've reached 50 tosses, it's highly likely that you've had 25 heads and 25 tails.
How does that relate to football? Well, when analytics says you should go for it because you have a high chance of converting, it doesn't really mean that you will convert on that given play. It means that over the course of the season, if you keep up with it, you will succeed. So over the course of the year, all these times you went for fourth will eventually be worth it.
And I think you've seen this already. There have been many games that you guys won because of gutsy 4th down at various points of the game. Of course, everyone will focus on the game where it all went wrong.
So I fully agree with Staley and his choice to keep being aggressive when need be. Because that is exactly how analytics is supposed to work.
PS: For those of you who are more technical, this is of course an oversimplification. Just wanted to talk to the bigger point about statistics and probabilities not being about one particular instance in time but rather a long term outcome of repeated events.
When else had a timeout affected the ESPN Win probability by this much?
Chargers go 9-8 with an insanely good roster and one of the the best QBs in the league.
They're secondary has so much talent and a really good pash rush yet they were one of the worst defenses in the league. How come the no one is asking for this guys job especially after he goes for it at their own 20 in the 3rd. Am I missing something?
But just know you sound dumb
