The strongest analytic and schematic trends of 2025, with Sam Schwartzstein

0:03Welcome to the athletic football show. I'm Robert Mays really good one on tap for you guys today. Our old buddy Sam Schwartzstein from Prime Vision, their analytics expert, is here to just talk about the year in like analytic and schematic trends. Essentially, Sam does a phenomenal job prepping for these games. We actually got into a little bit of his process and how he preps for some of these games, but they've done 15. This is going to be the 16th Prime Vision game that they've done this year. And so I just wanted to kind of mine him for what he has learned going through those 16 games. And so we dug into some of the large scale schematic trends in the NFL this season, some of the large scale analytics trends in the NFL this season, before talking about some of the work specifically like pocket health that they are doing on those prime vision broadcasts this year.

0:50And then we finished things off with a quick preview of the best Thursday night football game of the year and a reprise of maybe the best football game of the year with the Rams and the Seahawks. So really enjoyed this conversation with Sam. Thank you guys well as well. Let's get to it right now.

1:10joining us now it is one of our favorite friends of the show the analytics expert for Thursday Night Football on Prime Video our old buddy Sam Schwartzstein Sam how you doing man what's up Robert good to be back excited to have you here what we're doing today I wanted to just kind of mine you for information if that's okay with you that that's what we're going to do today always is always is it's december 17th and so you guys have done what 15-ish games yes on prime so far this year we have the biggest thursday night game of the year coming up today which we will talk about a little bit we never really preview the thursday night games on this feed i think just because of the way the schedule works if we didn't preview this thursday night game considering you're on and the falcon or the seahawks are playing the rams tomorrow i think i'd be like shirking my professional duty.

1:56So we are going to dig into that. So that'll be game 16. So you've had almost an entire season to just dive headfirst into every single aspect of who these teams are, how they approach things, the analytical side of it, the schematic side of it. And I wanted to just try to figure out like five or six lessons, themes, takeaways you've had from doing that work about the 2025 NFL season. So we're really just going to have you try to download your brain today on the athletic football show and see how far that gets us. Yeah, I think, you know, you guys are seeing a lot of the same things that we're seeing, especially listening each week.

2:37So I think probably the biggest thing for me is how we spend a lot of time in the Alex Camille isolating and analyzing singular scenarios. But so much of this game, especially in 22-5, is connected. You see teams going under center more and because not even to run the ball well, like we have the Seahawks, they don't even run the ball well. They just want to present everything to be similar. I think probably four years ago, the first time I was on this podcast, we talked about what analytics means to me. And the number one thing it is is do the thing your opponent is not expecting, disguising coverages, which is all over the place now.

3:12We have these conversations about pure progression reads versus concept area reads. And it's because there's too many disguised coverages. Team defenses are doing things that you're not expecting them to do. We see that with defensive alert. We've had to update defensive alert every single year since we launched it. That's our blitz identification model that we use that you'll see on Thursday night main broadcast as well as Prime Vision. To be able to update for what teams are doing, including coverage, including a bunch of different aspects of the game as it's changing from where we started four years ago.

3:41But for me, I go back to when it's what we're going to see a ton of on Thursday night this week is sometimes to go forward, you need to go backwards. And we're seeing under center. We're seeing play action. We're seeing all the buzzwords, which went away. And I was joking with a friend of mine about, you know, why did we ever start going away from under center on third down? Well, it was these double mug fronts. You could not block it up effectively. You're going to put a running back on a D end or a D tackle every time and double mug on third down. So that led to teams running gun. And then gun just took over everywhere.

4:15Teams running college. Now we're seeing teams with veteran quarterbacks. Hey, you can run a little bit of that old school stuff and make the defense play a little off kilter just from where you align the quarterback. And it's it's it's funny to see that that's the innovation this year that I'm seeing the most of. Maybe it's going so deep in this Thursday, but seeing that teams are like looking back in time to get better has been interesting. So we're going to try to hit a couple of different buckets. I want to do some schematic stuff and some analytical stuff. Obviously, those are going to blend in some of the conversations that we're having.

4:45It doesn't go as cleanly as you want it to. But I think this is kind of a schematic thought to be had about the 2025 season. And I'm curious about your thoughts on this, because the way that I've come to understand this and I've talked to Sean about this many times over the last 10 years, it's to me, it's like it's been at the crux of several football conversations I've had with Sean McVay since he became the Rams head coach about what the arc of the Rams offense has looked like specifically, because I think if you look at the Rams, they are often a canary in the coal mine or whatever other metaphor you want to use about where the league is going.

5:18And so when they moved away from that under center play action stuff, when Matthew got there in 2021, my understanding of that is because a lot of the defensive structures had started to change to take away a lot of the routes and the concepts that were best exploited coming off of under center play action. So when you're living in a single high world and you have all this single high post safety, if you're going to be running all these big crossing routes back across the middle of the field against cover three teams, which was the meta at the time, you can keep finding all these explosives. Well, if we're going to now be in an umbrella coverage world where you're sitting in a too high shell and you're rotating one of those safeties down and that rotating safety is essentially dropping right down into the window where you're going to run all those crossing routes, that's one deterrent.

6:07The other deterrent is the quarterback, the picture is going to change by the time he gets his head back around because all of these teams are playing disguise coverages. What's so interesting to me about this, that meta has not changed. That is still the same, but teams are now tapping back into the under center play action world. And my sense is that the reason that that has been worth it in the kind of calculation and the gambit they're running is that even if the coverages may not necessarily be best exploited by us being able to be under center and use play action in the way that they would have been in 2017, 2018.

6:44The benefits, because it makes us so much less predictable, are worth it, even if it's not necessarily as fit to the modern game as it would have been in the NFL 10 years ago. Do you think that is like a fair calculus in terms of how we've arrived at this point? Yes, I think you're a pretty smart guy and so is Sean McVay. So yes, of course, you know like i absolutely think so i think another part of the mcveigh innovations is they went to a lot of pistol when stafford first got there and it is it is that was their big thing in 23 in 23 they were like we're gonna be a pistol team and then they were a pistol team and you know what happens is i i want to give a little bit of a play call education to some people when you're running a run play we'll call it 96 zone which was their big zone three they're outside zone six gap being an outside gap nine being the position that's getting the football that's the running back that's what they called it what do you want to run play action off of that it's called pass 96 so you're just running the exact same thing as an offensive line and it's mirroring back but when the backs track is to a certain point the quarterback exits their ball handling skills they exit at a different point so those two are always married together now with the Rams be more of a duo team.

8:04And I don't know what number nomenclature they called it. We called it 92 duo. So more inside, close to the center. That's where you would hit inside on that play. You'd read that three technique on the front side. Now with the pass plays doing that, the quarterback can actually set up directly behind the center. What McVay first did that screwed me up because I'd never heard of it. We had inside zone. We had outside zone. There was another thing called mid zone so i would scream at people online as an uneducated person say what the heck are you talking about mid zone we can't just rebrand inside zone but that is what they call it that is what they call but that also is um talking to a couple of coaches that have been there on similar systems it lets you run similar landmarks up front for the offensive line but from the pass game on off of it the quarterback has a different landmark or when they end up And so when we talk about everything's connected, especially for these teams, even changing slight nomenclature and slight coaching points on run plays changes what you can do pass play wise.

