Biomechanical Reviews Part 2

Paxton Lynch and Mile High Stadium

Feb 2, 2014.  John Elway looks out over a familiar scene.  Streams of green and yellow confetti obscure the scoreboard, which reads 43-8. Elway’s former AFC West patsies slowly jog off the field, meeting instead the inward flickering vortex of press and fans.  Elway is thinking of Dan Reeves.

If someone asked you to name the single biggest advantage possessed by the Denver Broncos, not just this season but every season, what would you name? I’ll bet John Elway could tell you- it’s in the name of the stadium.  The Broncos play a minimum of 8 home games a year at 5280 feet.  The next highest altitude for an NFL stadium is 1,070 feet, at the University of Phoenix Stadium, in Glendale AZ.   

This is an enormous advantage: to train at altitude, and have your opponents train 4000+ feet below you.  

Dan Reeves didn’t get it.  Mike Shanahan understood.

Elway just didn’t have time to put the pieces in place.  Having already hired Alex Gibbs away from the Seahawks in Spring 2013, Elway had to watch the blocking scheme he made famous- the one Alex Gibbs and Mike Shanahan co-created in 1995 and the one that Elway ran to perfection, winning Superbowls in 1998 and 1999- conquer his own Peyton Manning-led creation.

But he had already seen the writing on the wall.  Alex Gibbs was already in the building.

Continue reading Biomechanical Reviews Part 2

Just How Accurate Are DVOA Mean Win Projections?

Yesterday, Chris Harris Jr. and other Broncos took much issue to an article on ESPN that projected the defending Super Bowl champions to go 7-9 in 2016.  The author of the article in question was Aaron Schatz, founder of Football Outsiders and the concept of DVOA.  FO has been a read of mine for a long time, as long as Schatz started up DVOA anaylsis in 2003.

Schatz’s bearish forecast on the 2016 Broncos hits on some common points he’s made in the past: extreme sides of the ball, good or bad, tend to regress to the mean, and performance on defense is more inconsistent than offense from season to season. Throw in a projection of Paxton Lynch more likely to “bust” than not, and Schatz sees a team that’s more like the Rams teams of recent years than a repeat champion.

As I said above, DVOA projections have been run for the past 13 seasons.  So given the disrespect that Schatz has inadvertently injected in the Broncos’ locker room, let’s take a look at that track record.

Continue reading Just How Accurate Are DVOA Mean Win Projections?

Looking Ahead To The Broncos’ 2017 Offseason

John Elway often says he wants “to win from now on”.  It’s an objective that he is excelling at, and in order to do so, it involves thinking many steps ahead.  So although the 2016 season isn’t even in the books yet, it’s important to keep tabs on a few things for 2017, even with the understanding that what happens in 2016 has the potential to change plans. Continue reading Looking Ahead To The Broncos’ 2017 Offseason

Thin Air Is Back Online

Sorry about the downtime for most of today.  To help ensure that there is not a repeat of the server issues that we’ve been having for the past couple of weeks, I have migrated this website to its own separate server in order to separate it from the rest of those operations.

Unfortunately, the last backup of this database was on Sunday, so there are three threads that lost its WordPress content.  However, the comments for those threads can still be found on Disqus’s website, as follows:

I will try to see if I can find another copy of that 2017 offseason that I wrote, and if not I may try to rewrite it at a later date.