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QB Sam Darnold, SEA (3 Viewers)

Payne said:
I wonder if he will finally make it into Travdogg's ROS rankings. :wink:

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.
Click to expand...
It would pain him greatly to have three non-running QBs — Dak, Darnold and Stafford— in his top 15.
 
Pip's Invitation said:
Payne said:
I wonder if he will finally make it into Travdogg's ROS rankings. :wink:

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

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.
 
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rockaction said:
Pip's Invitation said:
Payne said:
I wonder if he will finally make it into Travdogg's ROS rankings. :wink:

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

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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
Payne said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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SoBeDad said:
Hot Sauce Guy said:
Seahawks with 44

Darnold scored 6 for me. 6. I’m less than psyched about that factoid.
Click to expand...
Does Elias keep of such stats? Might be a fantasy record.

Outscored by Brisett, Gabriel, Shough, Tua and everyone not named Young.
Click to expand...
Truly remarkable. I wasn’t watching the individual stats in that game while working as I was up by a ton in both leagues I have Darnold.

To say I was shocked would be an understatement.
 
I don't think he threw more than a pass or two in the second half. Two sack/fumble/tds for the def along with his one td and the game was over after the first q. AZ was terrible.
 
Payne said:
His fantasy score was not his fault. This team is playing well top to bottom. Well, outside of the run game really.
Click to expand...
But it was. They completely avoided the passing game and putting the ball in his hands after he threw an INT and then fumbled twice. Yes, they had the luxury of running the ball but there would definitely been passes sprinkled in to some of the 3rd downs during the second half if he hadn't imploded.
 
Meh. Lot of overreactions in here.

It was what, 35-0 before halftime? This wasn't a real football game.

There was no real groove to be gotten into offensively for Seattle because the game was over before they ever needed to get serious about it.

Same feel as the Rams vs Saints last week. These games were over by halftime. Rest of the game, guys were just playing around burning the rest of the clock.

Personally, I'm just chalking this one up as an outlier and moving to next week when there's a real, actually competitive football game.
 
urbanhack said:
Payne said:
His fantasy score was not his fault. This team is playing well top to bottom. Well, outside of the run game really.
Click to expand...
But it was. They completely avoided the passing game and putting the ball in his hands after he threw an INT and then fumbled twice. Yes, they had the luxury of running the ball but there would definitely been passes sprinkled in to some of the 3rd downs during the second half if he hadn't imploded.
Click to expand...
Imploded? LOL

I think the Seahawks being up 38-7, with 9:40 left in the 3rd when Darnold threw the pick may have had a little more to do with the limited passing game.

And the play-by-play indicates one fumble with 6:48 left in the 3rd quarter.

Imploded
:lmao:
:lmao:
:lmao:
 
ShamrockPride said:
Meh. Lot of overreactions in here.

It was what, 35-0 before halftime? This wasn't a real football game.

There was no real groove to be gotten into offensively for Seattle because the game was over before they ever needed to get serious about it.

Same feel as the Rams vs Saints last week. These games were over by halftime. Rest of the game, guys were just playing around burning the rest of the clock.

Personally, I'm just chalking this one up as an outlier and moving to next week when there's a real, actually competitive football game.
Click to expand...
It wasn't even an outlier. 10 of 12 for 178 yards (14.8 yards/attempt :shock:) with a 43 yard TD and one INT is a great game.
 
Guys, you can check Seattle's Pass Rate Over Expectation if you want.


5% positive yesterday. That means they threw the ball 5% more than the situation usually sees.

Neutral down pass frequency here was 60% even. That was 8th-highest, it seems, for Week 10 so far.


dropback epa is 1.287

That's excellent. 2nd highest this week.

-5% on the year, though. They've figured out they're not a very good running team, it seems. That is what I would hypothesize. Well, too small a size but

Week 4 = -9%
Week 5 = 1%
Week 6 = -6%
Week 7 = -9%
Week 9 = -5%
Week 10 = 5%

My hypothesis would probably be the null.

I set the numbers between 20-80% win probability to eliminate outliers like most do (just for those who click on the link—I tried to capture the pictures, but no such luck.)
 