9:06Because when you run a vertical play, safeties and linebackers feel differently than if you're running an outside play. And by that, it opens up different passing windows. So by marrying the two together, now being a more duo, downhill team, that creates more open areas that would not have been there had they been that original golf. Teams started standing up that D-end, which is like in Stanford it would be illegal to run outside zone to us where you're bootlegging to a stand-up end. That would just be not possible. We're not running that play that week. So it's, it's, it's how much can these teams marry and then adapt from, if there's a run game innovation, like the duo run, which I'm not the biggest fan of, but the teams that do it well, it's amazing.

9:47And then you can run duo pass off of it, which I am a huge fan of. So talking out of both sides of my mouth here. It's interesting. I think that makes total sense. And I also, I'm curious what you think about this, but just at first glance, it would seem that by doing some of that more vertical play action stuff where you're getting to set up behind the center and the Lions are another great example of this, right? Like it's kind of ironic that Jared started doing a ton of it after he left LA, but like that's pretty much what the Lions passing game looks like. Number one overall picks can do a lot of good things.

10:14You know, like that's my team draft. You know, like when you do that, you're not cutting off half the field. And so you actually can access more of the passing game off play action than you would have been able to when we were in sort of an outside zone boot world. So it's almost like you're combining these two different things where the reason the Rams went to such a specific drop back place is because they had a quarterback who you watch Matthew Stafford play. Every blade of grass is on the table when Matthew Stafford is your quarterback. And that's what they wanted. And so now it feels like they're trying to get all of the benefits and the unpredictability unpredictable nature of the combination of run game under center stuff while still wanting to access every blade of grass in the passing game.

11:00And part of the reason that you can do that is because you have a more vertical play action game instead of a boot play action game that's cutting off certain opportunities. Yeah, it's, it's definitely fun. Football rules, by the way. Football rules. And a team's going to figure this out and the team's going to come up with a new personnel grouping. I've seen teams to stop quick game recently dropping players that have no idea what they're doing dropping, but hey, if you're going to answer a blitz with quick game, I'm just going to get hands up. We have the Andrew Vink Gingles of the world who are masters at it.

11:31We saw it last week. Colby Parkinson had a 51 % target rate entering the week in the red zone. So what does Aiden Hutchinson do? Oh, he sees that he won too quickly. I'm getting hands up. New things are going to come all the time and it really is the coolest thing in the world because it's never going to be solved. Let's go from a schematic thing. I think we can talk about the personnel stuff as well because that kind of blends both worlds and I do want to hit that as well. Is there anything purely from a strategic or math perspective that has really come up for you a lot this year that kind of goes beyond offensive or defensive X's and O's?

12:09We can even talk about kicking here if you want to, but a strategic or analytic trend. What are we talking about? It's the same. Kicking is the same this year in the NFL as it's been since I started covering the sport. Yeah. I think what I've been fascinated with is that the fourth down execution by teams is different across the board. We're seeing a new meta. There's a lot of teams in the Institute of the Tush Push, false starting or not. There are teams that are just doing it with tight ends. And that's more and more. And what's great about it is years ago when they first introduced this, It was all about, hey, we need to actually practice it.

12:46I remember the Giants ran a tush push on national televised game. They never practiced it. They were just like, oh, we're just going to do it years ago. And now we're seeing teams do it. Could be the last year of it. But teams do that. And we're seeing not a lot of teams question whether they go for it. You're seeing a lot of teams knowing on play call design. We have, again, two teams that run the ball the most coming up on Thursday night this week with the Seahawks and the Rams on third and medium plus. so third and three plus is they're running the ball at the highest clip because they can go for it on fourth down.

13:18The Seahawks don't as much. They rely on their defense. But the Rams, they're historically not a big fourth down team, not a big decision-making team. They went for it twice last week on the first series where there was no recommendation to go for it. It was a wonky area of the field, yeah, but they went on fourth and four and a fourth and seven. And what they do is they just go to Puka Nakua. I like how Matthew Stafford covers, looks at all blades of grass, but most of them have to involve Puka Nakua. or Devontae Adams in some capacity. And it's how can I find those guys in the right spots? And I think that's been a big thing.

13:49And, you know, I originally hired to help explain some of these decision-making processes, and I still help on Prime Vision go for two down eight and go for two down nine type scenarios. But I feel like more and more teams are just adapting to this updated meta of the game, of utilizing analytics to help them. And I think most important people need to figure out is I'll never tell you exactly what a team should do. because I'm not in their meeting rooms. I do not know what their two-point play is. I do not know where they feel, how good they are in fourth and four. So I wouldn't go and tell you that Sean McVay shouldn't go for it.

14:20It's not analytically sound to go for it. But if you feel confident, because that's really what conversion probability, a lot of this stuff is made up of. What have teams or have you performed well in similar scenarios around the league and in this place, this game state? But if you're not ready for it, don't overuse the analytics, in my opinion. so my the McVay part of this is definitely something worth paying attention to because like you said they were not historically a team that was going forward a lot on fourth down so watching what they've done all season especially what they did last week it's like a holy shit this is we are now in a different world to me the I cannot believe we've arrived in this place the Pittsburgh Steelers went for it on fourth and one from their own 30 yard line in the first half of an NFL game last week.

15:08Like that, imagine if I told you three years ago, we're going to be watching a Mike Tomlin team that's going to go for it on fourth and one from their own 30. Remember when Kevin Stefanski did that for like the first time and people lost their minds? Like it was just, it broke people's brains that a coach would even consider doing that. And now we have Mike Tomlin doing it on national television. And there's still some consternation about it, but for the most part, the response to it It's kind of like, yeah, that's just kind of how we do things now, which just seems like a crazy place to have reached the right place, but a wild place.

15:43That would have been your inception totem to wake up that you were in the dream because, OK, this is not real. Sorry, this is not this is a fantasy world we're living in. Yeah, I think what it comes down to is the play design. I think ultimately that's that's what people don't really get about numbers analytics is just teaching you play design and where you can be more creative. and them putting cam hayward in to do the tush push and darnell washington who finally admitted his weight that's why on our show we put 300 plus pounds because we were like we're definitely not putting his list at 265 and so like you know him at 311 pushing cam hayward a tight end like not cam hayward but his brother hayward yeah yeah yeah yeah and so hey that that is that is where this stuff comes in analytics are exposing you to where you can be unique and now with the dynamic kickoff where teams now and the end of the season have been electing to do touchbacks and they're going to give you the starting field position at the 35 because they don't want to have the dynamic return.

