Sterling Moore and Split-Play WPA
Posted By Admin on January 26, 2012
Sterling Moore posted a stellar +0.47 +WPA in Sunday's AFC championship game. That's very good — only Patrick Willis (+0.52) and teammate Dane Fletcher (+0.49) beat that mark for defenders on championship weekend. After all, Moore made arguably the defensive play of the weekend when he knocked what would have been the go-ahead touchdown pass out of Lee Evans's hands with mere seconds to go.
But most of Moore's +WPA actually comes from his contributions on the following play, the failed third down pass targeted for Dennis Pitta which set up the fateful fourth down on which Billy Cundiff kicked the Ravens out of the playoffs. The Ravens were still in excellent shape on that third down, and the failure to convert or score a touchdown took their win probability down from 83% to 43%, giving Moore a +0.40 WPA on the play. That leaves just +0.07 for his other successful play, the strip of Evans in the end zone.
That seems intuitively way too low, and that intuition is correct. Although technically the entire play from snap to throw to almost-catch to strip just cost the Ravens 7% of a win, if Evans holds on to the ball and Moore doesn't strip it, Baltimore's ticket to the Super Bowl is all but punched. But with the way the data is fed into our system, it's impossible to give out separate credit for different aspects of plays.
But let's say for a second it was possible. How would each aspect of that play have played out in the eyes of WPA?
Comments
Leave a Reply