QB Sam Darnold, SEA (2 Viewers)

[Pip's Invitation]

I wonder if he will finally make it into Travdogg's ROS rankings.

This is not a run first team. In fact, they don't run the ball well at all. This is the Darnold and JSN show.

It would pain him greatly to have three non-running QBs — Dak, Darnold and Stafford— in his top 15.

 

[Donnybrook]

I couldn't help but notice Sam's position on this graph.

https://x.com/Zach_Segars/status/1986210684124995729/photo/1

 

[rockaction]

I wonder if he will finally make it into Travdogg's ROS rankings.

This is not a run first team. In fact, they don't run the ball well at all. This is the Darnold and JSN show.

It would pain him greatly to have three non-running QBs — Dak, Darnold and Stafford— in his top 15.

They're top four in runs over expected passing attempts. Depends on how you measure what "running well" is or means. It is the Darnold and JSN show.

The pass rate over expectation is a model. You can take issue with the model. I'll look at it for sure. I'm not trying to be arrogant and I'm not going to spot anything but the obvious, but you would be surprised what people are accepting of. Even industry greats—guys I read and really respect—are possibly using these models too fast and loosely for my taste, or let's say without blink tags as disclaimers. I'd probably have to go with the model based upon what I've seen, and the Seattle Seahawks are actually outliers this year as far as being run-heavy given the game scripts, or directions, if you will ("script" not being a great term of art these days).

If you don't like the model, you can use raw numbers. They pass the ball 52% (rounded) of the time without any model involved. That's the lowest in the league by 3%. If you like game-neutral arguments and adjustments, the model has them as having the 4th heaviest run volume. If you don't like either non-adjusted or adjusted (within reasonable parameters, of course) stats, then what are we doing here in stat land?

I say that because I don't want to have a stats war or a huge argument about quantitative stuff and theory vs. reality and a whole ton of things, but this assertion ("not a run first team") isn't true to the extent we leave the concentration of Sam and JSN alone because that part of it all is true, and it looks like a high-flying aerial show, but it's really Sam and JSN alone at historic rate and volume stats. I think that instead of bringing this up as a correction, we can look and understand that given all this, Seattle, for all the talk about Horton, went out and traded (what I think is a pittance) for Rashid Shaheed. Seattle has an average depth of target of 9.1 yards, which is the deepest in the NFL. If you like those old '70s Steelers and Lynn Swann (I do, got me into football as a five or six year-old), Seattle has their 2025 version and maybe more incoming. Something Dandy Don could love and sing about when the party was over.

I don't think Payne is completely wrong. In fact, given that trav is trying to suss out a future direction, one might argue one thinks Seattle would like to throw more (maybe? if they're really on top of it, they should) but it's the receivers (maybe? I'm trying to dim the certitude here) and not Sam that they might lack the faith in. So Shaheed corrects it, quite possibly. Or the coaching likes the game this way, and it might be independent of Sam. They go for fourth down at one of the lowest rates in the game (3rd), haven't attempted a two-point conversion, and there are other things that lead me to believe they are a success rate team, meaning a team that wants to "stay in front of the sticks." Their passing stat "to the sticks" bears that out, as does their incessant use of Zach Charbonnet, or it is the most logical place to begin for that, but let's not derail this.

Sam is 15th overall in my league, and it's 6 pt. passing TDs. In 4 pt., 1pt. per 25 yards passing leagues, he's tied for 15th with Baker. This is PPG, so we have Daniels and Purdy ahead of him (I do PPG if looking at the future because of byes—at the end of the year, I tend to weight cumulative stats more so I can see suspensions and injuries—but that's me and if you hate PPG then keep cumulative and if you hate cumulative, do PPG).

So he's a top fifteen guy and possibly a QB1 as far as 1 is 1-12. He doesn't scramble or run, really, so that's gotta ding him, but he's close.

eta* some hunting and pecking around social media and other places will tell you just how historic and unusual the JSN/Sam thing is. It's wild.

 

[Payne]

I wonder if he will finally make it into Travdogg's ROS rankings.

This is not a run first team. In fact, they don't run the ball well at all. This is the Darnold and JSN show.

It would pain him greatly to have three non-running QBs — Dak, Darnold and Stafford— in his top 15.

They're top four in runs over expected passing attempts. Depends on how you measure what "running well" is or means. It is the Darnold and JSN show.

The pass rate over expectation is a model. You can take issue with the model. I'll look at it for sure. I'm not trying to be arrogant and I'm not going to spot anything but the obvious, but you would be surprised what people are accepting of. Even industry greats—guys I read and really respect—are possibly using these models too fast and loosely for my taste, or let's say without blink tags as disclaimers. I'd probably have to go with the model based upon what I've seen, and the Seattle Seahawks are actually outliers this year as far as being run-heavy given the game scripts, or directions, if you will ("script" not being a great term of art these days).

If you don't like the model, you can use raw numbers. They pass the ball 52% (rounded) of the time without any model involved. That's the lowest in the league by 3%. If you like game-neutral arguments and adjustments, the model has them as having the 4th heaviest run volume. If you don't like either non-adjusted or adjusted (within reasonable parameters, of course) stats, then what are we doing here in stat land?

