Joe’s Notes: Brady/Mahomes, Manning/Allen, and…Belichick/Reid?

Let’s do the comparisons.

Through Age 28 Season:

Caveats:

• Patrick Mahomes has one more year as a starter under his belt than Tom Brady did through this stage in his career, due to Mahomes coming out of college earlier than Brady did.
• For win/loss record, we looked at the team’s final record in seasons where the quarterback in question was ultimately the primary starter.
• This year’s playoffs aren’t finished yet.
• No, QB wins isn’t all that telling of a stat, but it’s the first thing on the list in determining how a quarterback is remembered.
• This is high, high, high-level stuff. But we’ll get into that a bit later.

The point is, yes, Patrick Mahomes is matching Tom Brady’s pace so far, for the most part. He could even pass Brady through this point in his career, if the Chiefs can spring two more upsets. What’s a bit of a rougher comparison is Josh Allen vs. Peyton Manning, the one that wriggled its way into the narrative last week.

Through Age 27 Season:

Oh.

So it’s not a rough comparison.

Manning had hardly even started all that losing yet!

This is a great bright spot for Josh Allen, of course. Even while being pushed into the “repeatedly losing to a great player” archetype, Allen is being compared to a guy many long regarded as the best quarterback in the world. There are distinctions. There are concerns regarding how mobile Josh Allen is and how that will age. There’s the wrinkle where Peyton Manning was much more institutionally integrated into the NFL’s governance than Allen is, something which only grew as he aged (we’re at the Eli Manning Draft Trade moment in the Josh Allen/Peyton Manning timeline, for those wondering). But overall, yes, Josh Allen is really in the Peyton Manning role of this narrative, and that is normally a pretty good person to be compared to as a quarterback.

Now.

Let’s do Andy Reid and Bill Belichick.

Through Age 65 season:

Reid has a lot of catching up to do.

Still, Andy Reid has six years to catch up to Bill Belichick, and probably more, given it doesn’t appear Belichick is done coaching. That’s if they age in the same way and make the same retirement decisions, and who knows what Andy Reid is thinking about those. But comparing the guys the way we compare quarterbacks, it’s not absurd to extend this Mahomes–Allen/Brady–Manning parallel to include the coaches, and it’s not absurd to wonder if Reid maybe will chip away at those Belichick titles. If we’re wondering it about Patrick Mahomes re: Brady, we’re wondering it about Andy Reid re: Belichick in an indirect way. So, if the trends continue: Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes will win a few more rings and then have a sulking divorce from one another, after which Mahomes will get one more and paint himself as the guy more responsible for all the success. I think what this really drives home is how sad the Brady/Belichick breakup is, at least for those who hadn’t or haven’t come to hate one or both.

As for that high, high-level bit: Who’s more responsible for the Chiefs’ success? There’ll be a time for that.

Will Anyone Beat the Ravens?

As for the games themselves: I’m not sure where to start.

• The 49ers deserve a lot more questions than they did going into the game. I love the Packers (we’ll talk about their offseason soon), but the Packers were very much a 7-seed team in terms of quality, and the Packers went into the Niners’ home and outplayed the best team in the NFC. The Niners made their share of fluky mistakes, but the Packers out-mistaked them. Some of that’s being a good team, but the Niners shouldn’t have needed the Packers to make those mistakes. On one side of this, you can say that the Niners are a lot worse without Deebo Samuel, but that’s troubling, because first, they might be without Deebo Samuel again on Sunday, and second, a wide receiver/running back hybrid is kind of a weird lynchpin for an offense. Offensive ingenuity is Kyle Shanahan’s calling card, but if it’s all about teams not having figured out Deebo Samuel, that makes the whole thing look fragile in a way which has nothing to do with injury.
• The Lions played well, and importantly, they avoided getting trapped in what had the script to be a brutal trap game. How good are they? It’s still unclear. The Bucs were better than their NFC South stigma, but the Lions did struggle to put them away, and the game was in Detroit. The best argument in favor of the Lions next week is how vulnerable the 49ers looked Saturday.
• We were ready for Mahomes and Allen to duel to the finish, but this was not that 2022 game. After the three traded touchdowns to start the second half, four of the final five full drives ended with one team lining up to kick. There were two punts, one fake punt, one field goal attempt, and the Mecole Hardman fumble.* Some of the credit belongs to the defenses, but again, there’s this question of how good the Chiefs really are. Chiefs receivers only caught seven passes yesterday. They’re going to have to go through their tight ends and their run game, and those are viable options, but they’re still more limited in their breadth of offensive paths than we’re used to them being.
• All of that gets us to the subheader’s question. Because after the Texans dominated a good Browns defense, they couldn’t do anything against the Ravens, and Lamar Jackson was a wizard. I had a terrible regular season betting on the NFL, but I’m surprised the Ravens aren’t favored by six or seven with the game being in Baltimore. Their starters have played in exactly one one-score game since the middle of November. They won it.