16:40And so you're seeing a lot of teams even want to go for it more because if you're giving the ball back at the 35, every coach can do that cost analysis going, all right, I really need to go and score touchdowns. If you're going for it backed up, teams are now figuring out that two times three is less than seven because because that's really the calculus on a lot of these fourth down decisions. Oh, every time you kick a field goal, you cannot score a touchdown on that drive. And you have likely 12 drives per game. So you need to maximize your touchdown drives over field goal drives. That's ultimately what this is.

17:13So I think seeing teams do that and then seeing teams midseason trades have been big. I know that's something you guys cover a lot of like we saw player for player trades. You know, we've seen teams try and maximize in season. So I think that's also teams trying to go all in has been, has been cool to see. This year specifically on the all in front, it just feels like this was the year to do it because I know I was guilty of this. We were guilty of this on our show where I think there was a lot of just benefit to the doubt of the mainstay teams with the mainstay quarterbacks. Those are going to be the teams that you have to worry about.

17:46Teams like the Broncos, the Patriots, the Niners. You know, I praise the Niners and the Patriots for not doing anything at the trade deadline because I was like, good for you guys understanding like what you actually are. This probably isn't the season. And then you're sitting there last week and it's like, maybe the Patriots should have done more at the trade deadline. Like that's how quickly it happened. But you think about like the Jacoby Myers trade and the fact that the Jacoby Myers trade in the moment, because we had higher profile trades that day, it kind of got lost in the shelf a little bit where it's like, I know I like flippantly made the joke.

18:16we already have a Jacoby Myers at home with Parker Washington. Jacoby Myers has been great, and he has been transformative for the Jaguars offense, and they got him for a fourth and a sixth round pick. In the moment, that would seem like, what is this really going to do for us in the back half of the season? But it clicked immediately, and because all these teams feel so jumbled together, something as seemingly modest as a trade for Jacoby Myers midway through the season might be enough to like make the Jaguars a dangerous team in the AFC playoffs. It's a weird season, like an incredibly weird season.

18:50Yeah, I mean, when I was doing the XFL, I would talk to all the sports books and the sports commissions to try and carry our games. And one sports book, when I offered to give them a bunch of preseason game data, they said, I don't need your data to sit the line. I just need the two quarterbacks. And I was like, what do you mean? I was like, just give me the two quarterbacks. They'll touch us to be worth around seven points. They'll feel those were your worth around three points, right? I was like, yeah, he goes, just give me the two quarterbacks. And I was like, so I've kind of lived by that motto when I look at team strength, you know, like but this is not the year to do it.

19:19I think one of the cool things, too, is like when you think about like rookie contract windows, everyone thinks quarterback. I think for us on Thursday, it's this defense, the lowest paid defense in the NFL is Los Angeles Rams. And they're one of the best in the NFL. Like they're in a lot of their rookie window contracts for a lot of the guys on the team. And so I think you're seeing teams that are kind of going and weirdly all in. We had Jacoby Myers on the Raiders the week he got traded. And so I had a bunch of third down stuff, one of the highest third down target rates. And I was like, oh, well, I get to throw this in the garbage now.

19:51And so that trade surprised me, too. And I think what these teams will do to try and make a huge playoff push, and it will come down to a lot of the high leverage plays to kind of cap off analytics. Like football is not poker, but there are certain hands in poker on your plane that are going to be the highest leverage plays that you can. and it's very similar in football. The team that wins fourth down will often win the game because it's a turnover or keeping possession or keeping a touchdown drive alive. And I think that we've seen last year it was the Commanders who way over leveraged fourth down conversions to get them into the playoffs and succeed in the playoffs.

20:29And we're seeing that again this year. The teams that can really benefit from fourth down and almost every Panthers game where they're winning is because they had some massive leverage swings on fourth downs. And I think you're, you're, you're, we always talk about expected points and fractional points and things like that. At the end of the day, you either win or you don't, you score, you don't, the results do matter and being results oriented does matter. So I think teams are finding, Hey, let's go all in a few times per game. And that's where we'll have our success. There are two things that you said that I want to just drill down on a little bit more The kickoff part of this and the fact that the 35 feels like a dangerous place to allow teams to start.

21:12And I think that's why you had so many teams not willing to kick touchbacks early in the season. But and maybe this is anecdotal, but I'm curious what your numbers say about this. Are we inching toward a place where making sure the opponent is starting on the 35 is less dangerous than them starting at midfield? Because we've seen so many of those kickoffs this year. Like think about the Bills game. Think about the Bills Patriots game. Like if those kickoff returns don't happen, do the Bills win that game? And so I know that coming into the season, that's the reason that the touchback got moved to the 35 is if you look at points per drive based on a starting field position of the 35 yard line, that was the tipping point for teams where they were saying, you know what?

21:52No, we're going to abide by the rules here. We're going to embrace the spirit of this thing. And we're going to allow kickoff returns to happen. Do you think we're getting to a place where teams are going to be risk averse again because the downside of giving a team the ball on the plus 45 compared to the minus 35 is worth it in the calculus for some of these teams? Two things. I hope not. I clearly love the dynamic kickoff return. But last week we saw that the Buccaneers kick a touchback every single time. And that was outdoors. You know, the teams in the dome. I think the biggest thing is, like you said, I don't I don't want the risk, but also I really want the practice time.

22:28I get limited time with these guys. I want to do my third down cards. I'm scared of third down blitz period. Or if you're Todd Bowles, I want to maximize my time to make sure I have the exact looks I want on third down blitzes. And, like, I think that's a big battle in offices right now. And, you know, if there's a guy like Rashid Shahid, I would be surprised if they're giving the ball to Rashid Shahid to return it with one of the best kickoff return. But it's so funny. You talk about the positives. If you can do the dirty ball kick or the line drive kick and you can have a team start inside the 20, that's just as massive as starting the plus 40.

23:06You starting inside your own 20 is a huge aspect. And you can dirty ball kick in the NFL and they can just have it bounce and hit the field of play. You're only kicking from the 35. There are some easy ways to get that thing rolling out the back of the end zone. You don't have to have them hit it. I think if teams wanted to practice that, it would give them even more advantage or teaching their team to cover. You're also losing plays if the if the Buccaneers had kicked timed down. So what people don't understand is by having returns, you're actually shortening the game. It's eight seconds per return and it shortens the game because that's a time down.

23:41When you kick a touchback, it's an untimed down. I'm sure they would want to have had to limit some of the time the Falcons had to come back by kicking it in the field of play to have some more time or give the Falcons less time to come back. It's funny to me because when you're talking about you have 12 drives a game and if you are kicking field goes on those drives can't score touchdowns. I've really gotten to a place and I'm I'll be honest. I'm one of the nerds online. That's just like I want to go for it on for it all the time because in my mind now the way that I think about the sport is that it is a sport of possessions.

