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Football Meteorology For 2007, Updated Forecast
Authored by Jeff Risdon - 17th September, 2007 - 1:18 pm
With John Herrera standing to his right dressed in black and appearing not unlike an undertaker, Lane Kiffin sat down at the podium for Sunday's postgame news conference.
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Two weeks are in the books, which means we now have a solid baseline of data and observation on which to build better forecasts. In meteorology, this is like getting wide area radar instead of just sticking your head out the window to tell you if it’s going to rain. We still don’t have enough results to cast a full accurate weather map, but we can certainly see warming and cooling trends in certain places. In some places the extended forecast is significantly upgraded, while in a few others the butterfly flapped too hard and the previous forecasts have unexpectedly morphed from sunny to stormy.
The unexpected highs:
I’ll start in Detroit, not because my Lions have set the world on fire just yet, but because the team is clearly better at the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball. In my preseason preview, I forecast the potential for the DL to be a dominant force. Through two games the front four has been among the very best in football.
DE DeWayne White has more than lived up to his lofty free agent deal, but the real force is the DT duo of Cory Redding and Shaun Rogers. Redding is showing Warren Sapp-in-his-prime quickness and power, while Rogers has essentially stopped two late 4th quarter drives in close games by himself. He basically shook down a mortified Vikings QB Brooks Bollinger in overtime for both the ball and his lunch money to get the Lions a Week 2 win.
The OL has been visibly better too, led by one of the more unheralded but important free agent signings. LG Edwin Mulitalo has played consistently strong ball, and his competence has provided embattled LT Jeff Backus with renewed confidence and energy. This is still not a great team, probably not a playoff team, but they are no longer a team you want to play and they are quickly learning how to finish games.
Sunny skies are back in Pittsburgh. After eviscerating the Browns in Cleveland, the Steelers turned their high pressure front on the Bills. Ben Roethlisberger looks very much like the guy who won Super Bowl XL 2 seasons ago and went 15-1 as a rookie. RB Willie Parker is finding huge holes to sprint through, averaging 117 yards per game. The defense has given up just 10 points, and has stingily allowed just under 225 yards per game. No, the opponents have not been good. But compare what the Browns and Bills did in their other games--Cleveland lit up the Bengals for 51 points, while the Bills led for all but one second against a good Broncos team. Pittsburgh annihilated both those teams and belongs back in the AFC elite.
It’s been clear sailing in some other locales as well. Dallas has played two very strong games, and TO appears to have found calm and confidence in Tony Romo. The Houston Texans are a legit 2-0, led by new QB Matt Schaub, who has shown the decisiveness with the ball and confidence in his OL and WRs that the Texans have never had before. The front 7 on defense has finally repaired the holes in the dam, not just plugging fingers in them. Rookie RB Adrian Peterson brings a bright, sunny future to the Vikings in Minnesota, where he has shown the power, balance, and explosiveness that defines greatness. The skies look good over Green Bay, where the defense is making the next step in progress quickly and the Favre-to-Driver combo remains one of the best in the game. The Colts and Patriots are every bit as good as endlessly hyped by ESPN & Co.
The unexpected lows:
No team is in more need of a rainbow than the New Orleans Saints, who have faced nothing but rain on their parade to the NFC South title that pretty much everyone anticipated. The offensive line has struggled to hold their ground, but what is of greater concern is the inability of any receivers to reliably get open. When you have a short QB like the Saints do in Drew Brees, it is incumbent upon the line to provide good throwing lanes and the WRs to present themselves as good targets. Neither has happened, and this is a team that is not going to win many games without scoring more than 28 points thanks to a still-terrible secondary. Peyton Manning exploiting a defense is one thing, but when Jeff Garcia averages 15.3 yards per attempt with almost no run support, that’s a serious problem. I suspected I was overly optimistic about these Saints this summer, but I don’t think anyone expected them to be one of the worst teams in the league. And through the first two weeks, I can find only a handful of teams that have been worse.
I suspected the AFC East was going to be New England and then loads of mostly cloudy skies, but the bottom 3 are clearly the worst threesome this side of a Charlie Weis-Paris Hilton-Dick Cheney ménage a trois. Miami cannot run the ball behind the worst OL in the NFL, and their decent D is not forcing turnovers. Buffalo has been devastated by injuries to the defense, but that doesn’t explain their complete inability to move the ball with the worst passing attack in the league. The Jets sorely miss LG Pete Kendall, but the real problem is that they play a defensive scheme that takes away the best abilities of their best players. A healthy Chad Pennington will keep the Jets respectable, but make no mistake--this trio of teams will be lucky to win 12 combined games outside of their own division.
The skies are certainly cloudy in St. Louis, even though the Rams play in a dome. The Rams move the ball with ease between the 20s but struggle to cash in those drives. What’s worse is that the opponents have the same success between the 20s but are turning those drives into points. Some of the problems are injury-related, but it’s not a good sign that heralded rookie DT Adam Carriker has just 2.5 tackles and one QB pressure in 2 games, or that the DBs have defended just 3 passes with no INTs but boatloads of tackles.
The rest of the NFC West has been mostly cloudy as well--have you ever seen a worse 2-0 team than the 49ers, who have the worst offensive output in the league and also have given up the 4th most 1st downs on defense? Wake me when supposed stud TE Vernon Davis (whom I predicted would be a bust, to much consternation) does anything besides whine about not getting the ball despite not ever being open.
The Cardinals have finally found an OL combo that seems to work, but Matt Leinart has not progressed as expected and the team still manages to commit untimely mistakes more than seems humanly possible. They were still good enough to steal a game from the supposed cream of the NFC West crop, the Seahawks, who are playing with a lethargy and inefficiency that indicates they still believe it’s the dog days of August and not the regular season quite yet.
Skies still too unstable to accurately forecast:
The Bears are still highly dependent on the most inconsistent QB in the league and special teams heroics, but their defense has enough playmakers to overcome those flaws more often than not. The OL is looking old, but they’ve faced two pretty good defenses.
San Diego is also 1-1 but has faced two of the three best defenses in the league in CHI and NE. They appear to have a major void at WR that those great defenses have exploited to bottle up superb RB LaDanian Tomlinson, while their own secondary has been uneven. If the injuries to NT Jamal Williams and RT Shane Olivea are serious, the skies are much darker, even though it still never rains in Southern California.
I’ve seen indicators of stormy weather in Cincinnati, Denver, Jacksonville and Philadelphia (just one game in the books on the Eagles). The skies are looking fairer in previously cloudy places like Oakland, Tampa Bay, and Tennessee, but I’ll need another week or two of data before coming out with a more accurate long-term forecast on these teams.
The Week 3 forecast (coming this Friday) should be more accurate than the first two weeks, where this humble meteorologist is just 3 games above .500.
The author, celebrating his 35th birthday on Sept. 17th, can be reached at Jeff.Risdon@RealGM.com
