Thorman’s Snaps and Pace: Week 12

Welcome to the Week 12 edition of Snaps & Pace — winner of the 2024 FSWA Best Football Series — where we examine trends in play volume and game pace. It is meant to be a 30,000-foot view of upcoming contests, while identifying main-slate matchups that will — and will not — be played on fertile fantasy soil. For a primer on why this is important, click here.

Welcome to the dog days. It’s cold and dark at 5:00 p.m. Bye weeks somehow still linger as the full weight of injuries bear down on rosters, and the holiday stretch run to playoff delirium has yet to begin. A quick perusal of Week 12’s starting quarterbacks sums things up nicely.

Assuming Aaron Roeglisberger sits, we’ll have eight of the 22 teams on the main slate, and seven of the 11 games, featuring quarterbacks who did not start in Week 1.

Only one out of 11 main-slate games match up two teams with winning records. It is, of course, the Steelers and Bears.

The eight teams playing in the 4:00 p.m. window have a combined 30-49-1 record, and that includes the 8-2 Eagles — the only winning team in action. Scott Hanson might head out early.

The best thing for Football Seasonal Affective Disorder is a bunch of fast-paced, high-scoring matchups. We almost certainly won’t get that, but we will settle for a few — so let’s dive in.

“Situation neutral” is meant to provide context and refers to plays while the game is within seven points during the first three quarters (minus the final two minutes of the first half). Neutral Pace (average play-clock seconds used), Neutral Pace Over Expected (POE), and Pass Rate Over Expected (PROE) are based on neutral game script and are provided by our data science team.

Up In Pace | Slow-Paced Slogs | Pace Notes

Up In Pace

New York Giants at Detroit Lions

A pair of new/old play-callers fuel this matchup with more pace-based juice than first meets the eye. In his head coaching debut, Mike Kafka had the Giants still playing quickly despite the absence of Jaxson Dart, only with a far more ground-based approach. New York ranked 29th on the week in raw pass rate (46%) and last in PROE (-18%). It was the fifth-lowest PROE mark of any game this season. Yet, with New York remaining competitive throughout — they were leading until four minutes remained — we have yet to see Kafka’s approach in a trailing script. They are double-digit dogs on Sunday, so we’ll probably get our answer. He also dealt with a wind-blown Jameis Winston doing his damnedest to throw picks. The Giants’ use of tempo snapped back on Sunday, nearly doubling (32%) after a Week 10 no-huddle lull when Russell Wilson played (17%). Between an elevated tempo, a more neutral pass rate in a likely trailing script, and Kafka’s appetite for fourth-down risk — he went for it four times — the early returns say these Giants figure to be feisty from a pace perspective.