In 2013 the Detroit Lions were 6-3 after the first ten weeks of the season. Things were looking good. Really good actually. Aaron Rodgers and Jay Cutler were both out for the majority of the remaining season with injuries, while Detroit was in the driver's seat in their quest to win their first NFC North Division title. We all know how the rest of the season played out. They absolutely imploded down the stretch, losing every game but one dominant performance against a Rodgers-less Packers team on Thanksgiving, going 1-6 to finish the season 7-9. The kicker of it all? The Packers won the division with an 8-7-1 record. The division was there for the Lions' taking, and they squandered it.
Fast-forward to the present and the 2014 Detroit Lions are preparing for a Wild Card game vs. the Dallas Cowboys this Sunday, having just wrapped up a very successful regular season campaign. Last week Detroit went into their Week 17 matchup with the Green Bay Packers sitting at 11-4 and in first place in the division, but their 30-20 loss to Green Bay gives them a final record of 11-5 and the 6-seed in the NFC bracket.
Despite an excellent 11-5 season that fell just shy of a possible 2-seed and bye week in the playoffs, a number of Lions fans are still skeptical about having any sort of sustained success in the postseason let alone this success carrying over to future seasons.
I personally am not one of those Lions fans who is skeptical about the team's chances in the playoffs. But I understand those that are. We Lions fans have been burned too often and at times this Lions team has been…not good. Because of that, I decided to look at this Lions team and attempt to discern whether or not they're a legitimate playoff team with a bright future or if they're just Lions in sheep's clothing. First we'll take a look at the methods we'll use after the jump.
Method and Practice Run
To determine whether or not the 2014 Detroit Lions are the real deal or not, we're going to follow a similar methodology to the one Grantland's Bill Barnwell uses in his NFL season preview posts. We're going to use the following metrics to try to find an overall picture of the team's legitimacy:
Record
Expected Wins
Record in Games Decided by Seven Points or Fewer
Strength of Schedule
Turnover Margin
To help explain some of these methods, let's practice first on the 2013 Lions and see what these metrics tell us about them compared to how the Lions should have performed in 2014.
2013 Detroit Lions Record: 7-9
Expected Wins: 8.5
Record in Games Decided by 7 Points or Fewer: 3-6
2013 Strength of Schedule: Opponents had a win percentage of 0.452, giving Detroit the easiest schedule in 2013
2013 Turnover Margin: -12 (4th-worst in the league)
Pythagorean Expected Wins
Essentially, Expected Wins (also known as Pythagorean Expected Wins) is a formula that uses a team's point differential (Points Scored minus Points Allowed) as an indicator for future winning. It is generally believed to be a very strong indicator of a team's success. The formula for a team's Expected Win Percentage is:
Points Scored2.37/(Points Scored2.37 + Points Allowed2.37).
I know it looks a little complicated but it's truly not. Once you plug in the numbers for the formula and get an Expected Win Percentage, you multiply it by 16 (the number of games a NFL team plays in the regular season) to get your Expected Wins.
For the 2013 Detroit Lions, who scored 395 points and allowed 376 points the formula looks like this:
3952.37/(3952.37 + 3762.37) = 0.529175 Expected Win % x 16 games = 8.4668 Expected Wins
As we can see, based on how many points the 2013 Lions scored and how many their defense allowed, they should've been expected to win about 8.5 games.
This next part might be a little confusing but I'll try to keep it as simple as I can.
Grantland's Bill Barnwell created a chart that "lumps teams from 1983 to 2010 into groups by the difference between their expected win total and their actual win total, and then notes how that team's win total changed during the following year." Using this chart, we can get a general idea of how the 2014 Lions were predicted to fare based off how the 2013 team "underachieved."
So let's subtract the 2013 Lions' 7 actual wins from their 8.5 expected wins to get a difference of -1.5 and plug that into Barnwell's chart:
Expected Wins vs. Actual Wins
|
Teams
|
Avg. Change in Wins
|
-3 to -2
|
57
|
Improved by 2.6 wins
|
-2 to -1.5
|
44
|
Improved by 2.5 wins
|
-1.5 to -1
|
86
|
Improved by 2.0 wins
|
-1 to -0.5
|
124
|
Improved by 0.6 wins
|
-0.5 to 0
|
119
|
Neither improved nor declined
|
0 to 0.5
|
123
|
Neither improved nor declined
|
0.5 to 1
|
127
|
Declined by 0.9 wins
|
1 to 1.5
|
97
|
Declined by 1.5 wins
|
1.5 to 2
|
66
|
Declined by 1.8 wins
|
2 to 3
|
33
|
Declined by 2.5 wins
|
According to the chart, it appears that the 2014 Detroit Lions should've been expected to improve by 2-2.5 wins, also known as a 9-7 or 10-6 record. Not too far off! A little bit later we'll use the Expected Wins formula on this year's Lions to see if they outperformed or underperformed their expectations.)
