Closing Time Pt I: Do we have an issue closing games?

Didn’t love it [Sports Illustrated]

Ever since the end of the Super Bowl, you knew this was going to be a point of discussion during the off-season, and while a lot of things had to go wrong for the Niners to lose the Super Bowl in the fashion that they did (including the refs absolutely blowing it on missed calls), there have been enough traces of late game issues to give it a closer look. Also, who knows if there’s even a season, so fuck it. At least it’s an excuse for some football content.

For the first section of this three-part series, I’ll be trying (and potentially failing) to determine how substantial our late game issues really were based on a mix of statistics. In the second part, I’ll look at potential culprits and solutions in regards to our late-game offense. The third part will focus on defense. 

Alright, let’s jump in.

Level 1 Analysis: Drunk at a bar with a rando

On the surface level, the worry—or more realistically, the trolling—centers around the fact that the Niners’ biggest blown lead was in the Super Bowl and that Kyle Shanahan was the OC of the most famous Super Bowl meltdown in league history (and for some reason has shouldered the majority of the blame in both instances). This is also the easy media cop-out as, well, sports media kind of sucks, and—in the case of most outlets (and unfortunately most standard news media as well)—they make their money by stirring up knee-jerk theories, manufacturing hilariously bad takes, and generating hot take clickbait.

Others could point to Shanahan’s first season as the head man, when the Niners started 0-9 and went an (I think record) five straight games where they lost by three or fewer points. But that team was absolutely devoid of talent, had Hoyer/Beathard at the helm, and close losses like that are actually more of a sign of future success than anything else. You keep your young guys energized and focused, you show progress while not destroying your draft positioning, and you get the bad close game luck out of the way so you can regress to the mean in future seasons when the games actually matter. Also—in this particular case—how the locker room gelled and stayed together despite that brutal start actually pointed to how well Shanahan and Lynch had started to build a team culture and how hard players would play for Shanahan, even when there was no hope for the playoffs.

I’ve already made clear what I think happened during the Super Bowl, but in general, know that the people who are making the “Shanahan chokes away leads” claim likely share a healthy Venn diagram overlap with those who have said Andy Reid can’t win the big game or that Dabo Swinney’s five-game losing streak to South Carolina (the longest in the 100+ year history of the series) was proof that Clemson would never amount to championship material. They’re right only until they’re inevitably very very wrong, and since neither accuracy nor projection are barometers for success in the sports media world, it’s unfortunately something that Shanahan will have to hear until he breaks through and wins a Lombardi trophy.

Level 2 Analysis: Drunkenly discussing with friends 

But how much did the Niners REALLY struggle to close out games last year? The Niners were 6-3 in one score games (if we include both Cardinals games in the equation), but while our defense finished 7th in points allowed/game (19.5), it was 17th in points allowed per fourth quarter (6.3). Over their last six games, we saw fourth quarter leads of nine (Falcons), ten (Chiefs), and—almost—twelve (Seahawks) evaporate in dramatic fashion. That included allowing 14+ points in the fourth quarter of five of our last seven games (despite winning three of those contests) and—in four of those five games—letting the opposition score within the last 3:36 of the game to either take the lead, tie, or get within a field goal.

Now, there is very clearly a correlation between those figures and our injury status on defense by the end of the regular season, but it would be overly optimistic to believe that was the entirety of the problem. After all, the Niners’ offense was riddled with key injuries through much of the first-half of the season, but the effect on that side of the ball in close games—save for the Seahawks OT loss—wasn’t nearly as pronounced. And while our scheme and the natural obligations of different position groups demands more depth on the defensive side (particularly along the defensive line) than on offense, we still had all of our non-IR guys back for the Super Bowl and the NFC Champ Game but allowed a combined 34 points in the fourth quarters of those two contests.  Sure, letting in 13 in the NFC Champ Game when we were up 27 may not seem like much, but there’s enough anecdotal evidence throughout the season to at least warrant a closer look.

Level 3 Analysis: Nerding the fuck out / being hammered

As is always the case, there’s a ton of noise in football stats, so I tried to look deeper into our late game questions by charting the team’s performances in the fourth quarter and overtime but excluding blowouts. Thus, the only games included in this chart (which unfortunately has to be opened in a separate Google Sheet because Squarespace lacks table functionality) are ones where the Niners or their opponent were within a score at any point in the fourth quarter. That means 12 of 19 games.  

