Thorman’s Snaps and Pace: Week 9

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

Welcome to the Week 9 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.

“If you want God to laugh, tell him your plans.”

What is true in life is often true in fantasyland. Or doubly true, if you had beautiful Burrow Doubles with Ravens-sized holes blown in them 10 minutes after kickoff.

We can fruitlessly bitch about the variance that comes along with breathing or embrace it. The variance doesn’t care which — and it’s not going away no matter how many friends we bore with tales of bad-beat woe.

From freak injuries and real or imagined weather worries to waiver-bid sniping and random Tyler Allgeier curb-stompings, fantasy football — and life, itself — would be damn boring without variance. A wise man once said, “chaos is a ladder,” and rolling with it is a leg up on those who waste time tilting.

Speaking of tilting, the schedule serves up a couple of main slates each season matching up fast offenses against slothy ones — and few, if any, clear up-tempo games or total slogs. In these uncomfortable cases, a useful tool is leveraging the preferred pace of the favorites projected to drive game scripts.

It’s about as fun as meeting Jim Harbaugh and his OC out for a frosty milk — but we’re currently in it up to Mike McDaniel’s ankle-high capris. Like variance, however, the Week 9 schedule is not going away, 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

Dallas Cowboys at Indianapolis Colts

Shoving all-in on this game feels dirtier than a Jerry Jones glory hole. Stop it. The matchup does, however, offer a clean path to a pair of dusty defenses delivering a mouthwatering 51.5-point projected total in a dome. The Cowboys have been sticking it to Jones all year, with the latest embarrassment entailing four straight touchdowns for the Cardinals starting with a minute left in the third quarter on Sunday. They rank 28th in points allowed and have given up the league’s most yards. The offense, while inconsistent, has been mostly fine. It is third in points and seventh in yards, while operating at the sixth-fastest neutral pace over expected. No one snaps it with more play-clock seconds remaining during neutral situations than Dak Prescott, and Cowboys contests rank top six in both combined plays and total points. As frustrating as games are to watch for Jones, he’s created the perfect fantasy storm of “take much and give more.”

If the Dallas defense can wake up Gardner Minshew, perhaps it can reanimate the corpse of Daniel Jones. Anything is possible, although after last week’s euthanizing at the hands of the Jaguars, it’s tough to picture. Jones ranks 33rd in yards per attempt and has nearly double the interceptions (nine) as touchdown passes (five). That’s almost as bad as Justin Herbert. The good news, if there is any, is the Colts picked up the pace, finishing top 10 in neutral play-clock seconds after coming into Week 8 ranked 24th. Likely a blip on the Colts’ painfully slow 2026 radar, there’s a chance Shane Steichen wants to go down swinging while playing at his traditional fast pace. It would offer a needed boost to Indianapolis’ contests, which rank 28th in combined plays after typically yielding voluminous results during Steichen’s tenure. After facing strong defenses almost exclusively, when the Colts shoot their shot in Jerry’s dome, it’ll come against the worst unit in the league.