24:12You only have so many possessions over the course of a game. And if you are, it's, it almost come and I'm not like an analytics expert, but like for my like very novice brain, it kind of reminds me a little bit of how baseball got to three true outcomes where it's like, if we are not, if I'm bunting, I only have 27 outs over the course of a game. If I'm giving a team an out, that is an incredibly valuable thing to sacrifice. And so if we're punting or Or if we're kicking field goals on four down, we only have 12 possessions. It's a possession centric sport and we should value the possessions more.

24:44At the same time, this year has been like a resounding example of how much field position also matters. And so it's like this crazy kind of push pull of a being a possession based sport, but also a very stark reminder that 20, 20 yard difference in field position goes a long, long way in the quality of those drives. And so I don't know where in the field position versus total possessions battle I sit and which side of the line, because I think this year has been a confusing one on that front. I think I, I'm so with you, man. And like I spent, I send you a lot of my stuff I work on in the off season, get your advice.

25:23But one of the things we work on a lot was the end of game suite, which is trying to give you that path to victory when you're going to get the ball back. And ultimately, when can you go to victory formation on our show? and when you look at it the average possession in the fourth quarter is 237 and so when you're on defense you need to get a stop before that 237 to try and increase your chance to come back but I also was like why are we teams not starting the four minute offense at 10 minutes if you're up two possessions do it and then I go well because they're built for pass so if you're a team that's built for the run like the Rams are you can start closing out possessions and And one of the things we looked at is, oh, the Bills actually don't have that many possessions in the fourth quarter.

26:06And we thought originally, oh, you know, they're going too fast or they're not going – their defense is letting teams move the ball on them. No, they're starting four-minute earlier. And because they're committed to the ground game, they can close games out better. If you're committed to the pass game and you're trying to pass all the time, we had another issue. The Buccaneers decided to throw the ball in second and 14 last week. They throw an incompletion. That's 45 seconds that they're then going to lose on the expected time because that time running through the play added 40 seconds. Now, David Sills catches the ball with 40 seconds left.

26:40The game would have been over on that third and 28, but it's not because of the team's not committed to try and run some clock. Because at the end of the game, limiting your opponent's possessions to come back is just as valuable because if a team's banking on 12 and they end up with 11, you may win. And so I'm like battling this and you're there's the Chip Kelly's the world run so much. So you get your 14 and 16 possessions like old school college football. And then you have the teams, which is great for television, the Kansas City Chiefs that play so many one score games because they're too successful.

27:12They always run the clock. And so they were at like 10 possessions per game last year. They're like a little over nine possessions per game. And so it's like, oh, where are you going to balance how we're going to maximize this early game possessions and minimize your opponent's possessions later in the game? And again, like you're saying, I can talk out of both sides of my mouth on what's valuable. I truly don't know. And that's what's fun about this is that it's so far from being solved. But I do think the quality of a lot of the decision making has improved. And I think a perfect example of this, and I want to ask you about this specifically, watching what Mike McDonald did with the timeouts.

27:47And I loved him shouting out his game management guy after the game. He got a game ball. We just have more people in these roles that are optimizing decision making in these situations for these teams. So when you look at timeout usage at the end of these games, do you think that what in your mind have been the hallmarks of the improvements in how teams and coaches are handling in the aggregate these situations in a better way than they would have been five, ten years ago? I think teams are really good at not wasting them on offense because you have control on whether you can stop the clock on offense a lot of the time.

28:20So teams have gotten really good. Everyone knows call defensive timeouts, start calling them. And we see teams calling them at five minutes, two-score game. It's 50-50 split across the league in around three minutes. That's when teams really start committing to calling their timeouts. I think what's really good is, like you said, implied outcomes. So when you get to your opponent at a certain point in the field, you'll start calling timeouts, assuming they're going to score. We saw it with the Cardinals-Seahawks game the first time around. And they started calling timeouts because the Cardinals got inside the 5-yard line or inside the 10-yard line.

28:53They're your maximum amount of plays you can have. You can run 28 seconds off the clock because you have the 7 seconds per play, 4 plays. You can't have more of that unless there's a penalty. And so you know, okay, I can start calling timeouts. instead of letting them score, call the timeouts and hedge on how much you need to come back in the game. And they were able to win because of it. And then Brian Ayers, again, a guy who I've talked to for years, he was there with Pete Carroll. He's been at many different roles. And the way that Seattle has their analytics group set up is amazing. They're very forward thinking as well as current thinking.

29:26They're thinking 10 years in the future and also in current time, not just how do I solve today. And I think what they're able to do on making sure that they're getting, hey, what's the most likely outcome for this drive for the offense to maximize my time to come back? I think we're not seeing a lot of people wasted or will take the delay game now on third and seven to go to third and 12. It's shocking when they don't. It's shocking when you see a team burn a timeout on offense to save those five yards because I think we've so quickly realized that it's the wrong way to handle those situations.

29:59But again, imagine a team even five years ago, especially 10 years ago, taking a delay of game instead of calling a timeout. They would get excoriated like they would. The criticism in the moment would be so resounding. And now it's the exact opposite where we know for a fact that's the wrong thing to do. I feel like that happened much quicker than I was paying attention to in real time. Yes. And I think I think what's happening. We talked about this earlier in the year, but I think analytics is being demystified a lot of ways because of LLMs and people interacting with data in more unique and easier ways where it can be explained to you.

30:39And just like all things time, we would have never thought we'd be spending so much time on cell phones. There's our famous AT &T, McKinsey, right up where McKinsey said, don't ever invest in cellular telephones. It's never going to be good enough. They won't be widespread enough. So like this on anti McKinsey, but I'm just saying they did write that report for AT &T. As I work through the crippling addiction I have to my telephone. Hey, look, like we barely use it for actual phone calls now. Still call the telephone. So it's like I think I think that just time has helped a lot of people, but also people's integration.

31:14I think like podcast, I give a lot of credit to Ben Baldwin being so crazy online about fourth downs and making fourth downs accessible. because guess what? Owners and coaches and players, they all have Twitter. They see these conversations and it gets into their brain over time. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then I want to come back and dig into a little bit more schematic nerdery with you. Let's do it.

31:42All right, so we had the under center stuff, okay? And the return to under center, which by the way, I just cannot love it more. Not only from like the proficiency of it and like the veracity of the choice, just stylistically, like this is what football is to me. Like, and so going back to this place has been so beautiful. Like I just love the fact that, oh yeah, the best, the smart, good thing to do is to have an under center and play action game that are tied together. That's the best thing to do in the NFL in 2025. I love that we've arrived back here. That aside, anything else schematically that you think has been like a drumbeat this year that's been particularly important and you feel has kind of been an indicator of what good football looks like in 2025?

