Saturday, January 23, 2010

AFC Championship Preview

Another regular season game. That said, unlike the rematches we've already seen before, we have a perfectly predictive sample: it's not a week seventeen game where most of one team was sitting. It's a week sixteen game where the Colts stood up, then laid down. The net: three touchdowns left on the field, Colts still leading when the Curtis Painter Show began.

So, like, let's be frank. If the Colts do precisely what they did last time, and the Jets do precisely what they did last time, then the Colts will win. This is a Fact. Moreover, if we perturb the specifics of what happened last week, the Colts will win by more. A lot of the ticky-tack things where a player uncharacteristically misses his cut by an inch, slips, misjudges the ball or the receiver... those happened to the Colts. Colloquially, they got unlucky. And so if they do the exact same stuff, then we have to expect that they'll be luckier, and win by more.

Still, I'm hesitant to say that this is a done deal:
  1. The Colts will have different personnel on the field. With Mathis and Freeney playing all the time, they'll be able to maintain the same amount of pressure on the quarterback with fewer blitzes (or get more pressure with the same amount of blitzes). In the latter case, ceteris paribus Sanchez will just get sacked more. In the former case, he'll have to read a field full of more defenders, and get sacked just about as often (or perhaps more, still, because he'll see no one open and hold on to the ball).

    But this isn't a done deal! Pressure generated from linebacker and safety blitzes develops differently from pressure due to defensive line play. Perhaps Sanchez reacts better to the latter. Perhaps he perceives pressure less in the latter case, allowing him to feel more comfortable in the pocket, and read the defense, though denser, better. We don't have enough data to predict how Sanchez will react. It's safe to assume that he'll fail, but, you know, you can't be sure.

  2. A pass-rush-happy defensive line is vulnerable to the run. What would Shonn Greene like more than to run past a pass-mad Dwight Freeney? And, look, the Colts were 29th in Adjusted Line Yards. (That said, they did pretty well in power situations (third or fourth down, two or less to go), so it's possible that once the Jets fall behind and start passing, the running game won't be able to pick up short first downs with good enough regularity.)

  3. About that vaunted Colts pass rush, well, let's be honest: these aren't the 2005 Colts, which won a lot of games with defense and had the second-best adjusted sack rate in the league. That season (and 2004: 7th, 2000: 10th) has defined Freeney and Mathis as great pass rushers; the fact of the matter is that they've been positively middle of the road this year and were worse than that the past two years.

  4. The Jets defense will probably be mostly helpless against Manning, modulo the drops and mistakes that happened last time in spades. They can't consistently make him miss because his blitz identification is second to none; they can take away his number one weapon but he has four or five perfectly good weapons.
This is almost certainly a Colts win. But there's a sliver of hope, mostly featuring the Colts defense folding and Peyton Manning having another bad day. That's football.

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