Week 14 Quick Reads

Not Peyton’s best week…but check out the Brandon Marshall commentary. It means that 21 catches isn’t always a big deal.

Here’s as good a place as any to mention that Brandon Marshall finished seventh this week in receiving DYAR, so there won’t be any comment on him in the receiving charts that follow. How do you finish outside the top five receivers of the week when you set a single-game receptions record? Well, not all receptions are created equal. Marshall was thrown 28 passes on Sunday; one was intercepted, and six fell to the ground incomplete. All six were either on first-and-10 or second-and-8, but the pick came on a third-and-6 from the Colts 20. Marshall doesn’t get penalized for the interception, but he does get penalized for the incompletion. A catch there is very important.

Now, let’s look at Marshall’s 21 completions. Five of them were considered unsuccessful plays despite being complete, meaning that they didn’t do enough to push the team forward towards a first down. Those catches include a four-yard completion on third-and-8 and a 14-yard completion on fourth-and-18 on Marshall’s final catch. All five of those passes went for negative DYAR. Every single one of Marshall’s catches came while the team was down by 11 points or more, so our methodology takes some air out for picking up yardage in a situation where the winning team is generally playing looser coverage. At the end of the day, with 12 of his 28 targets resulting in a negative play for the team, those 21 catches only yielded 36 DYAR.

On one hand, that underestimates Marshall’s performance, since it doesn’t consider the effect his presence had on the rest of the offense and the defense’s coverage scheme. On the other hand, our figures also don’t account for the Colts’ secondary being ravaged by injuries; at points on Sunday, Indy was one more defensive back on the shelf away from being forced to employ Pierre Garcon as an emergency corner. And while Marshall undoubtedly had some impact on the rest of the offense, the Broncos ended up scoring a grand total of 16 points, and the other seven guys that ran the ball or caught a pass could only muster 157 yards. So Marshall’s big day couldn’t be worth that much.