At one point in the season (just over a month ago), we had the league's top offense and top defense. How can you not call that progress? I get what you're saying- the regular season means nothing if you can't win in the playoffs. We can't take getting to the playoffs for granted though; we've done it twice in three years and then once over the previous 15+. So we are seeing progress, even if it's not to our standards.
Yeah you answered your own question. The purpose of all those stats is to win the SB. So progress for us means getting one step closer to the SB => playoff win.
Not to mention we were more competitive with the Bills last year with a less talented team So if anything we went backwards
And definitely hard watching them advance to divisional round when we had a 3 game lead on them why we sit home as usual.
Not a successful season in its totality A successful part of the season sure Too many questions going into the off-season.
What we did earlier in the season, was all done against the NFL's easiest schedule up to that point. Whenever we played a winning team, we lost. Only winning team we beat all season was Dallas and we barely even won that one. It was all a mirage with padded stats from playing against bad teams most of the season.
The Broncos and Raiders were 8-9 and in the playoff hunt. The Jets were 7-10. If we lost those games, those three teams (4 games) would each have a wining record. And then what? They were good teams because they beat us? We did play some bad teams in the Pats, Chargers, Giants, and Panthers. Yet many here said we'd start the season 0-2 against the Pats and Chargers. So they were perceived as good teams until we beat them...then they were bad teams? It's football- you win or you lose. Your season is not defined by your opponent's record. One more thing. We lost to the Chiefs by 7 in another country. The Titans beat us by one in a catastrophic collapse at the end of the game. Buffalo also beat us by 7 in the final game...where they beat us by 28 in week 4. The Ravens destroyed us, right after they destroyed San Fran. It's quite easy to say that the Ravens are a great team this season. But the rest of those games? They were tossups and we were in it the entire time. We had two bad losses and that's the two teams playing in the AFC championship. That's not a coincidence. I get that some people only look at the negative. Others (like myself) are overly optimistic. The truth is somewhere in the middle though and we were not a bad team that could only beat other bad teams. We were a good team that couldn't beat the elite teams quite yet.
That's just not true. History is filled with Super Bowl Winning teams that had losing records in December. "The 2000 Ravens, 2005 Steelers, 2007 Giants, 2010 Packers and 2020 Bucs had an aggregate winning percentage of .636 through the end of November, and then won 80% of their regular-season games afterward, for an improvement of 16.4 percentage points. Since 2000, 93 NFL playoff teams have improved by 16.4 points or more late in the season. And 14 of them, or 15.1%, went on to make the Super Bowl — hardly different from the proportion of other playoff teams (16.9%) that got to the championship game. The top 10 teams with the biggest jump in EPA in December never even made the Super Bowl. There are all sorts of factors that can emerge in December and shape a team’s ultimate fortune, from injuries to schematic shifts. Improvement and regression are legitimate forces. Just don’t be fooled into thinking a team’s stretch-run record, on its own, is determinative of playoff success. There are plenty of myths worth enjoying during the holiday season. Momentum isn’t one of them." https://theathletic.com/5111479/2024/01/03/nfl-playoff-success-momentum-analysis/ I mean, sure, ALL teams want to win ALL games, but it's not like a December win is more important than a September win. They all count.
We went 1-1 against the Bills last year, but lets not pretend that the 2nd Bills game this season was some blowout and the Dolphins had more talent than last year. This year's team was decimated by injuries.
Such a stupid post and a clear lack of critical thinking. One of the reasons those teams weren't "winning teams" is because the Dolphins beat them. Those teams (losing teams) had no problems beating the Bills, Ravens, 49ers, and all the other teams that you're most likely a fan of. No team went undefeated this season. Bad teams beat good teams , good teams beat bad teams, and good teams beat good teams all the time. I'm sure you'll just make excuses for them, however.
Oh, the Bills and Dolphins played nearly identical schedules. Each finished 11-6. The Bills lost to the Jags (We didn't play) and Philly and beat KC and Dallas. We beat Dallas and lost to Philly and KC and Ravens (Bills didn't play). However, the Bills also lost to the Pats and Jets, and Bengals. All under .500 teams. The Dolphins only lost to one under .500 team. In no world does beating one more winning team and losing to 2 more losing teams show any sort of pattern.