Records in Games Decided by 7 Points of Fewer
The 2013 Detroit Lions went 3-6 in games decided by 7 points or fewer. While this is not a rock-solid metric it's a very simple and useful one in that, generally speaking, sometimes teams get a break or two and that makes the difference in a close game. Over time those breaks can be expected to normalize.
The Lions went 3-6 in those kinds of games, meaning they were a bit unlucky. An example of this is their loss to the Baltimore Ravens when Justin Tucker kicked 6 field goals to score all of Baltimore's points, including the game-winner with 38 seconds left to give Baltimore the win 18-16 despite a really good defensive performance by the Lions.
Looking towards the 2014 Detroit Lions, seeing how the 2013 team was a little unlucky in close games, it should've been expected that they their record in close games might normalize closer to .500.
2013 Strength of Schedule
The combined win-loss percentage of the teams Detroit played in 2013 was 0.452, the lowest in the NFL. This basically says their 7-9 record should've been better because they had an easy schedule. I think the eye-test confirms that, don't you?
Turnover Margin
A team's turnover margin is the difference between a team's defensive takeaways minus a team's offensive giveaways. A positive turnover margin means a team intercepted more passes and recovered more fumbles on defense than they threw interceptions or fumbled the ball away on offense.
As Grantland says, "the turnover margins produced by teams over a 16-game season are markedly inconsistent from year to year." Turnovers are pretty random in football. It's the difference between a perfect pass and a tipped ball that gets intercepted; the difference between an offensive lineman trying to pick up a botched handoff and a linebacker scooping it up instead; a running back holding the ball a little too loose when a safety's helmet knocks it out, etc. You get the point.
So looking at last year's Lions, who had a turnover margin of -12, we can tell there was a mixture of poor play and bad luck. Two plays that come to my mind, both from the Lions' loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, are Kris Durham inexplicably fumbling the ball along the sideline when no one touched him and when Calvin Johnson had Matt Stafford's desperation heave in his hands when one defender punched it out of Calvin's arms into the arms of another defender to seal the Bucs' win.
Overall, with a -12 turnover margin we can surmise that the 2014 Lions should've been expected get an extra win here or there based on that turnover margin normalizing.
Applying Methods to the 2014 Lions
Now let's apply all of these metrics to this current 2014 Lions team:
2014 Record: 11-5
2014 Pythagorean Expected Wins
Following their Week 17 to the Green Bay Packers, the Lions finish the regular season having scored 321 points and only allowing 282 (3rd-best in the NFL, and just 1 point more than Kansas City, FWIW). Let's plug those numbers into the formula:
3212.37 / (3212.37 + 2822.37) = 0.57615 Expected Win % x 16 games = 9.21842844 Expected Wins
Based on the Pythagorean Expected Wins formula these 2014 Detroit Lions should've gone 9-7 or thereabouts. Instead they went 11-5, a full two games better than expected. Generally speaking this means the Lions got lucky.
If we look back at the chart by Grantland we can see that between 1983 and 2010, 66 other teams had that range of positive difference from their actual and expected wins. We can also see that next year's Lions should be expected to win about 1.8 fewer games. We'll see.
Record in Games Decided by 7 Points or Fewer
The 2014 Detroit Lions went 6-1 (.857) in games decided by 7 points or fewer, a drastic difference from going 3-6 in similar games in 2013. Basically this means that the pendulum swung from one extreme to the other as the Lions got a little bit lucky (or a lot lucky depending on whom you talk to) in 2014.
Standout examples of this luck include the come-from-behind wins against the Saints, Falcons and Dolphins in back-to-back-to-back weeks. The Falcons game specifically stands out because of the Lions falling ass-backwards into a second chance at a game-winning field goal when they didn't get the snap off in time for their initial attempt that ultimately missed. So yeah…the 2014 Lions were lucky at times, which means we should expect a normalization next season.
2014 Strength of Schedule
For the whole 2014 season, the Detroit Lions' strength of schedule was 0.471, the 4th-easiest schedule in all of the NFL and the 2nd-easiest in the NFC. So they got a bit of a break from having played an easy schedule, though it's juuuuuust a bit tougher than last year's. Care to guess who had the easiest schedule in the NFC this season? Detroit's opponent on Sunday - the Dallas Cowboys.
2014 Turnover Margin
Here is a big difference between 2013 and 2014. Last year the Lions had a turnover margin of -12, while this season they have a turnover margin of +7, tied for 6th-best margin in the league. Part of this positive turnover margin is thanks to only having given the ball up via interception or fumble 20 times this season, also tied for 6th-best in the league. On the flip side, Detroit has 27 takeaways on defense, 20 of those coming from interceptions (tied for 3rd-best in the league).