While the reasoning behind this selection was to see how the Niners fared in higher pressure situations while both teams were playing their starters and trying their best to win, this sampling decision will inherently—based on the type of year the team had in 2019—skew against the Niners.  They had no blowout losses, didn’t lose a single game until the Super Bowl by more than one possession (on a score that happened when the game was functionally already decided), and all of the instances where they had a comfortable lead then put teams away in the fourth are missing from this chart. For clarification, the 7 games excluded from this table were all “blowout” wins, with two coming in the playoffs. So any takeaways should be met with a grain of salt.

Now is this the best way of charting for these purposes? I dunno. I took like one statistics class in college and rarely even showed up. But as I’d rather lean more pessimistic/conservative when evaluating the weaknesses of a 13-3 team that was some bad luck, a few missed opportunities, and a game filled of blatant missed holds away from winning a Super Bowl, it’s the way I went with.

Again, my apologies for the table and the write-up existing in separate windows. If there’s any solace to this formatting fail it’s that the chart is so large that perhaps it will be easier to read and reference in two windows rather than one (he said only half-believing it).

A quick glossary before we dive in:

Drives: the number of drives on offense or defense in the fourth quarter + OT. This was far from scientific, with drives that were in progress as the fourth quarter started or ended as the game did counting as 0.5 while full drives counted as 1. 

YPP: Yards per play

YPD: Yards per drive

Penalties: “Pen” marks the total number of penalties committed by either team while “P. Yards” is the net difference in yardage. For the purposes of this chart, positivity/negativity of P.Yards is in regards to how the penalty affected the Niners (i.e. negative yards while the Niners are on offense hurt the offense while negative yards when the Niners are on defense helped the offense. So a negative mark is always bad for the Niners). 

“P. FD” is how many first downs were taken away or given out based on penalties. This includes instances where a player was granted a first down despite the result on the field, but not in addition to the result. So when George Kittle rail-roaded the entire Saints team and then was face-masked thirty-yards past the sticks, the first down was already earned and so a “penalty first down” is NOT recorded.

Finally, “P. Mar” refers to marginal penalty yards, which tries to look at the hidden yardage found in particular types of penalties. While blocking penalties are likely the most common offensive penalty, they’re spot fouls that don’t reset the downs, and—on any successful run or completed pass—they take away otherwise earned yardage (i.e. a hold that comes on a five yard run can result in the exact same penalty yardage of a hold that comes early in a forty yard run). Thus their yardage impact is typically minimized in pure statistics. In contrast, the only spot fouls on defense are pass interference, which—while potentially accounting for a whopping amount of yards—spot the ball at the point of the penalty so the yardage is much more likely to be shown on the stat sheet. And while there are instances where a pick six or a sack or a would-be touchdown could be wiped out by a pass interference call, the most likely positive defensive outcome that gets erased by pass interference is typically an incomplete pass.

The shit-show of the Steelers game is a perfect example of all of this at work. In the fourth quarter, two holds and a clip on Justin Skule created -29 in official penalty yardage, while a defensive hold on Mark Barron gave the Niners 5 yards. In terms of penalty yards, that would make the Niners -25 on offense for that quarter. But while Barron’s defensive holding nullified an incomplete pass—thus making his net yards and marginal yards the same—Skule’s penalties wiped away 11 yards of offense. Thus, his marginal loss generated was -40 yards. Meanwhile, on defense, we had one -32 yard pass interference penalty from Jason Verrett on an incomplete pass. The net and marginal penalty yardage were the same. And yes, that’s right, we had -68 marginal penalty yards in the fourth quarter alone against the Steelers, which largely contributed to how hideous and close a game it was. 

Exclusions: Drives that were nearly finished (had one play to go) when they started the fourth quarter, I excluded. The same goes for last play defensive touchdowns that did nothing but mess with the spread (to end the second Cardinals game and to end the Falcons game). Those tell us nothing about our actual play and are (outside of Vegas) totally pointless to include.

Offensive Takeaways

Positives: In terms of drives and yardage, we’re nearly identical from the first three quarters to the fourth. In fact, in the fourth quarter we actually average slightly more yards, slightly fewer turnovers, and half a point more than in each of the other three quarters. We also trended the right way as we got healthier. After the first Cardinals game (in which we were missing both our starting tackles, our top swing tackle, Juice, and — by the end of the game — Kittle), the only real instances of a massive fourth quarter drop in YPP were against the Ravens and Chiefs. And while you could also include the Saints game, going from an otherworldly 10.15 YPP to 5.9 YPP—which would have been good for 6th-best in the NFL across all quarters and was only 0.1 YPP under our season average—shouldn’t reasonably be called a “massive drop.”

