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Thread: Why The Experts Are Wrong About KC

  1. #1

    Default Why The Experts Are Wrong About KC

    Its that time of year again. Chiefs football is right around the corner and I'm stuck talking Donkeys on a daily basis. Considering that the last 3+ years I have used this website as my outlet to *****, cheer, analyze and hear from other Chiefs fans, I thought that there wasn't a better way to start this football season.

    With that said, I'm really excited about the Chiefs this year. I would be lying if I said that the pre season hasn't gave me doubt about this team, but my self perceived football knowledge has curbed this panic with rational thought.

    I am just a firm believer that the pre season cannot be used as a gauge for a team like KC because they are a game plan team, meaning that there is not one particular scheme that is used from game to game. Instead Todd Haley and staff create different schemes and formations depending on who they play, so the outcome is a different look every week. Unlike most teams in the league that are going to run the same style offense no matter who they are playing. They practice that particular scheme week in and week out, resulting in a more polished look in the pre season.

    Considering that there is no actual game planning done in the pre season, a game plan style offense like the Chiefs are just running through the motions against defenses that are trying to nail down their particular scheme before the season starts.

    So if the Chiefs don't have a favored scheme and they are not game planning, then what are they doing during the pre season?

    I'll tell you exactly what they are doing. They are creating matchup opportunities to evaluate on tape. They are running behind questionable offensive lineman to see if they can block and they are throwing to questionable wide receivers to see if they can make this team and help this team win.

    They are also throwing to guys like Dwayne Bowe to see if they have improved or are as reliable as they were the previous year. They are running behind Casey Weigmann or Branden Albert to see exactly where their physical skills are at compared to where the staff expects them to be.

    They are creating a four week evaluation project.

    The other thing that should be noted is that Todd Haley didn't walk in after the lockout and start running team scrimmages and formation walk through's. He got those guys in shape first!

    He said from the first moment that he became the head coach that the players would have to be in a certain level of physical condition to play.

    Unlike most coaches around the league, he did not stray from this notion because of the lockout. Not only did they only do conditioning for the first few weeks of camp, most starters never played the first pre season game.

    So while other teams were learning their playbooks and perfecting their schemes, the Chiefs were doing cardio! You might not believe in that method.....

    Apparently John Fox doesn't believe in that method either. That's why half of his team is banged up. Example you ask........

    As I am standing on the sidelines at Dove Valley with the rest of the Denver press watching Broncos training camp, I see new signing Ty Warren come running out of the locker room in full gear. Everybody is excited and talking about how this guy is going to change their defense.

    Keep in mind that Ty Warren didn't play all of last year, went through a locked out off season and just entered a climate that is literally one mile high. So whats the first thing that the coaches have him doing?

    Well, hitting the sleds and working on block shedding of coarse! The next day he's in scrimmage going 100% against other grown men. 10 days later hes injured and hes out for the year. Wonder why? What a bad break. What a shame. That's what I heard.

    All along I was telling myself, Todd Haley would have never let that happen.

    Pre season is not about winning, Its about getting better and finding out who is going to help you win down the stretch. If coach Haley made a mistake this pre season, it was playing Tony Moeaki, Matt Cassel and the rest of the starters too far into that fourth game. But then again, he was making up for lost time during conditioning.

    I expect the well conditioned, well coached Chiefs to have an exciting, healthy year. Just like last year. Don't get too caught up in pre-season. The 1972 undefeated Dolphins lost 3 of 4 pre season games. the 2007 undefeated Patriots went 2-2 in pre season and of coarse, the Detroit Lions 0-16 actually went 4-0 in pre season that year.

    Scott Pioli is always building for the long term. They might not win as many games because of a more difficult schedule, but this team will always be moving in the right direction.

    GO CHIEFS!!!
    Last edited by Big Daddy Tek; 09-09-2011 at 04:32 PM.


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  2. #2
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    Good post and I agree.

    I heard on the radio today that Teams that have gone 0-4 in the preseason have actually won more games than teams that have gone 4-0 over the last 5 years. I'm not surprised.

    One big thing that I noticed about the Chiefs in the preseason is that they passed a lot and ran the ball very little, because they needed to evaluate the passing game, but they know what they have with the run. During the regular season they will play to their strengths and not their weaknesses. That will make a big difference.
    Last edited by TopekaRoy; 09-09-2011 at 07:37 PM.