Detroit's +7 turnover margin tells us that not only have they improved upon last season's margin, but it's not a big outlier that would say it's fluky. Instead they've picked off 20 passes through skill and a bit of luck, and recovered seven fumbles, which isn't an inordinate amount. The difference between 2013's margin and 2014's margin of +18 absolutely lead to one or two of Detroit's wins this season compared to last year.
Conclusion
When we take all of these factors into account, it appears the 2014 Detroit Lions got a fair amount of luck over the course of the season.
Using the Expected Wins formula, based on both last year's performance and this year's, they should've only gone 9-7. Instead they went 11-5.
Looking at their record in Games Decided by 7 Points or Fewer, they went 6-1. Odds are next season that's going to even out a bit more, or even possibly swing back into a sub-.500 record in those kinds of games like they were in 2013.
They had the 4th-easiest schedule in the league this season which was fairly lucky. In regards to next season we can already see that their schedule should be expected to be tougher than these past two seasons. Here are Detroit's home and away games for 2015:
2015 Home Opponents: Green Bay, Chicago, Minnesota, Arizona, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Denver, Oakland
2015 Road Opponents: Green Bay, Chicago, Minnesota, Seattle, St. Louis, San Diego, Kansas City, New Orleans
Altogether Detroit's 2015 opponents went a combined 135-121-0 in 2014, meaning the Lions' strength of schedule headed into next season is 0.527, the 14th-toughest schedule in the league. So yeah, things are gonna be a bit tougher next season.
All of that said, the real question of this post was whether or not the 2014 Detroit Lions are for real? All of the metrics we used in this exercise show that the Lions got pretty lucky, which in turn means they're probably not real in the sense that they're not going to be a consistent 11-5 team. So I suppose the straight answer is, no, these 2014 Detroit Lions are not for real.
And yet, in regards to sustaining some modicum of success, I think their turnover margin and the fact that the Lions have the 2nd-best defense and best run defense in the league means they're somewhat legitimate. But it largely depends on whether or not you believe Matthew Stafford will ever break out and whether or not this defense remains elite.
The run game was paltry as the Lions only averaged 88.9 rushing yards per game, ranking 28th out of the 32 NFL teams in that regard. But I think it's fair to say that Detroit's offensive line had a lot to do with that, dealing with some injuries and drop-offs in performance from Dominic Raiola, Rob Sims and Larry Warford. The offensive line will certainly be an area the Lions look to improve in the offseason.
If the Lions can re-sign Ndamukong Suh to continue anchoring their defense, I see no reason it won't remain an elite unit. (If they don't re-sign Suh, I have no idea what the defense will look like.) I also believe the offense is bound to improve in their 2nd year in Joe Lombardi's offensive scheme. At first glance, I think best-case scenario for the 2015 Lions is a 10-6 record. More likely it's 9-7.
As for this Sunday's Wild Card game in Dallas? Maybe I'm just being a homer, but I think the Lions pull it off and win their first playoff game in over two decades.
They've won the last 2 games they've played against the Cowboys, including that thrilling game in Dallas two years ago.
A number of the Lions players are familiar with the schemes run by Dallas' offensive and defensive coordinators, Scott Linehan and Rod Marinelli, both of whom are former Lions coaches (Marinelli was also the Bears' defensive coordinator between 2010-2012).
And while the 'Boys are the 2nd-best team at running the ball, the Lions have that stout run defense, which makes me think it'll come down to whether Stafford and his receiving corps can outplay Tony Romo and his. I have a feeling they will, with a huge game from Calvin Johnson and some big plays from the Detroit Lions defense sealing the deal in the second half.
Are the Lions for real? I think they are. But considering the evidence I've shown above, I completely understand if you think they aren't.
Update - Post Script: Grantland's Bill Barnwell, whose work we followed in using the metrics we used, wrote this paragraph about the 2014 Lions in his Wild Card round previews on Friday:
"The difference between this year’s Lions and the Lions of the past few seasons boils down to an improved defense and better luck in close games. Detroit was a scarcely believable 6-14 in games decided by one touchdown or less in 2012 and 2013, including season-destroying stretches in close games both seasons. This year? Detroit went 6-1 in one-score games, including that bizarre win over the Falcons in London, a stunning comeback gifted by the Saints, and a comeback victory over Jimmy Clausen in Week 16. The gap in point differential between the 2013 and 2014 Lions amounts to 0.7 wins of Pythagorean Expectation; the dramatic swing in close-game luck is how the Lions improved by four games this year."
So yeah, essentially what I said above.
Photo Courtesies: detroitjockcity.com
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