Football Outsiders: Falcons will be better but not good

When Football Outsiders speaks, I listen. You should, too. A year ago, the data-based website predicted a Seahawks-Broncos Super Bowl and a playoff berth for Carolina (!) and, most notably for us locals, a plunge by the Falcons, who were coming off a 13-3 season. All of the above came to pass, making Outsiders the most sagacious seer since Nate Silver aced the 2012 election.

The 2014 Football Outsiders Almanac has arrived – it’s available at FootballOutsiders.com at $22.95 for a print copy and $12.50 for a download – and we Atlantans should be mildly if not wildly encouraged. Vince Verhei, who wrote the Falcons chapter in the Almanac, had identified them, in a post for ESPN Insider, as an NFC team apt to rise. This sounded sunnier that his actual Almanac forecast. In an email, Verhei offered this explanation: “When you start at 4-12, 7-9 or 8-8 still counts as a pretty big rise.”

That’s the Outsiders’ corporate take on the 2014 Falcons: They’ll be better without being good. The Almanac assesses the Falcons’ mean projection at 7.3 wins, which ties them with Arizona for 12th-best in the NFC – ahead of only Dallas, Detroit and Washington – and puts them last in the South. (Outsiders expects Tampa Bay to be better than last season and Carolina to be worse.)

Writes Verhei: “Why is our enthusiasm for a bounce-back season so restrained? For starters, (the Falcons were) almost never as good during their five-year run as their sterling win-loss record would indicate. Though they ranked second in total wins between 2008 and 2012, they were just eighth in average DVOA (Defense-adjusted Value Over Average, the Outsiders’ proprietary metric) and Estimated Wins, and sixth in Pythagorean Wins. In fact, if we subtract either Estimated Wins or Pythagorean Wins from actual wins, we find only one team (the Colts) in that time span that overachieved more than Atlanta did.”

Said Football Outsiders editor Aaron Schatz, speaking Wednesday: “Their best year was 2010, and even at 13-3 they were seventh (in Outsiders’ overall rankings). They were not in our opinion one of the top five teams in the league.” (Sure enough, those top-seeded Falcons were bounced 48-21 in the playoffs by Green Bay.)

With the Falcons coming off 4-12, Outsiders offers no reason to gas up the ol’ bandwagon. Still, that shouldn’t be construed as a dismissal. “I think they weren’t as good as they looked in some of those seasons,” Schatz said, “and they weren’t as bad as they looked last year … They weren’t a 4-12 team. They were a 6-10 team that got unlucky in a couple of games.”

About Estimated Wins: That’s an Outsiders gauge, according to Schatz, “of how many games a team would win with average luck and an average schedule. In 2012, our Estimated Wins for the Falcons was nine. They won four more games than you’d have expected. Last year our Estimated Wins for them was 6.5, and they won four games.”

What happened in 2013 wasn’t that Matt Ryan had a down year – Schatz calls Ryan “a great quarterback, distinctly in that second tier behind the all-time greats and (Aaron) Rodgers” – or even that Julio Jones was lost in Game 5, though that surely didn’t help. “The offense has been almost entirely the same for five years,” Schatz said. “It was worse last year but not that much worse. What happened was that the defense collapsed.

“It got old. (John) Abraham left and they really didn’t replace him. Asante Samuel got old. They had to bring in young talent – and the NFL is tough on young players in the secondary – and took an understandable step backward. They were going with two undrafted rookies at linebacker.”

The June loss of linebacker Sean Weatherspoon, Schatz believes, mightn’t be as big a deal as we’d think. “Weatherspoon is worth a quarter of a win,” he said, which isn’t nothing but isn’t all that much. Then this: “The most likely scenario is that getting Jones back is offset by the loss of (Tony) Gonzalez and that the offense stays a little above average. The defense shows improvement but not great improvement. Very average is kind of how I feel about the Falcons.”

Not coincidentally, that’s the Verhei verdict in the Almanac. He wrote: “Most likely some of it works out, some of it fails and the team loses eight or nine games.”

For the record, Schatz did voice a cheery parting thought. “We have a lot of teams grouped together in the NFC,” he said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the Falcons had a winning season. They’ve got the most important thing – they’ve got a quarterback.”