32:27I do want to do one quick thing on the under center stuff is like, I'm talking to Kirk Herbstreet this week, preparing for the game. And he was like 13 personnel under center. What is this Stanford 2011? We had Zach Ertz and Kobe Flaner and Kobe Flaner played the Colby Parkinson role who would split out at wide receiver. And it's like what like this is like you guys were doing this years ago like it's not like the craziest innovation um just and i think to me you hit it earlier in the year on the podcast but like the guys like jackson haws where you're getting these hyper specialized players that can do things that make the other team go what am i gonna do here and he's him from a blocking tight end perspective but it's much better than reporting eligible spencer anderson type of guy he's not actually going to get the football having a guy who can actually catch football he caught a football on tnf earlier in the year for a touchdown and so the specialized players and whether it's nick and i'm going to get his name wrong and i'm in warry thank you um i'll be good tomorrow uh he he specialized over 220 pounds playing nickel and they're like oh the the seahawks never got a nickel defense against rams 13 personnel in week 11 yeah you don't have to this guy's massive so he's he's just he can move like and it's like you know old school bill belichick style swift swiss army knife players that you can play on offense defense kyle hamilton is crazy to me because he's listed as a safety and then he's playing sam on linebacker like old school 25 fronts that we saw in college and like if you told me oh a safety is playing the sam on linebacker in an under front i'd be like oh we're running at that guy all day well guess what teams can't do it you have a guy who's playing who's the defense changed when he played the deep half in the earlier in the year and now he's playing on the ball I think finding these players that you can do anything with this positionless football for a center I would freak out anytime I saw something wonky I hated spinner spinners where the defensive end would stand up as a linebacker because I don't have to explain to the guard well he's not actually and then you love what the Rams do where eight and zero, we're the same number versus Byron Young.

34:40Like, come on. Then they're going to wear the midnights and I'm going to go, what? I can't see these numbers. Like, come on. I'm screaming with a mouth garden. I think those are different ways that teams have schematically changed the game by what makes this all again. This all goes back to making teams confused. I'm not telling you don't copy Patrick Mahomes. You'll never be Patrick Mahomes. What makes your team unique? What's the best version of your team? Is it going for it on fourth downs? If it's not, don't do it. but what makes your team unique and special and maximize those players that can do that?

35:13Yeah, it's what you look at it. And a lot of the teams who live in nickel and are proficient in nickel, like you just said, they're the teams that have those guys. Like it's Kyle Hamilton, it's Nick Emanwari, it's Cooper Dejean. It's these guys who are big and they can hold up in those situations. And, you know, we had this thought about positionless football. I remember talking about this a lot in like the 20, 2015, 2016 ish range. And the guy I always go back to is when the Cardinals drafted Daylon Buchanan, right. Where it was like, they had these players like Daylon Buchanan, where it was like Mark Barron was like this, or you had these safeties who walked down as undersized linebackers.

35:53And that, that part is cool, right. Where it's like, is he a safety? Is he a linebacker? But if he's like one of your two off ball linebackers, you have gotten too small. Like we pushed it too far the other way. And it seems like now we've reached like the correct happy place when it comes to how these undersized second level defenders should it should fit into your defensive plans. And teams have actually realized like what that should look like. And there's several examples of it. I played, Monty Kiffin was the defensive coordinator in 2011 at USC. And we had an argument in our room because they had their Will linebacker who was listed at 185 pounds.

36:37I think something, Bailey was his name. And then they would have TJ McDonald who was listed as their strong safety. It was like 225, he felt like 240 when he hit you. And I was like, no, we're going to argue about who's actually who. but what happened was is that 185 pound guy played out of position he didn't know really what to do because he was the actual safety listed wrong but now you're having guys who are playing spots that they know what they're doing you're not just taking dion buchanan saying hey i want size weight speed at this spot on the field no but they're actually playing positions that they're comfortable and they know what they're doing like i felt like sometimes camp chancellor he actually was my oh this is why you don't play in the nfl because he would take the wrong step off of the read and then still make a TFL.

37:23I go, okay, I'm not athletic enough to handle that. It actually doesn't matter how right you are sometimes, but these guys now are right. They're fast. They're in place. And this is no camp chancellor. Hey, he's a legend. Legion of boom forever. But this is the getting guys that are going to comfortable in their spots, doing things that are unnatural is a game changer right now. I also think that it's about player development. Like this is a player development story. And I think what Mike McDonald has done a really smart job of, and I know this was the plan going in and it was a plan for this reason, is that too often with these guys, remember I had like the Isaiah Simmons plan early on where he was doing everything and they were doing this with Derwin James too, where it was like, oh, he's going to play 10 positions, right?

38:04And he was a little bit deeper into his career. So there's less danger to it. But I think early on specifically, when you have these guys who fall in between these positional designations, there's an inclination to move them around because it makes the defense harder to get a beat on. In actuality, what you should do is, especially early in their careers, have them learn one thing. Have them do this one thing well. And then maybe you can start to expand that when you need to solve problems on your defense, similar to the Kyle Hamilton thing. But I feel like limiting the scope of what Emanwari has been asked to do as a rookie has been one of the reasons that he's been able to acclimate to this faster than some of these other positionless guys who were brought along with the wrong plan at the wrong tempo five years ago.

38:49100%. I think – and there's going to be times, struggles against tight ends, one-on-one sometimes. We'll see if that comes to fruition this week. But, like, getting guys to be comfortable early, building confidence, providing problems to the offense or to the defense is huge. I think as we get, you know, a relative athletic score and all these data points to identify how good players are. We're going to have to try and figure out how do we put them in the right spot once we have. We actually did a modified combine at the XFL. We had a regular combine because historical data is so valuable. We did a combine with Dave Anderson, and he was able to put tracking chips on pads, on players, and we could identify which position you should be based off your tracking data.

39:35Even if you were listed, remember this is XFL minor league players that we need to find anything we can find. We were able to move guys from an athletic profile to different positions because of that tracking data. And I think you'll see some of this moving players around to different spots on the field because of the access to tracking data. And now teams are requesting it of colleges when they're scouting players. Hey, can we get your tracking data from practice to be able to evaluate players more effectively? I want to talk about pocket health because this is something that I don't know how long we've been talking about this.

40:09We've been talking about a long time, big dog. long time. And it's, it's been, it's been a really fun back and forth to have it start as like a kernel of an idea because, you know, it's just, when we think about pressures and how we tally pressures and how we think about the way quarterbacks are affected in the NFL, the data just, and this isn't to criticize the people who do it this way, it's crass, right? Like there's just, it's not super specific in terms of like how quarterback play is affected by those pressures. I think NextGen has done a very good job of being able to bucket the difference between pressures and quick pressures, right?

40:44So if you have a pressure that's three and a half seconds into a play, it's hard to know whether that's on the quarterback, whether that's a product of play design. With quick pressures, it's like, all right, if this guy had eight quick pressures that he saw over the course of a game, then the defense and the pass rush plan clearly was able to affect the game and like warp the game for the quarterback. We have that. But even those are like pretty broad buckets. By going to what you guys have done with pocket health, it changes our understanding of what pressure is because it's talking about the space overall, not just one player who might get an initial pressure, but the rest of the pocket is completely clean.

