Week 17 TNF Bears-Seahawks: Advanced Review

The Seahawks stay in the playoff hunt, with an ugly win over the floundering Bears

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

CHI vs SEA (-3.5)

Somehow the Chicago Bears and Seattle Seahawks managed to score only nine total points, despite not missing any field goal attempts, only one total turnover and just two fourth down conversion tries. It was a punt-fest, with 13 of the team’s 18 full-length drives ending by booting the ball to the other team, 11 of those drives ending in six or fewer plays for the offense.

No matter the score, the Seahawks get to register the W, which keeps them a game behind the Los Angeles Rams in the loss column for the NFC West title. The two teams face each other in Week 18, but unfortunately for the Seahawks, the Rams will own the second tiebreaker (division record) even if they win and split head-to-head matchups this season. This means the Seahawks need to beat the Rams next week, and see the Rams lose to the Arizona Cardinals this weekend. The probability of those even coming together is roughly when the Rams are playing both games at home is roughly 15% by out numbers.

The Seahawks were clearly the better team in terms of success rate (42% to 34%), and both teams underperformed heavily in EPA versus the results you’d expect based on those rates. It wasn’t turnovers holding down numbers, but instead sacks, with both teams combining to take 10 for 63 yards lost.

The Bears could even find success dropping back to pass, with a success rate of 27%, a bottom-10 figure for any team in a game this season (of 486 offensive game performances).

Geno Smith produced another high-CPOE, low-EPA game, measuring at +8.8% by the first metric and total -2.1 EPA in the latter. In this game, sacks only lowered the total by 4.6 expected points, with Smith only deriving a tiny +0.4 EPA on 23 pass attempts. Smith and the Seahawks were relatively poor at converting high-leverage third downs, going 5-for-13 and losing 4.1 expected points on those downs.

Caleb Williams was coming off of one of his best games of the year, though a lot of that production was generated in garbage time against the Lions. In this game, he took a ton of sacks (7), and derived negative expected points on pass attempts, averaging only 4.4 yards per. The Bears were also awful on high-leverage third downs, going 5-for-15 and losing 5.8 expected points.