  3. #3
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    Nicely posted. Here are some numbers compiled regarding preseason records since the league went to 32 teams I found interesting, a fairly nice article put together in all:

    Does the NFL Preseason Matter

    Last weekend, a friend of mine mentioned that it's important for NFL teams to do well in preseason, since the results can affect a team's performance in the regular season. I assured him that was a load of baloney, but my buddy insisted he'd seen a study proving it. A lifetime of following the NFL left me certain that there was either a very weak correlation between preseason and regular season performance, or — more likely — no correlation at all. He sent me the link he'd seen, which is from almost a decade ago and kept the sample sizes pretty small.

    So I did my own research, looking at preseason results from every season since the league expanded to 32 teams (2002-10), a total of 588 preseason games. Some of what I found surprised me, though most of it confirmed my prior belief that preseason results are effectively meaningless. Consider the 2010 preseason:

    * The Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers went 2-2. So did the New England Patriots, who finished with the best record in the NFL, and the Atlanta Falcons, who had the best record in the NFC.

    * The only team to go 4-0 in preseason was the hugely disappointing San Francisco 49ers, who finished 6-10 in the NFL's weakest division.

    * Two teams went 0-4: the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts, both of whom won their divisions.

    I could go on. The Seattle Seahawks, who won the NFC West, went 1-3 in preseason. Everyone else in the division went 3-1 or better. And so on. It's seldom that extreme, but most years, there are good teams who do terribly in preseason, and bad teams who look like world-beaters when the score doesn't matter.

    Over the past nine years, the team with the worst preseason record is the Indianapolis Colts, who have gone 11-27 (.289). The five teams with preseason records worse than .400, along with their regular season records during those years:

    1. Indianapolis Colts, 11-27 (.289) preseason — 109-35 (.757)
    2. Kansas City Chiefs, 12-25 (.324) preseason — 67-77 (.465)
    3. Houston Texans, 13-24 (.351) preseason — 55-89 (.382)
    4t. Buffalo Bills, 14-23 (.378) preseason — 59-85 (.410)
    4t. Philadelphia Eagles, 14-23 (.378) preseason — 91-52-1 (.635)

    That's two of the best teams in the NFL (Colts and Eagles), two of the worst (Bills and Texans), and one that's been up and down (Chiefs). Tough to draw any conclusions from that. Fewer teams have really excelled in preseason over the last nine years, but there are two who are well over .600:

    1. New York Jets, 25-12 (.676) preseason — 72-72 (.500)
    2. Dallas Cowboys, 23-13-1 (.635) preseason — 78-66 (.542)

    Again, you wouldn't really want to draw any conclusions from that. The team with by far the best preseason record since expansion is exactly average in the regular season, and the team with the worst record is in reality one of the most consistently successful teams in the league, making the playoffs during every season included in my study.

    Ultimately, though, I did find one correlation that surprised me. Teams that do poorly in the preseason are below average in the regular season. Not dramatically so, but the correlation is there. Interestingly, I did not find the opposite to be true: doing well in the preseason appears to be meaningless. Since the 2002 expansion, 16 teams have gone 4-0 in preseason. That includes successful teams like the '03 Patriots and '05 Broncos, but it also includes terrible teams like the '03 Cardinals and the winless 2008 Lions. Overall, those 16 teams went 130-125-1, almost exactly average. A great preseason doesn't seem to be a meaningful guide to a team's regular-season performance.

    When a team really bombs the preseason, though, that can sometimes be an indication that the team is in for a disappointing year once the real games begin. Since '02, 18 teams have gone 0-4 or 0-5 in preseason. Again, there are some good teams: six of those 18 teams won 10 or more games, including the 2005 Colts, who started 14-0. But overall, the teams that went winless in preseason came up with a collective record of 134-154 (.465), which isn't devastating, but it's not good, 10 games below .500. Eighteen is a pretty small sample size, so you wouldn't want to draw too many conclusions from the fact that these teams went an average of 7.5-8.5. I mean, it's not like they all went 5-11 or something.

    But there's more. I've always thought of records between .250 and .750 as pretty average. A good team having a bad year might finish 5-11, and a pretty average team can win 11 games with a little luck. But 4-12 or worse is an awfully poor season, and anything 12-4 or better generally marks a pretty elite team. Looking at the years I studied, 40 teams went 12-4 or better. Those teams finished a collective 86-77 in the preseason (.528), which is a little better than average, but not at a significant level. Literally every season, there is a great team who had a miserable preseason.

    * In 2002, the Eagles went 1-3 in preseason before finishing 12-4 and making it to the NFC Championship Game.

    * The 2003 Rams were 1-3 in August, but they went 12-4 and got a first-round bye in the playoffs.

    * Both 2004 Super Bowl teams, the Patriots and Eagles, finished 1-3.