41:24That was part of the problem we've been talking about over the years is that you'd have these teams with one good pass rusher, and that guy would have a pressure, quote unquote, because he would bull rush the left tackle into the quarterback, but then the quarterback would just be able to step up in the pocket. And so the pocket health wasn't affected overall in the same way that we would we'd want to know so we could come to an understanding of like how much the quarterback was actually being bothered. And so as you guys have sat with pocket health as an idea and as it's been folded into the broadcast this year, I want to ask you just about a couple of realizations or just numbers associated with that, that you have found particularly interesting as you guys have started to dive into it.

42:04Yeah. And I give a lot of credit to Alex Strand, our coordinating producer and Scott Carpin, who's a producer on Prime Vision, as well as Dan Palowski, who's our product lead on this project. The whole team in Israel, our paved team of scientists working on this, because this was like a very big dream that we had originally when we started doing this. And all the tools that we learned from defensive alert, from defensive vulnerability last year to coverage ID all helped us be able to build this thing. that was kind of like a pipe dream that we loved. Built it with Andrew Whitworth, too. I think what was a big thing is like, let's build with a big-time expert.

42:39Yes, I know O-line play and analytics, but I'm not a Hall of Fame O-lineman. That's not why you have me on your show. And so being able to build with somebody like that was really, really cool. And what we were able to learn a lot about is also how good quarterbacks are at knowing their internal clock when O-line's about to be beat. And we saw a lot of times where quarterbacks were getting the ball right away at the right time. And how they beat pressure and how they beat collapsing pockets is so important. Again, why pressures are not a perfect metric like no metric is. Pocket health isn't even exactly perfect is because we can only measure results.

43:18If you hold on to the football, it gets a pressure. If you never had the football, there's no pressure. So what we can do now is see how quarterbacks react to those collapsing pockets. And for me, I kind of was hard on Caleb Williams. My wife is a USC football fan or father-in-law went to, or my father-in-law went to USC. So I watched a lot of Caleb Williams when he was in school. And so I was, I'm a fan of his. And then I saw last year, how many sacks he took 68 sacks. Again, I went on prime vision and said he could throw seven more interceptions and be legal and have this and have league average sacks.

43:52And he'd be better off. Like I was really getting, I said it all last year. I said all last year, I wish he threw more interceptions. Look, people listen to this podcast We're admitting how wrong we are most of the time And I think, because I really didn't think That he could fix how we handle the pocket And I was sharing with you this earlier You know, he was getting sacked 38 % of the time when the pocket collapsed Last year So when we look at collapsing pockets We have a metric that we do from 100 to 0 On the health of the pocket When it gets below around 25 % We say that's collapsed That means someone's beat on the O-line Depending on where they are Because if you get beat closer to the quarterback It's a little bit different and we see, hey, when Nate got below 24%, he was getting sacked 30 % of the time.

44:33That was by far the highest. Now he's top six at 12%. Talk about, he's three times better at avoiding sacks on the pocket collapse. And we got to show a really cool video and our visualization's awesome. You got to witness the growth of the visualization from a janky little tether line that I was obsessed with. I go on maternity or paternity leave for a week and my boss said, we had this idea of putting one or like 36 orbs on the ground that we had of, hey, here's where the safe spots and unhealthy spots were. And not a lot of people liked it. It was like, no, he should go to this spot. And then I come back from break and my bosses were like, here's 652 dots.

45:11What do you think? And it's like, I'm out. You guys do it. This is pretty sweet. And so like Caleb Williams, being able to find those healthy spots you should go to. And that's what's beautiful. Last week we had Kirk Cousins who doesn't move in the pocket. But he still beats collapsing pockets with his arm. I'm just going to get the ball out now. That's what Matthew Stafford does. And then you have guys like Caleb Williams, like Baker Mayfield, that want to use their legs and find those healthy spots. And another cool thing about Caleb is when you look at an unhealthy pocket, we start categorizing that at 50 % pocket health.

45:46How long does it take you to go from 50 % to 25 %? His is the longest. So when things are unhealthy, he's finding the healthy spots in the pocket without throwing the ball or then ultimately getting to the spot to then let the play develop and throw the ball because you don't want to always throw it quickly. The guys aren't as further down the field. But his ability to manipulate the pocket itself has been an unbelievable adjustment from last year. And I couldn't be more excited to watch him play football, especially when he's on our broadcast, because we can now evaluate and show that little magicianry that he has.

46:21I remember last year I can't remember what show it was it might have even been this offseason me and Derek were talking about Caleb Williams and about the sack taking and I was sitting there like my brain was breaking because when you look at guys that just take a disgusting amount of sacks the example that always comes to mind for me is the last Carson Wentz season in Philadelphia was like one of the most unwatchable versions of NFL offense I can remember I think he took 60 sacks that year and you just watched him during that season And there is a complete lack of awareness about how to navigate that space.

46:56And for the most part, guys who took a lot of sacks, that's the problem is that they just aren't, they don't have a sense for what that space is supposed to look like. But you watch Caleb at USC and you even watched him last year. And it's like, that's not his problem. So I, I, part of me, I'm looking at the actual results and I'm like, guys do not get better if they're this bad at this. Like this is potentially a fatal flaw, but then watching him stylistically, like he doesn't fit in the bucket with a lot of the other guys who've struggled with this. So I do have faith that this can get better.

47:30And so to watch what has happened this year has been so soothing because it lets me know that I'm not losing my mind. That that that's my favorite part about what this has looked like, other than the fact that it has made the Bears a much better football team. Yeah, and I think what we found going in is like, okay, are we going to make this an O-line metric or are we going to make this a quarterback metric? How are we going to evaluate this really? And again, like all things in football, it is 11-on-11 football and it is a team metric. But we can see how long it takes for O-lines to get to 50 % pocket health.

48:04We can see for how long it takes for quarterbacks. And one of the things that's interesting is if you do a cover zero blitz, that pocket is collapsing quickly. That doesn't mean the quarterback's in danger. It means that if they don't do something right now, they're in big danger. They need to scramble, throw, or they're going to take a sack. That's what we've seen with pocket health zero. It's either you get hit or you get sacked or you have to get out of there right now. And I think that that is so enlightening to see because when I were viewing for this upcoming week, seeing Matthew Stafford, when they played the Vikings in the last wild card game last year, Pockets were collapsing really fast, but he was actually dominant in collapsing pockets because he knew what to do with the ball.

48:49Versus Sam Darnold, the pockets were collapsing later. But what it was was twists. And when a twist gets home, it's unencumbered and it's a D lineman. They know what they're doing back there. And so the timing in which a pocket collapse, how it collapses is all valuable information to know who whose fault should we attribute this to? It's a unit. Quarterback can have things that they're great at. O-line could have things that they're great at. Ultimately, the whole group needs to work together. As you've dug more into the data holistically and looked at who succeeds, who has strengths in this area, any other guys or teams that come to mind that you think have been particularly surprising or illuminating as you've looked at all of the numbers from this season?