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I read he dropped back to pass 13 times. Even Justin Fields dropped back 14 times. If you have a non running QB drop back 13 times you get good fantasy numbers 0 times out of 100.
 
Chaka said:
ShamrockPride said:
Meh. Lot of overreactions in here.

It was what, 35-0 before halftime? This wasn't a real football game.

There was no real groove to be gotten into offensively for Seattle because the game was over before they ever needed to get serious about it.

Same feel as the Rams vs Saints last week. These games were over by halftime. Rest of the game, guys were just playing around burning the rest of the clock.

Personally, I'm just chalking this one up as an outlier and moving to next week when there's a real, actually competitive football game.
Click to expand...
It wasn't even an outlier. 10 of 12 for 178 yards (14.8 yards/attempt :shock:) with a 43 yard TD and one INT is a great game.
Click to expand...
Where do we slot in 2 lost fumbles?
 
urbanhack said:
Chaka said:
ShamrockPride said:
Meh. Lot of overreactions in here.

It was what, 35-0 before halftime? This wasn't a real football game.

There was no real groove to be gotten into offensively for Seattle because the game was over before they ever needed to get serious about it.

Same feel as the Rams vs Saints last week. These games were over by halftime. Rest of the game, guys were just playing around burning the rest of the clock.

Personally, I'm just chalking this one up as an outlier and moving to next week when there's a real, actually competitive football game.
Click to expand...
It wasn't even an outlier. 10 of 12 for 178 yards (14.8 yards/attempt :shock:) with a 43 yard TD and one INT is a great game.
Click to expand...
Where do we slot in 2 lost fumbles?
Click to expand...
The same place I pointed out in my post above. The play-by-play shows one fumble at 6:40 in the 3rd.
 
FarFromHome said:
I read he dropped back to pass 13 times. Even Justin Fields dropped back 14 times. If you have a non running QB drop back 13 times you get good fantasy numbers 0 times out of 100.
Click to expand...

Bud, they had two fumble returns for touchdowns. Check the play-by-play before it's 28-0. Heck, even 35-0.

They threw the ball 11 times and ran it 13 times.

Then it was 35-0 and the game was over and they salted it.

I've been the one saying they're not a high-volume passing attack. Yesterday they kinda were given they were throwing up 28 even.
 
rockaction said:
FarFromHome said:
I read he dropped back to pass 13 times. Even Justin Fields dropped back 14 times. If you have a non running QB drop back 13 times you get good fantasy numbers 0 times out of 100.
Click to expand...

Bud, they had two fumble returns for touchdowns. Check the play-by-play before it's 28-0. Heck, even 35-0.

They threw the ball 11 times and ran it 13 times.

Then it was 35-0 and the game was over and they salted it.

I've been the one saying they're not a high-volume passing attack. Yesterday they kinda were given they were throwing up 28 even.
Click to expand...
Yeah I watched the game. Perfect storm against Darnold here.

Felt lucky he threw for a TD for their first score. After that things snowballed. And then Darnold has some fluky turnovers.

Hell, the guy has been red hot. It happens. Thankfully he didn't cost me the game.
 
9. Sam Darnold’s Deep Completion Percentage

Sam Darnold might lead the offense with the lowest pass percentage (47.1) in the NFL, but he’s been threading the deep ball. Darnold has the highest completion percentage (69.6) and passer rating (151.7) on deep passes in the Next Gen Stats era. In fact, his completion percentage is over 10 points higher than the next closest player (Brock Purdy, 59.5 in 2023). - Next Gen Stats
 
rockaction said:
9. Sam Darnold’s Deep Completion Percentage

Sam Darnold might lead the offense with the lowest pass percentage (47.1) in the NFL, but he’s been threading the deep ball. Darnold has the highest completion percentage (69.6) and passer rating (151.7) on deep passes in the Next Gen Stats era. In fact, his completion percentage is over 10 points higher than the next closest player (Brock Purdy, 59.5 in 2023). - Next Gen Stats
Click to expand...
LARs have been burned by the likes of Mac Jones so I wonder if the supposed LARs D isn't so fearsome and this could be a sneaky shootout.

Was originally thinking of benching him in a superflex for Tua, but now not so sure.

This for sure is the game of the week. Would be ashame if it was a defensive struggle.
 
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