*That’s a great rule, by the way, and it seems like the discourse might be coming around on that because of how many people were rooting for the Bills? That’s what was going on in my corners, anyway.

Josh Hader’s Value

In the baseball world, the free agency ice cracked and shifted a little on Friday, with Josh Hader signing a five-year deal worth $95M in its totality. The contract is comparable to the one Edwin Diaz signed with the Mets last winter.

We’ve long been skeptical around here of the wisdom in giving relievers big contracts. We’ve long been skeptical in the wisdom of doing anything but trading your best relievers at the deadline every year you aren’t playoff-bound. It is so rare for relief pitchers to continuously be as good as good relievers are expected to be.

We also, though, think Win Probability Added is a better way of understanding relief pitcher value than WAR is. By WAR, Josh Hader has been worth eleven or twelve wins over his seven-year MLB career. By WPA, he’s been worth more than 15. That’s more than a 25% boost, and it comes from the leverage in which he’s pitched. Josh Hader’s innings have come at more important times than those of Justin Verlander.

Does this make $19M per year a good deal for the Astros? It doesn’t make it a bad one. If Hader is what he has, on average, been, and if he pitches in the playoffs a few times (when the leverage is enormous), that’s not a terrible deal. He’s averaged 2.2 WPA per season. The old $8M/win calculation would say that’s worth $17.6M per year. The $8M/win number might be outdated. Maybe Hader got something of a market rate. It’s really hard to know. Relievers are used so differently from how they were used twenty years ago that our data on how they age is still young. The leverage question, combined with the small-sample nature of their individual seasons, makes it hard to identify what a market rate really is. For a team like the Astros, there’s the competitive angle too: By signing Josh Hader, they save themselves from ever having to face Josh Hader in a playoff series.

It’s a risky deal, to be sure, but all reliever contracts with any length to them are risky deals. If you’re willing to treat $19M/year as a sunk cost, then yes, it’s a good contract. If that’s going to hold you back from making other deals, you could probably find a better way to invest that money in your bullpen.

Novak Djokovic Is Rolling, But?

Here’s a funny phenomenon:

Novak Djokovic has won four straight matches to start the Australian Open. He plays American Taylor Fritz in the quarterfinals tonight. Early in the tournament, Djokovic looked a little vulnerable. He was dealing with a cold, he was dealing with at least a slight wrist injury, and players who would usually not win sets against him or take him to tiebreaks were doing both those things. Then, in the fourth round, he beat 20-seed Adrian Mannarino 6–0, 6–0, 6–3. He smoked him.

Where this gets interesting is that Djokovic’s odds to win the tournament have gotten worse as the tournament goes on, and it hasn’t just been due to concerns about his sinuses and his wrist. Djokovic was at +105 heading into the first round, at least on one offshore book. He was at +105 going into last night, having won his way through the fourth round already. He’s now at +115. Why? The other favorites just keep winning. All of the top six seeds are in the quarterfinals. I’m not sure a Grand Slam has ever been this chalky.

Of course, Djokovic was a huge favorite in each of those first four matches. To the point where it was a story that he wasn’t winning all of them in straight sets, without tiebreaks. Some of Djokovic’s odds getting longer is that his competition is going to be better than expected. But a player like Djokovic, whose win probabilities are routinely north of 90% (often 95%), just doesn’t see his odds shorten often until these final rounds. The probability he’ll get to the quarters (or the semis, or the championship) is baked into the market before the tournament starts.

Miscellany

Among other things I personally care about:

• Iowa State got a big, big win against TCU, and is getting close to being a tournament lock? Assuming they time them correctly, they probably only need five or six more wins to be a very safe team on Selection Sunday, which is a great outcome compared to where the program looked heading into the year (or into both last year and the year before). They’ve got a decent chance of grabbing a top-4 seed, but for that, they’ll probably need Tamin Lipsey back at full strength. Winning without him is a testament to how deep the defense goes. They forced turnover after turnover in Fort Worth, and they did enough when they had to run offense to survive.
• The Bulls won two more since we last Noted, but lost Zach LaVine on Thursday to an ankle sprain which should keep him out for a week or two. They’re in Phoenix tonight. Personally, I’m very anti-LaVine (in this role on this team with this contract), and while I acknowledge that he is a good player, I’d like a better explanation than “small sample” for why the Bulls are 11–7 without him. At the very least, I’d like someone to go through the strength of schedule in those 18 games vs. the others. I guess that someone should probably be me.
• The Blackhawks split Thursday and Friday’s games and now head out west. Not a lot going on over there. Waiting for Connor Bedard to return and give us storylines.