49:30Look, I wanted to do a lot of, oh man, Bo Nix is evading healthy pockets too much and things like that, but he's actually gotten even better this year at knowing when to hold on to the football or not. I mean, he's not my favorite quarterback to watch, but I have to give the guy his props. Last year, he didn't have much to work with from pass catchers, and he's able to manipulate the pocket really well this year. He does have a great old line, but he does have great pocket presence. When he does evade early, he is collapsing pockets himself, and so we have that. But I think from a standpoint of a guy who's, hey, I went into this going, I'm going to evaluate him, and it's not going to look good.

50:09He still looks good. And it is a very big, strong point of what he's able to bring this team. I love you pointing him out because I was just thinking about this with him like a couple of days ago, trying to figure out like, OK, where is he kind of transcended some of the weaknesses he had as a rookie? And one of my issues with him is that he just wasn't a very creative player from the pocket as a rookie. And he wasn't really a creative player very much overall. He had a lot of production outside the pocket, but I think that fell into like two buckets that are kind of hard to get excited about.

50:39One, they did a lot of designed rollouts with him, right? I mean, that was a huge part of their offense with the Broncos last year. And so that's going to juice the numbers a little bit. And I think a lot of the outside of the numbers throws he had last season is because he was bailing from pockets a little bit too early. This year, I think when you look at some of his production and some of the explosives he's finding outside of the pocket, he's actually creating that time and space when he should. And you're seeing some of the physical traits really start to shine through. Like he can change arm angles.

51:08He has a good arm. He is a good athlete. You're seeing that flexibility kind of on display a little bit. And the other thing that was always frustrating with me with him is he wasn't a very creative player from that space when he did stay in it. And you very rarely saw him climb the pocket for the first like 20 games of his career. Go back and watch that Troy Franklin touchdown from last week. It's exactly what he's doing. And it wasn't something that he was doing at his most frustrating over the first season and a half. And so I think he's a great guy to shout out in that regard, because I think there have been, there has been growth.

51:40And I think that there has been him pushing back against the perception of him a little bit when it comes to those moments specifically. Yeah. I, I, I gotta give the guy credit too. And, and to see what he was working with too. I think that's what makes this so exciting is, you know, we're not done yet. We have a ton of new ideas to be able to make this an even better tool and what we can do evaluate. But it's a, we hear coverage sack. We, I don't even measure coverage sack when we hear Everyone can see it. We know it when we see it, but how do we actually measure it? Oh, is it time to sack? Well, that might not be it because we might have long developing routes that didn't get open, right?

52:16We're really excited to see what ways we can make the quarterback evaluation even better. I think fans of Prime Vision might remember QBDI from years ago. Fans of current Prime Vision don't hear about QBDI quite a bit. And that's one of the things that we pride ourselves on is we don't have to stick to any one metric. But we're still trying to evaluate how difficult it is for a quarterback to play. so that we can highlight that. I work on NASCAR. And one of the things, I never loved NASCAR before. I used to go to races as a kid with my dad. But now knowing how difficult it is that these guys are struggling, you might watch and you see them turn left.

52:49But, man, they are frightened and they're working hard. And that is how it is for a quarterback. I'll give one story real quick. I'm watching this and I'm seeing a pocket health. There's a hold on a play and I'm evaluating the quarterback. And they know there's a hold downfield. but they have to continue the play. So I, you know, I'll name drop. I called Andrew Luck and I was like, what are you, what are you thinking when you see downfield that there's a hold and you can't go to your number one, but they haven't thrown the flag yet, but you, you don't know what to do yet. Like, how do you, and he's like, yeah, it's really, really scary.

53:21Yeah. It's really hard. It's really hard because you don't know if they're going to throw it. So it's like, wow, this is difficult. And that's all, all what we want to show is how do we show you the fan at home on prime vision, how difficult this game is and how hard it is for the quarterback. We're going to take one more break and then come back and very quickly hit a banger of a Thursday night football game.

53:45All right. Rams Seahawks tonight on prime vision. It does not get any better than this from a football perspective, let alone what we're getting on Thursday night football. Walk me through this, the two things, two or three things that you have at front of mind that you studied this week that you think are going to go the furthest in determining how this Rams-Seahawks game goes tonight? So I want to talk about sequencing plays for Sean McVay. You're going to hear a lot about 13 personnel if we see it tomorrow. You're going to hear a lot about Pukunakua, but how he sequences plays. So what he does is when they're in 13 personnel, there's a 64 % chance that the next play is 13 personnel.

54:29And why is that important? Teams typically put on a lot of tight ends to then run the ball. Hey, we have a couple of plays out of this package. We carried three this week, a run right, a run left, a run strong, weak, and a pass off it. They build full packages and sequences out of it knowing I'm going to run this on first down, second down, third down, fourth down. They have multiple instances where they've run eight plus 13 personnel plays in a row. They had two such instances last week. Now, why is this important? Because they do a very similar thing on offense in 11 personnel. When they're in 11, there's an 80 % chance the next play is also 11.

55:10So they're sequencing. They're not like Sean Payton cycling in or Joe Brady cycling in personnel agreements every other play. They have their packages, a series that we know we're going to get on each individual look. First play, I'm looking to see how they're going to play it. Watch for the strong safety. This is what happened in week 11 where they only was four passing yards for the Rams in 13 personnel. Watch for the strong safety. He's going to start in too high for Okada. And in the moment Matthew Stafford turns his back, he's going to sprint downhill. And on prime vision, you're going to see this.

55:43He's going to sprint downhill. We might see a play action first play in that hole that he's vacated because they're playing cover three behind it. And that's how they're able to play it to nickel. So watch for the play sequencing. And maybe the first play is not perfect, but know that McVay is watching to see the read and react from Seattle. On the other side, it's how do we get JSN on a linebacker? How do we formation and make them get in base? He's almost twice as good yards per route run against base defense than he is all other defenses. He's around, I think, around five yards per route run against base.

56:16He's at the NGS high since 2016 at 4.0. But for them, it's all about can we manipulate you into running base defense, whether it's formationally, personnel-wise, we're going to put 21, 12 on the field to then get under center, make you stop the run to then find JSN. Because if he's lined up on a linebacker, my goodness. And if it's base, that means there's easier coverages that Sam Darnold's going to see. And when there's not a disguise, that boy good. Boy can play. The more it's disguised, the more there's – I hate that I'm doing this, but the more he's seeing ghosts, that is where it gets a little tricky for Sam Donald.

56:56That has not changed. I'm curious because I was looking this up and I know that you were paying attention to this this week, but I was looking it up after the Seahawks game because anecdotally for me, Seattle struggled a lot on third down last week. And when they can dictate the game on early downs because they can use play action, that's when they're at their scariest. But if you look at the numbers, Seattle on like third and medium to long is only like 17th or 18th. I can't remember what the number is, but it's in the teens when an EPA per drop back, the Rams are worse. What do you think? Because with Seattle, it's easy with Seattle.

