The pace of play at the team level is instructive in fantasy football. The faster a team is, the more plays they will tend to run. The more plays a team tends to run, the more players on those teams tend to score. Using the RotoViz Pace Tool, we can see the tendencies of every team in these areas so far in 2023.
I toggled to neutral game scripts (-7 to +7 point differential, excluding the last two minutes of each half) and launched a quick investigation, and these are the results after Week 11.
We should remember that, even extrapolated over 18 weeks, the sample size of an NFL season is relatively small, but this data set is dangerously close to reliable. The information is already incorporated into the RotoViz Game Level Similarity Projections (GLSP). But I like to see this isolated in case I want to give this projection area a little extra weight.
The Patriots were on a bye and held up at the top of the list in neutral script seconds/snap. Their QB has yet to be announced, but Mac Jones seems to be taking first-team reps in practice. The Saints and Chargers round out the top three, so the top of the charts remain unchanged from Week 11 to Week 12.
Cleveland remains at number one in total snaps/60 minutes. They have demonstrated a tendency to keep this up, even without Deshaun Watson in the lineup (the sample size when he doesn’t play is essentially the same size as it is when he does). There is a three-way tie for second, with New Orleans and Philadelphia joined this time by Dallas, who is new to the top three. New Orleans is the only team in the top three in both categories.
Specific game context is vital in a limited sample, so while these are evidential indicators, they are only partially predictive. In this selection, I’ll highlight three games that feature fast-paced teams and three that match up with slower-paced squads so far this season.
The two lists may diverge, so we won’t always see the teams that rank high or low in the neutral script seconds/snap necessarily end with a similar rank correspondence in total snaps/60 minutes. A lack of correlation in the two separate areas can be explained in the following ways:
- A team chews up the clock with stick-moving drives that result in points, giving them a higher play total for an entire game without necessarily hurrying to hike the ball.
- A team’s defense smothers its opponent, often earning the ball back after a short possession, giving its team more chances with the ball per game than its opponent.
- A team spends very little time in a neutral script, so it compiles plays faster while chasing to get back into a game, plays that would not be reflected in data selectively collected out of a neutral script.
I’ve concentrated on the extreme outliers and games where the matchup ranks on the same half of the spectrum for both lists.
