Thorman’s Snaps and Pace: Week 10

Up In Pace | Slow-Paced Slogs | No-Huddle Notes

Welcome to the Week 10 edition of Snaps & Pace — back-to-back winner of the FSWA’s 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.

Ready or not, the stretch run is upon us. Clocks are turned back, the trade deadline has passed, and your leaves need to be raked. While dealing with that last item might have been more stimulating than the Week 9 early-window games, we get a couple of 1:00 p.m. ET fantasy bangers this Sunday.

Thanksgiving is somehow only two weeks away, and if it seems like it came faster than a first-date freshman, that’s because it did. For football nerds, anyway. With the season starting later than usual, Thanksgiving lands in Week 12 — earlier than in recent years.

Either way, pace profiles should theoretically be set by now. Of course, the Colts should have traded Jonathan Taylor, and the donkey Chargers should have done anything at all.

One look at the combined-plays grid shows how often teams act like we expect them to.

The only things we can truly count on are the Dolphins delivering duds, never knowing what to expect from the Bengals, and the Vikings having only one direction to go with Kirk Cousins. Finding pace-based patterns in the chaos can be as maddening as it is rewarding, no matter what stage of the season — but still, we must 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

Carolina Panthers at New Orleans Saints

Over the past two seasons, predicting Panthers games has made Jonathan Brooks’ health seem reliable. Just when we start to believe, they pull more rug than Kristen Stewart at a Chappell Roan show. Since a promising 3-2 start filled with pace and points, Carolina has plummeted to 3-5. The scoring is still elevated, albeit mainly on the opponents’ side. Carolina’s contests rank first in combined snaps (131.1) and fourth in total points (52.3) after a typically voluminous 26-21 loss to the Broncos. With the second-fastest neutral pace over expected and the third-highest neutral pass rate (64%), plus a defense allowing the seventh-most points per play, Carolina sets a reasonable floor from a fantasy environment angle. Recently, the ceiling has been capped by an uptick in opponent quality and a beat-up offensive line.

This week, the quality of the opponent is back where we like to see it, at least on the defensive side. The Saints rank dead last in pressure rate and surrender the eighth-most points and seventh-most yards on a per-play basis. That’s music to the ears of uber-pressure-sensitive Bryce Young. New Orleans’ contests have cooled down from the season’s first month as well, but remain friendly for fantasy with the seventh-most combined snaps and eighth-most total points. While the Saints haven’t operated at quite the breakneck speed they did a year ago, they still rank fourth in neutral pace over expected and fourth in neutral play-clock seconds, despite a relatively subdued Week 9. It took a while for their game with the Browns to ignite, but it eventually did turn into a typically raucous Superdome fourth quarter and overtime. The Panthers present a significantly higher-octane pace profile for our projected fastest matchup of the week.