And the Bills knocked the snot out of us both times we played them and won the division. They beat winning teams and playoff teams, we didn't. All you got are injury excuses at the end of the season, but that doesn't explain the stomping they gave us in game 4 of the season. I knew right after that game we were pretenders again and posted my prediction for the rest of the season, which was pretty accurate to how things turned out. Being a fan does not mean covering up your teams ****ups and making up stupid excuses and playing mental gymnastics to try and make it seem like everything is fine. It's not.
The Cowboys aren't a playoff team? Were both teams 11-6 and now sitting on the couch? Why do you make excuses for the Bills and have no objectivity for the team you supposedly root for? Game 4's final score would seem, to someone who didn't watch the game, that it was a blow-out, but smart people realize the Dolphins were in that game up until the final quarter. And were missing key players on defense that was still learning a new system. Dumb people will call that an excuse, but smart people will understand that context, and injuries, matter. Grow up and learn something for once.
Stop being so dense, I'm not making up any excuses for the Bills, they beat our *** twice and won the division, that's just reality. You are the one making up excuses. We are not on their level, and Tua is not as good or better than Allen. Deal with it. The bills are also not on the level of the best teams in the league, and Allen is not good enough to beat the best QBs in the league, but he is still better than Tua. So at the end of the day, we are still a couple of levels below being able to win a superbowl, which is where we have been for most of the last 2 decades. Realizing that and asking for change and improvement is what you should be doing instead of being a blind homer and cheerleader for continued mediocrity in this organization.
Pretending that 31 teams, every year, don't win a SB is the definition of dense. Not realizing that the Dolphins are one of the top teams in the league, when healthy, is obtuse. Fawning over Allen, not being objective, having no answers for the these perceived faults of the Dolphins, ignoring injuries, turning a blind eye to context, and actively rooting against the team you claim to root for is absurd.
In the second game this year, it took Allen a touchdown bounced off a helmet and a punt return where one of our guys broke his knee and took out some of his own teammates to win.
Can't say we are one.of the best teams when we keep.losing to the best teams. 3-12 last 2 years.That is not good enough
Come on man. Yes, losing games just before the post season is not what you want. It changes all sorts of dynamics, kills confidence, etc. I mean, I don't understand why all of a sudden you guys want to argue against accepted norms, by always trying to cite outliers. TL;DR It's always better to win games than to lose.
Read my last paragraph. You’ve basically took the time to copy what I posted and then complain about it. lol… nice And it’s not an outlier. Winning in December, other than winning games period, has no more bearing on how a team does in the playoffs than those that lose in December.
My question is why all of a sudden are we arguing against norms? Losing in December is not inconsequential. When you get on a losing streak, it can be hard to come out of. If the stats are telling you something different, I'd stick with what experience playing sports taught me. You played sports, I know you understand these things.
I'm also sick and tired of all you stats people wanting to "predict" the winners. This isn't Madden, and this is why stats don't always seem to predict what you think they should. I don't watch sports because they are "predictable."
You’re missing the point. Losing at anytime isn’t inconsequential. But the false narrative that teams who lose in December can’t win in the playoffs is provably wrong. Your ”experiences” seem to be based off of what the media says rather than reality.
If by “stats” you mean reality, as in teams that lose in December have no concernable difference between how they play in the postseason vs teams that win in December, then keep being sick and tired. I’ll keep looking at reality.
The goal in sports is to win! Of course it matters what best predicts win%. Why would it not matter? Comparing model predictions to actual data is the only way to test the accuracy of hypotheses or models, so if you're at all interested in what matters most for winning and how different measurable quantities relate to each other in sports, then you absolutely should care about how accurate model predictions are. Also, despite the distaste some of you have for analytics, the entire NFL (as well as other sports) is being revolutionized by analytics. GMs and HCs have bought into this so you're fighting a losing battle. The most basic type of analytics is conditional probabilities (if X occurs what is the probability of Y occurring). That's tremendously valuable information and is technically a prediction. It's all danmarino is referring to: win% late in the season has near zero correlation to win% in the playoffs. That's just a fact. It's a variant of the "hot hand" fallacy, a well known false perception among humans regarding momentum in sports. That was first demonstrated in basketball where people erroneously thought making a string of baskets increased the probability of making the next basket. With a few caveats, it's in general not true. danmarino is right. You're basically advocating for ignoring reality. Also, these predictions are probabilities. They're not deterministic. In other words the predictions are right X% of the time, not always, and of course you want to increase that percentage as much as possible if you want to win.
