Peter King’s Monday morning column is always a great read.

It used to be published by Sports Illustrated, but it’s over at NBC Sports these days.

There’s a lot of stuff in today’s article about the Saints and how they approached Sunday’s slaughter of the Eagles. The most interesting part of the story mentions New Orleans’ game-planning and how they felt like they would be in good shape if they put it on Carson Wentz to throw his way to an Eagles victory.

In the story:

“And then, a bit of a surprise. “We want to put the game on [Eagles quarterback Carson] Wentz,” Payton said. Payton likes Wentz as a player, but his player-personnel analyst, Ryan Herman, gives him trends and numbers every week, and Payton tells the group two interesting ones about Wentz, from Herman: The Eagles are 1-11 when Wentz plays and they allow more than 26 points. And he’s 0-9 when he passes for between 308 and 364 yards, the point being if he does that, the Eagles likely won’t be running the ball well, and the Saints feel they can beat a one-dimensional offense.”

Oh yeah?

The Eagles are shitty when they give up a lot of points and/or have to abandon the run game? I’m stunned.

That’s a monolithic revelation by the Saints’ analytics department. Normally the team that plays with the lead and takes away the running game is going to have the advantage. It’s what the Eagles did throughout the entirety of the 2017 regular season.

If you really want to parse that statistic, you can basically conclude that Carson Wentz hasn’t been able to win shootouts with his arm alone. I don’t know how many quarterbacks can do that on a consistent basis. Nick Foles was successful in this scenario during Super Bowl 52, so that’s a one-game example. And when you consider the fact that the Saints’ defense was not exactly the 1985 Chicago Bears, then sure, that makes yesterday’s Wentz performance look even worse.

Will on Twitter filtered Carson’s games by that second statistic, the passing yards:


Out of curiosity, I ran that same filter on Aaron Rodgers. There are too many 300+ passing yard games to fit on this page, so I just cut a chunk out of the page and pasted it here:

Six losses in there. Not a ton of pure “shootouts” I guess. It looks like he was 2-1 in games where the opponent scored 26+ points, just based off this small sample size.

Here’s another one for Drew Brees, where I cropped a chunk of games from the bottom end of the yardage spectrum:

16-4 career record when throwing between 312 and 328 yards, for what it’s worth.

All of this is interesting, but it’s ultimately arbitrary and doesn’t account for limitless variables. Who is each quarterback throwing the ball to? Who is the offensive coordinator? Does the play calling suck or is it good? Is the offensive line decent or horrible? How much experience does the quarterback have? Does the head coach even trust the running game in the first place?

There are plenty of examples out there of teams just stubbornly refusing to commit to the run, even when playing from ahead or in close games (Doug Pederson).

So yeah, intriguing paragraph about Wentz, and maybe one of these days he’s gonna have to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do it himself, but in this case isn’t the analytics department just telling us what we already know?