When do you give Brock Purdy credit?
In my analysis to members last week, I didn’t give him credit when writing up Seattle at San Francisco. Instead, I leaned toward a small sample size of five games for Purdy.
However, Purdy had another great game during Wild Card weekend. To look at how he did, let’s look at success rate on passing plays.
A play is a success if the offense gets the following fraction of yards towards the next first down:
- 50% on 1st down
- 70% on 2nd down
- 100% on 3rd, 4th down
As I wrote last week in discussing Philadelphia, this is the most predictive team metric in the NFL.
Against Seattle, Purdy and the San Francisco pass offense had a 54.8% success rate. Let’s look at a few more passing success rates:
- 51.5% – San Francisco over the past 6 games with Purdy
- 42.8% – NFL average during the 2022 season
- 52.4% – Kansas City’s league best rate
Sure, Kyle Shanahan is probably making his life easy with play calling. It also helps to have Christian McCaffrey, George Kittle and Deebo Samuel.
However, I’m now leaning towards giving Purdy credit.
In addition, Purdy had excellent pocket presence against Seattle. He was able to anticipate pressure and scramble to an open part of the field.
Let’s also take a look at San Francisco’s defense. They led the NFL in points allowed per game (16.3) by a large margin during the regular season.
San Francisco is weaker in the underlying metrics though. They are 7th in pass success rate allowed, but they drop to 15th after my schedule adjustments.
The Niners defense has had the honor of facing Carolina, Denver and Arizona twice, all bottom five teams by my metrics.
Dallas is 7th in my pass offense numbers by adjusted success rate. With the exception of Kansas City, they will be the best pass offense San Francisco has faced this season.
It should also be noted that San Francisco faced Miami with Tua Tagovailoa and Atlanta with Marcus Mariota (they actually had some decent numbers when he was the QB). The pass offense numbers of these two teams have declined since the back ups took over. The numbers most likely underestimate the San Francisco pass defense.
My member numbers have San Francisco by 2.7 points. However, I don’t see value in Dallas.
As of Thursday morning, some books have moved to San Francisco -4, and I don’t think this number comes back towards 3.
Football betting with a PhD edge
This article was sent to The Power Rank’s email newsletter on Thursday, January 19, 2023. This newsletter is a free service that strives to be:
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