    * The Colts finished 1-3 or worse every year from 2005-09, a total record of 4-18 (.182). Their regular-season record over those seasons was 65-15 (.813), every season 12-4 or better, including two years at 14-2, with two AFC titles and a win in Super Bowl XLI.

    * In 2010, the division-winning Bears, Colts, and Chiefs finished a combined 1-11 in preseason.

    Doing well in the regular season simply is not related to doing well in the preseason. The correlation is extremely small, less than half a game. But doing poorly in the preseason may be a slightly different story. Over the past nine seasons, 42 teams have finished 4-12 or below. Those 42 teams posted a combined preseason record of just 70-92 (.432). That makes almost 100 points of difference between the preseason records of the best teams (.528) and the worst (.432). Is this data statistically significant? No, not really. The difference is still pretty small — .432 is 7-9, a pretty average season — and the sample sizes with these teams aren't large enough to inspire confidence in the findings. Here are the big numbers: the chart below shows the overall results, sorted by preseason record, since the league went to 32 teams:

    Chart

    * Includes a 3-0-1 preseason
    ** Includes a 2-1-1 preseason
    ^ Includes a 0-5 preseason

    Sorted another way, by winning record, losing record, or exactly even:

    Chart

    The difference is not between teams that do well in preseason and those that do poorly; it's between those who do poorly and those who are exactly average. Looked at this way, the difference is small, but it is real and statistically significant. Bombing in August may be a negative indication about a team's actual strength. The causal nature of this relationship is not obvious: do bad teams lose in preseason because they're bad, or does a poor preseason affect a team's psyche going forward?

    When this becomes interesting is from 2004 on. In the 2003 preseason, and to a lesser extent '02 as well, there was a dramatic connection between preseason and regular season performance. In '03, both Super Bowl teams (Pats and Panthers) went 4-0, as did the 12-4 Titans. Even the Colts had a good preseason, going 3-1 before a 12-4 regular season. Two teams, Houston and Atlanta, followed winless preseasons (0-4) with 5-11 regular season records.

    Looking just from 2004-10, the results show the opposite of my friend's assertion: there is an inverse relationship between preseason performance and regular-season success. Teams that went winless in preseason had a better regular-season record (109-115, .487) than those who finished preseason undefeated (71-89, .444), and Super Bowl teams had a losing preseason record (27-29). Here's the same table as above, looking just at the past seven seasons:

    Chart

    * Includes a 3-0-1 preseason
    ** Includes a 2-1-1 preseason
    ^ Includes a 0-5 preseason

    Chart

    I don't normally like to shrink sample size, but the data appears to show a trend starting in 2004, with teams that were very successful or very unsuccessful in preseason marginally worse than the rest of the league. I also think the records of teams that played five preseason games are potentially instructive here. The 12 teams that went 3-2 or better were subpar in the regular season (.443), while those that went 2-3 or worse were exceptionally successful (.635), with four of the six making the playoffs. This is probably a statistical aberration rather than meaningful data, but it's still interesting, I think.

    Conclusion

    Preseason records should be ignored when predicting a team's regular-season fortunes. There is a correlation between preseason mediocrity and regular-season success, but it is too small to be of any predictive use, more likely to mislead forecasters than to assist them. From a fan's perspective, preseason games are almost entirely meaningless.
    Here is the link to the write-up: Sports Central / Sports Articles and Columns / NFL / Does the NFL Preseason Matter?

  4. #4
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    Great post Brandon

  5. #5
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    Great read. And yeah, i mean last year experts were saying the Chiefs were going to go 4-12 and 6-10 but they were wrong.

  6. #6

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    Thanks guys. And yeah Topeka, I think that you made a very solid observation about the passing game being utilized almost exclusively during the pre season.

    I got the wings, the pizza roles, the beer, and some Scotch. Pretty sure I'm ready for the game on Sunday.


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  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by Big Daddy Tek View Post
    I got the wings, the pizza roles, the beer, and some Scotch. Pretty sure I'm ready for the game on Sunday.
    That's my kind of party right there. Loving scotch nowadays. Great post! I look forward to hearing your insight this year with the backdrop of being in enemy territory.


  8. #8
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    I went with Crown over the scotch, but other than that, I'm right there with you!!!!

  9. #9
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    The Chiefs have proved everything the experts said was right. I still believe the season can be salvaged-this is only 1 game-but Charles may not be the running back we thought. Secondly, the D line has gotten worse. The O line actually performed well enough to win-just the skill players seem to have no clue.

  10. #10
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    How ya feeling now? That sucked! I'm pretty sure Herm Edwards was somewhere close.

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