57:29It's like, I know why they're worse on third down than they are on early downs because of the way they're, they're constructed. When you look at the Rams relative struggles on third down this year, what do you think is driving that? Well, you heard me for the earliest part of the podcast talk about, Hey, when they know it, when they can't know if it's run or pass, you have an advantage, but guess what happens on third and medium plus, This is why both teams want to run the ball because they don't want to be there. If they can convert on fourth, it's much helpful because they lose the benefit of surprise.

57:58It's hard to be an under center again with double mug fronts where you can't be an under center against the double mug unless you plan on running the football into it, which you can do. It's allowed. People don't do it, but you're allowed to do it. The Bills did it last week. It was beautiful, actually. It was one of my favorite reps of the entire week. Like, come on. Finally, someone did it. it's cheating. I remember it. Sorry. I remember looking at it the first time and Fangio did it. And I was like, this is cheating. We should just, you shouldn't be allowed to do this and practice. And I was like, come on.

58:28But I think that they're, they can't, they can't use the element surprise anymore. They're not surprising anyone when you're under center in that spot. They're also really Matt Stafford really phones on who his top guy is. If he's going to go to a guy he's going to go to a guy it's the beauty of having an army trust it's like Dak Prescott he trusts he could because throwing it here and here I'm talking my shoulder or my chest is actually very different location when you have a quarterback that can do that he's going to put it in the guy he wants to so I think that's the big element watching the film I was like because I was I I do my early game prep Sundays the Mondays I check myself and then Tuesdays, my producer's like, you have a lot of mumbo jumbo here.

59:11Let's, let's, let's, let's, let's go file this in. And I was spending a lot of time looking at it. And I think it comes down to, you have to go gun there. They lose that element of surprise by doing the under center, by not having the ability to say, guess if it's run or pass. This is me just nerding out. Cause I'm curious about this. When you start your prep for these games, do you do numbers first or film first? Depends on the game, depends on the team. I really try and try and start film first and so i'm doing uh film tv copy and i go oh i think that's cool i'd say why tv copy first uh charles davis and devon mccourty work really hard on preparing for a game and so they have a lot of good preparation i wouldn't let that go to waste jj watt prepares really hard for the game and so i go tv copy early and say hey these guys research this game what would they see they're going to get their best stuff out there so this is actually really fun they're going to get their best stuff out there I'm going to go on tv copy I want to see what their NGS packet was package was that week I want to see how their understanding about the quarterback play versus if I'm listening to JJ Watt describe defense I'm getting better and so I want to I want to hear that and then I go that's cool I go to the analytics I then see from the numbers, was I wrong or right?

1:00:30Was I on a game basis? Was this right? What changed about this game that went to it? So I spent a lot of time this season, especially going game by game. And what Keegan Abdu, Bailey Dieter, Callie Baker, all the people I work with, Nick Esposito at NextGen, is how can we be really good about bi-week changes? Because a lot of teams make bi-week changes and go from a game basis. Then I go to the All-22. I'm going to then look at what teams are doing as unique. I watch in situational football. I do not watch all the way the game through on Monday. Third down, red zone, fourth down. Those are the big things you're going to hear us talk about on TNF because that's how I prepare as a player.

1:01:09Those are the things that I can provide that might be a little bit different than what Kirk's can provide. Then it's complete games because now I've got my two-month-old daughter, Shea. In the mornings, I'll put a complete game on, watch all 22 all the way through, sideline end zone, sideline end zone, and get my ideas there. So it's evolving over time. And throughout that time, I'm having meetings with my producer, Scott Carpin, who's refining the ideas. And he's also doing research analytically and also watching the games and going, I want to tell this story with safeties. How can we make it right?

1:01:39This is unique. Baker Mayfield struggles against single high versus too high. How can we make it right? So that's my game prep in a nutshell. So when you're watching the full game back and you're watching both angles for 120 plays over the course of a game, what percentage of those plays do you think you're taking notes on? Probably 30%. And the way I take notes is I pause the film and I go straight to the NGS page. So if I could send you a screenshot of my page right now, you'll see 20 different NGS pages open at least. I guess this is probably 50 right now. or I'm looking at a pocket health render.

1:02:17Oh, what would this have looked like if they had pocket health on this play? So I re-render that play. Or how do I approach, okay, it said this. Well, do we have an analytic that will show Okada sprinting into the box? Because this is a fun thing with analytics. It's going to show it's a light box when Okada starts at 22 yards. But the moment he sees Stafford sprint into the box or turn his back, it's no longer a light box. It's now a stacked box. There's an extra guy there. But when we capture the data at the moment, so how do I tell that story? And so I'll pause the film and I go, oh, that's weird.

1:02:54That's typically when I know it's – if I take a notice, oh, that's weird. And it's about 30 % of the plays. But it's normally like this with one arm. Be nice to daddy. Be nice to daddy. This is me just asking curiosity questions because my process and my prep is always such a f***ing mess that I'm trying to do everything I can to make it better. The other part is to round this out next year. This is our next innovation, just planting seeds for you. We need box counts at the snap of the ball. We need we need box counts at the time the handoff is happening. And I need those numbers now. And so if you want to get started on that, so we're ready for those by the time we get to next season, that's your homework.

1:03:33Hey, you might be in London with us in January, brother, when we do our ideation, because that is a big we have we had a couple innovations this year. I don't know if you got to see what we've done with field target lines this year and showing what it's not career long or not what they're we saw saw them make in practice during the game because wind can change. Everything can change. It's what is the live data from next gen telling us about this kicker, this direction on this night and what's their likelihood to make it at three different spots. and it's been a huge innovation and something that it's data that was available to us, but Scott Carpin, our producer, had a lot of ideas on how we could show it the right way.

1:04:10And we introduced it four years ago, but it didn't look as good on the sideline at all 22. But now when that area of the field is visible at all times, when you know a team's driving in field goal range, but you want to know what's their likelihood to not just is this a career long, what's the actual likelihood to make it, it really amps up that anticipation. So there's a lot of stuff that's like low that doesn't need to take, you know, lots and lots of bad hours and AI to solve problems that will be really cool for us in the future. You don't have to twist my arm, my friend. If you want me to come out, I can come ask weird, weird, nerdy football questions for a little bit.

1:04:46You know that I'm down to do it. Always appreciate the time. Sam Schwartzstein, you can see him on the Prime Vision broadcast on Thursday Night Football. And we've got a good one tonight. So please go check out Sam during Ram Seahawks. I'm sure we'll do this again very soon, buddy. Awesome, man. This is blast. All right, guys, that's all we got for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you to Sam for his time. We will be back tomorrow with a jam packed week 16 preview on the athletic football show. Please come back and check that out for now. That's all we got. Appreciate you listening.

1:05:17We'll talk to you very soon.

1:05:26We'll be right back.