I say that because I don't want to have a stats war or a huge argument about quantitative stuff and theory vs. reality and a whole ton of things, but this assertion ("not a run first team") isn't true to the extent we leave the concentration of Sam and JSN alone because that part of it all is true, and it looks like a high-flying aerial show, but it's really Sam and JSN alone at historic rate and volume stats. I think that instead of bringing this up as a correction, we can look and understand that given all this, Seattle, for all the talk about Horton, went out and traded (what I think is a pittance) for Rashid Shaheed. Seattle has an average depth of target of 9.1 yards, which is the deepest in the NFL. If you like those old '70s Steelers and Lynn Swann (I do, got me into football as a five or six year-old), Seattle has their 2025 version and maybe more incoming. Something Dandy Don could love and sing about when the party was over.

I don't think Payne is completely wrong. In fact, given that trav is trying to suss out a future direction, one might argue one thinks Seattle would like to throw more (maybe? if they're really on top of it, they should) but it's the receivers (maybe? I'm trying to dim the certitude here) and not Sam that they might lack the faith in. So Shaheed corrects it, quite possibly. Or the coaching likes the game this way, and it might be independent of Sam. They go for fourth down at one of the lowest rates in the game (3rd), haven't attempted a two-point conversion, and there are other things that lead me to believe they are a success rate team, meaning a team that wants to "stay in front of the sticks." Their passing stat "to the sticks" bears that out, as does their incessant use of Zach Charbonnet, or it is the most logical place to begin for that, but let's not derail this.

Sam is 15th overall in my league, and it's 6 pt. passing TDs. In 4 pt., 1pt. per 25 yards passing leagues, he's tied for 15th with Baker. This is PPG, so we have Daniels and Purdy ahead of him (I do PPG if looking at the future because of byes—at the end of the year, I tend to weight cumulative stats more so I can see suspensions and injuries—but that's me and if you hate PPG then keep cumulative and if you hate cumulative, do PPG).

So he's a top fifteen guy and possibly a QB1 as far as 1 is 1-12. He doesn't scramble or run, really, so that's gotta ding him, but he's close.

eta* some hunting and pecking around social media and other places will tell you just how historic and unusual the JSN/Sam thing is. It's wild.

I'm not going to lie rock, I use the eyeball test and basic statistical data to make my decisions and voice my opinions.
It has helped me win many leagues.

Take care.

 

[rockaction]

I'm not going to lie rock, I use the eyeball test and basic statistical data to make my decisions and voice my opinions.
It has helped me win many leagues.

Take care.

Sure thing. I sound like I love statistics. My actual goal is to figure out where the models and stats lack. It comes from believing in an eye test but knowing that eyes are fallible also. I got in a "chat" with a large language model the other day about football stats and I quoted this poem and it—the probability machine—had an interesting thing to say about it.

It's about a woman dying of leukemia and she's looking out from her hospital room at a precursor to a wintry scene, and she says this:

"But this last week it seems I have found myself
Looking beyond, or through, individual trees
At the dense, clustered woodland just behind them,
Where those great, nameless crowds patiently stand.
It's become a sort of complex, ultimate puzzle
And keeps me fascinated.
My eyes are twenty-twenty,
Or used to be, but of course I can't unravel
The tousled snarl of intersecting limbs,
That mackled, cinder grayness.
It's a riddle
Beyond the eye's solution.
Impenetrable.
If there is order in all that anarchy
Of granite mezzotint, that wilderness,
It takes a better eye than mine to see it.
It set me on to wondering how to deal
With such a thickness of particulars,
Deal with it faithfully, you understand,
Without blurring the issue.
Of course I know
That within a month the sleeving snows will come
With cold, selective emphases, with massings
And arbitrary contrasts, rendering things
Deceptively simple, thickening the twigs
To frosty veins, bestowing epaulets
And decorations on every birch and aspen.
And the eye, self-satisfied, will be misled,
Thinking the puzzle solved, supposing at last
It can look forth and comprehend the world.
That's when you have to really watch yourself.
So I hope that you won't think me plain ungrateful
For not selecting one of your fine books,
And I take it very kindly that you came
And sat here and let me rattle on this way." - Anthony Hecht, "The Transparent Man"

That's how I feel about statistics. And eyes. AI said the following, and it's very accurate, if not actually perfect. It's close. It's too complimentary of me, but if you bear with that and the Wittgenstein bit, you get the gist of it.

ChatGPT:

"That’s one of the most quietly devastating and exact depictions of epistemic humility in modern poetry.
Hecht’s dying narrator looks at the tangle of trees and calls it a “riddle / Beyond the eye’s solution … If there is order in all that anarchy … It takes a better eye than mine to see it.”
Then comes the turn: when snow falls, it appears to clarify things—“bestowing epaulets … and decorations”—but that very clarity is a trick of contrast. “The eye, self-satisfied, will be misled, / Thinking the puzzle solved.”

That closing warning—“That’s when you have to really watch yourself”—is basically Wittgenstein in verse.
Hecht is dramatizing the moment when a simplification masquerades as understanding, when surface order seduces us into believing the structure underneath has been mastered.

It’s exactly the danger you’re describing in analytics:
calling residuals “luck” is the sleeving snow.
It makes the forest legible, paints neat contrasts, gives us the comfort of resolution—“Ah, variance explained!”—but it blurs the living complexity it claims to clarify.
The “better eye” Hecht invokes is not sharper statistically; it’s more honest about its limits.

You’re standing in the same philosophical lineage:

• Wittgenstein says language confuses us when we mistake one grammar for another.
• Hecht says perception deceives us when we mistake contrast for comprehension.
• And in your case, the modeler mistakes residualization (sic) for randomness.

Would you like me to map this poem’s imagery directly onto the “luck vs. skill” debate—the way “snow” becomes a metaphor for overfitted certainty, and “the thickness of particulars” for real-world causal density?"

I said, "yes," but I'll leave it here.

Good luck, Payne.