Photo by Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images
It’s not because of one person, either. This defense is playing at an extremely high level as a team
To make this as clean and easy to read as possible, I’m leaving out the giant box score and breaking it down into two articles where I review the offense and defense. The Monday night game threw me out of whack, but here is the data from the 49ers debacle of the Browns. We’ll start with the defense, as this unit becomes more and more impressive by the week.
EPA compared to the rest of the league
As a refresher, here is “expected points added” defined:
The value of any individual play can be calculated as Expected Points Added (EPA), the difference in EP before and after a given play. Having EPA as a currency allows all sorts of different play results and events to be compared apples-to-apples, taking into account the fluctuating value of yards and downs as the other changes. And this allows for really interesting analysis when applied on a holistic level. For example, EPA shows that a “staying ahead of the chains” run of 4 yards on first down is most often a negative play. The rare exceptions include plays at the outer end of field goal range.
On the season, the 49ers are allowing a success rate for opposing offenses through the air of 32%. That’s 14% above league average. It’s ridiculous how efficient the Niners have been
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