Yeah the product on the field is worse than ever, imo, and I believe stats and attempting to predict is ruining it. Again, the entire point of sports and competition is that it's unpredictable. It's no different than Klaus Schwab telling everyone that with AI and quantum computing we can predict the way people will vote, so we don't even have to have elections. It's insane. Stop trying predict. Just enjoy the game. Other than gambling why try to predict?
To your last sentence: You don't increase that percent in order to win as much as possible. You win as much as possible to increase your predicted win%. That's my point. You're literally looking at it backwards, imo.
Why try to predict? To increase win%!!! Coaches need to win to keep their jobs. That's why analytics is making serious inroads. Also, if everyone starts using it your win% won't increase, statistically speaking. But if you don't, you'll increase the probability of losing. And I certainly enjoy the game. I also enjoy seeing what works and what doesn't. Removing analytics from the game would make it less enjoyable for me, so this has nothing to do with game experience. Also, AI only works with massive amounts of the right data. Even with the right model, you wouldn't have the right data to make sufficiently accurate predictions at the individual level for how people vote. You might be able to predict larger trends though.
No it's not. By demonstrating you have a more accurate model — increasing the predictive accuracy of models — you increase win% by using that same model to predict what is likely to occur if you did X, Y or Z. Some of the parameters in these models are things you can change, like how often you go for it on 4th down or run-pass balance or where to focus resources in building a team, etc. So understanding how these parameters are related (which you can only do by testing the model!) is precisely how you decide what will most likely increase win%.
Why practice? Why evaluate players? Just play the game and draft whomever you pull from a hat? That’s what you seem to be advocating.
The problem is really using stats and it's prediction as gospel, when there's often too many variables. Just inaccurate models being paraded as accurate. For example, if you were going to use Tua's overall numbers to predict forward you would have gotten a far rosier picture than using his numbers against playoff teams. The latter would have provided a far better representation of how the season was going to unfold.
That's questioning which model is the best predictor, not whether comparing predictions to actual data is useful. resnor is saying we shouldn't compare predictions to actual data in the first place!! Also, you can't say a statistical model is "inaccurate" until you get a statistically significant difference between predictions and data. A few data points isn't going to tell you that. So you don't know whether over time (assuming we don't get rid of Tua) Tua's overall numbers will be a better predictor of playoff performance or not. Remember, these predictions are probabilities. Also interesting is that you tried to argue the exact opposite when it came to Jackson. His playoff performance is crap with much larger sample size than Tua, but you tried to use his overall numbers and performance against good teams in the regular season rather than in the playoffs to predict playoff performance. It's an inconsistent point of view.
It's not only inconsistent, it's dishonest. That's not what a fan of a team does. Make excuses for other team's players while not using those same standards for a member of a team you supposedly root for. That's not to say a person shouldn't try and be objective when evaluating a member of one's favorite team, but some here are doing the exact opposite of that. They will allow injuries, the rest of the team's play, weather, homefield, etc. etc. to excuse some other player's poor play, but when it comes to Tua none of that matters. It's always "Tua bad" and that's that. They will explain away great play and then pounce whenever Tua has a bad game. That's why they disappear for weeks at a time when he plays elite and are readily available to nitpick, without using any context or rational thinking, when he plays poorly. As if all QB's don't have bad games. What they are basically doing is saying that seatbelts don't really save lives. Just fly around, no seat belt, at 100mph because the "stats" don't matter and predict nothing. lol
No, that's you creating a strawman to argue over and mock instead having a reasonable conversation. You can draft a player without running a bunch of formulas to figure out your predicted win% if you draft him (even though those predictions are worthless without one NFL snap being played yet). Hell, why play at all? Just run simulations and do online drafts like they do for fantasy football. If it's all about prediction. You guys love to take something to some crazy extreme to argue about it. It's weird.
So yeah, those things are not what I'm talking about. I'm certainly not against use if stats by the organization, and I understand that they can have an impact. We've all watched Moneyball...but 160 games is far different than 17. I also think that fans on a forum shouldn't be too concerned with the stats that the coaches might be interested in. I'm talking about applying those models and principles to players and stuff is silly, imo. And while the model might predict something with relative certainty, it does not guarantee that result. It still comes down to the players executing.
It's certainly important to demonstrate that statistics are applicable in given situation, I'll agree with that. What each fan cares about is up to him. I personally love that stuff as you know lol. However, sample size isn't necessarily number of games. In many cases it's number of attempts which can be quite large. In other cases it's number of games, but you can use all games in NFL history. And in other cases it's number of seasons. Depends on the stat.
