polynomials

The Panthers if only because they are earlier in the rebuild and won't be in cap hell thanks to a single contract. You just have more options.

We can look at Pythagorean expectation, which predicts the expected number of wins based on points scored vs. points allowed at this point in the season. And then teams that are winning more games than they "should" based on points scored vs allowed are "worse than their record", and conversely teams that are winning fewer games than they should are "better than their record."

By 9 or 10 games played in the expansion era (since 2002), 62% of teams are within 1 win of their expected wins. About 87% are within 2 wins. This season, interestingly, 100% of teams are within 2 wins of expected, and 85% are within 1 win.

There is 1 team who is 2 wins below expected (better than their record):

• Buffalo Bills. Expected: 7-3. Actual: 5-5.

There are 4 team who are 2 wins above expected (worse than their record):

• Philadelphia Eagles. Expected: 6-3. Actual: 8-1.
• Detroit Lions. Expected: 5-4. Actual: 7-2
• Seattle Seahawks. Expected: 4-5. Actual: 6-3.
• Pittsburgh Steelers. Expected: 4-5. Actual: 6-3.

Now personally I'd argue that no team is really better or worse than their record, because a team that is getting significantly more wins than expected based on points probably has the benefit of skillful players and coaches who can figure out how to keep games close and exploit advantages to squeak out victories (e.g., the Steelers). And teams that are below expected conversely underperform in such situations by habitually making costly errors in close games (Bills). Also, it can be skewed by big blowout wins or losses which in some cases could be isolated "burn the tape" outlier games that don't really reflect a team's average performance (Lions and Seahawks vs. Ravens). So make of this what you will.

Lol

I can see an unsportsmanlike but a fine? Come on

Jason Kelce is literally here just for them to have something else to talk about than these two teams lol

I wait to reserve judgment on any QB until the rest of the league has played him with the benefit of a full season of film on him. It's awesome that Stroud and Levis look so good, but there is likely to be some kind of regression once the league figures their weaknesses out more so we will see how they respond. It is exciting though

RG3

Never watched a game with such incredible stats for my team and yet was so frustrating to watch

Hurts really? Wow

What happened to Tyrod Taylor

So I decided to put Deshaun Watson hatred aside and just look at his stats and compensation to see how bad is contract actually is. To do this, I looked at the pro football reference Approximate Value (AV) and cap number as percent of salary cap (Cap %) for every QB in 2022 who started at least as many games as DeShaun Watson, which is 4 games. In this way, we can compare how much production each team got in 2022 in return for the salary cap spending.

Top AV/Cap%

1. Jalen Hurts (2857)
2. Brock Purdy (2000)
3. Davis Mills (1167) - Hunh? Davis Mills is among the worst with only 7 AV, but he also only took up 0.6% of the cap, so he was way cheaper than he was bad = great value! If only they had used that extra cap space well!

By this metric, DeShaun Watson was the 33rd ranked QB contract year with AV/Cap% of 93, or the 6th worst of all QBs with at least 4 starts, so as of the start of this season it was already a disaster.

The only contracts worse than his by this metric, Kirk Cousins, Matt Ryan, Sam Darnold, Ryan Tannehill, and Carson Wentz, in that order. Each of these player took up at least 8.8% of the cap, and all of them except Kirk were 29th or worse in total production. Kirk was 12th, but took up 15% of the cap, which is 3rd most expensive.

But - we should note it was not because he was bad, but because of his sexual misconduct suspension that he only played 6 games. The length of this suspension was originally supposed to be only 6 games total, so he would have played 11 games. If Watson had played 11 games under the original suspension terms, and had the same amount of AV per game, he would have had the 22nd ranked QB contract year - merely on the bad side of mediocre, but not a disaster. If he had started all 17 games it would have been 20th ranked. The additional 5 games imposed after appeal therefore turned it from a kinda bad contract year to a disaster.

Now, we don't know how Watson will play for the remainder of his contract. But if he continues to play similarly at 0.67 AV per start, and we assume the QBs on average will perform similarly and be compensated similarly over the remainder of his contract as they did in 2022, we can look at where each year of his contract would rank on a per game basis, had it occurred in 2022.

• 2023: 9.4% of cap, Contract Rank: 31. Terrible.
• 2024 - 2026: 31.55%, Contract Rank: 37. Horrific.
• 2027: 4.43% of cap, Contract Rank: 31. Back to "only" terrible.

What would we have to do simply not be overpaid? Well, in that particularly horrendous 2024-2026 stretch, he would have to put out something like 123 AV just be to be ranked 19th (out of 38 QBs with at least 4 starts). Patrick Mahomes put out 17 AV in 2022, for comparison.

This contract was in fact a disaster from the start, no matter who it was, because an QB would have to be about 7x better than Patrick Mahomes for at least 3 out of 7 years just to not be overpaid. 32% of the cap for 3 years guaranteed for 3 years is truly and utterly insane.