Blitzing All The Time Is Analytics

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. An internet lifetime ago, ESPN football columnist Gregg Easterbrook was one of my go-to reads. Easterbrook was a pundit for The Atlantic by day, but moonlit over at ESPN's Page 2 to write his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column every week during the NFL season. TMQ included tons of snooty jokes that only George Will would find funny, but it also served as the tip of the spear in introducing analytics to the mainstream football discourse. I hate giving Greggggggg credit for anything, because he’s an eternally haughty dipshit. But he was a notable part of my education as a football fan, and I was an easier mark for his shtick back then than I am now. For 20-something me, it was worth enduring Easterbrook’s preciousness to read his more entertaining copy, which often recounted strategic errors that NFL teams routinely made simply because those teams hadn’t looked at the data. It was through Easterbrook’s column that I first understood, mathematically, why punting was dumb. And it was Easterbrook who conditioned me to believe that blitzing too often, particularly on third downs, was a recipe for disaster. He had a recurring section in TMQ for failed blitzes titled Stop Me Before I Blitz Again! I read that every word of that section, every week. That was because I had watched my own team’s defense get burned in such instances enough times to believe that Easterbrook’s line of thinking was sound, and that his methodology was airtight.

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