Our yards-per-drive (YPD) stat also sees a slight boost, but it’s important not to take away too much from that figure. Remember that drive # is the loosest figure in this chart by far and was put in primarily just to see how many times each team got the ball in the last stanza. Since it is a figure that basically rounds to the nearest half-drive, once it is divided / multiplied / manipulated it becomes increasingly irrelevant.

Negatives: The dips in yards per play (YPP) and first downs (FD) are worth noting, particularly because when you’re up in the fourth quarter the most important thing is keeping it that way. That means generating consistent yardage and first downs. Some of the 1.1 YPP difference could be explained by a natural conservative lean when you have a lead (the Niners entered 9 of 12 of these fourth quarters ahead) and how that can eliminate the big shot plays that balloon averages, but you shouldn’t actually get very conservative until much later in the fourth quarter than many people think and conservative or not, that doesn’t shed any light on the 1.1 FD drop. You’re never NOT trying to get first downs and keep the ball. Penalties could also be somewhat at fault. -3.3 marginal yards doesn’t sound like much, but it’s not hard to imagine that yardage being the difference between a stalled out drive on a third down and a narrow conversion to continue running the clock. There’s also the obvious ripples that come from a penalty putting the offense behind the sticks and that affecting future play-calling. But we’ll get into that more in detail in the second part.

Defensive Takeaways

Positives: The stats aren’t pretty, but the majority of the issues were back-loaded to the time when we had fewer healthy bodies. Other than the Steelers game and a first matchup with the Cardinals where the YPP numbers are greatly skewed by a 90-yd touchdown catch, we didn’t see a major drop-off in YPP until that Saints game in week 14 (and by the end of that game we were down Dee Ford, DJ Jones, Jaquiski Tartt, Ronald Blair, Damontre Moore, and Jullian Taylor). We also showed the ability to adapt while far from full-strength with incredibly impressive fourth quarter performances against the Ravens (2.94 YPP) and the Rams (3.09 YPP) during the second-half stretch, not to mention our work in the playoffs.

Negatives: Unfortunately, there are quite a bit of worrisome figures. The upticks in plays +4.2, yards allowed +43, and points +3.5 do not paint a friendly picture. While the first down figures may not shift much, it’s clear that opposing teams are getting bigger gains past the sticks in the fourth quarter. If you look at an even broader picture, while we finished 7th in points allowed/game (19.5) across the regular season we were T-18th in points allowed/4th quarter (6.5). The figures look even worse across this particular sample of close games. Our 8.5 points allowed/4th quarter would rank 29th in the NFL if prorated across an entire season (which isn’t a fair thing to do, but still…), and even if you take our two fourth quarter defensive touchdowns (and their two point conversions) to subtract that from that total points allowed (which is even more arguable, but whatever) our figure of 7.2 points allowed/4th quarter would still rank 25th in the league.

Again, some of this is injuries. If you take the first seven games on this chart (when we were still reasonably healthy on defense) and count the Seahawks OT game as two separate fourth quarters (as it went the entire extra stanza), our defense was allowing less than 3.4 first downs and 4.6 points allowed/4th quarter. The first figure would be excellent and much better than the 5.1 first downs conceded/quarter across the first three periods of this 12-game sample. The second figure would be good for T-4th in the NFL if extrapolated over an entire season. On the flip side, over the last five games, our first downs conceded more than doubled to 7 first downs/4th quarter and our points allowed nearly tripled to 13 points/4th quarter. Unsurprisingly, that scoring mark—if applied to an entire season—would be worst in the league. It’s important to note that it is far from fair to extrapolate either the good or the bad figures of this chart to a whole season, but it at least lets you see the potential issues at hand.

Now is there some bad penalty luck on the defensive side as well? Sure. -4.8 marginal yards and half a first down per fourth quarter can certainly be the difference when you’re looking at one score games. But that doesn’t account for such a drastic dip in performance late in games.

Again, it’s important to note these statistics are only statistics and what they’re inferring is far from world-ending. We were 13-3, on a the edge of a championship, and our 6-3 record in close games means there was considerably less luck involved—and thus, more repeatability—than, say, the 2018 Rams’ 6-1 record. While the Super Bowl hangover is something that is often referenced, I actually think we’re in a great position to avoid that fate, but finding and addressing any late-game concerns will be necessary for sustained long-term success.

We’ll look at that in the next post, coming… hopefully soon cause I don’t have a job.