Divisional Round Saturday Football: Advanced Reviews

All the advanced stats, visualizations and commentary for Chiefs-Texans and Lions-Commanders

The adjusted scores quantify team play quality, with emphasis on stable metrics (success rate) and downplaying higher variance events (turnovers, special team, penalties, fumble luck, etc). Adjusted expected points added (EPA), in conjunction with opportunity-based metrics like total plays and drives, projects adjusted points. Adjusted scores have been tested against actual scores and offer slightly better predictive ability, though their primary benefit is explanatory.

All 2024-2022 and historical Adjusted Scores and other site metrics are available in a downloadable format to paid subscribers via Google Sheet.

Find previous advanced reviews here

** Adjusted Scores table:

• “Pass” - Pass rate over expectation (based on context of each play and historical averages

• “Success” - Success rate on offense, a key metric in adjusted score vs actual

• “H & A” - Home or away team

KC (-9.5) vs HOU

There’s already more talk about the referee calls in this game than the rest of the play, and the adjusted scores agree, without even “watching” the game, that the result went the wrong direction. The Kansas City Chiefs won by a comfortable looking nine points, but were fundamentally five points worse than the Houston Texans by my numbers. Unsurprisingly, it all came down to huge advantages the Chiefs had with penalties and special teams, totaling +16.6 expected points across those categories.

In some ways, the straight EPA numbers for measuring penalty gains don’t fully incorporate how big those calls were. EPA is looking at pre-play expected points versus after the play and penalty. They don’t account for the wider differences in the alternative play expected points and post-play, and we saw that the Chiefs would have had negative EPA results on the two roughing calls if there were no penalties.

Those two calls led to nine points for the Chiefs, with another three scored following a big opening kickoff return (and penalty added on). You could argue 13 of the Chiefs 23 points were extremely lucky, and the Texans lost seven points on two field-goal misses of 35- and 55-yards and another missed PAT.

Even the straight EPA efficiency numbers were basically the same between the two teams, despite the penalty advantages included in them. The Texans were much more successful offensively on a play-by-play basis, posting positive EPA on 48% of plays to the Chiefs at only 39%.