The Rise Up, See Red podcast

2024 Cardinals preview with FTN Fantasy's Aaron Schatz

In a special edition of the show, Jess talks to FTN Fantasy's Aaron Schatz, the creator of DVOA and the author of the yearly FTN Football Almanac. The 20th edition was released recently. Check it out.

Schatz talks about the Cardinals' 2023 season, the play of Kyler Murray, projections for the Cardinals in 2024 and gives some fantasy insight.

Duration:: 23m
Broadcast on:: 28 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

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Fresh for everyone, prices and product availability subject to change, restrictions apply, see site for details. [Music] This is the Rise Up Sea Red podcast, all about the Arizona Cardinals and the NFL, featuring insider and outsider perspectives. Enjoy the best hour of Cardinals Talk on the web. Now, here are your hosts, Jess Root and Seth Cox. Hello, Arizona Cardinals fans and welcome to the latest edition of the Rise Up Sea Red podcast of the Seth Cardinals Talk on the web. I'm your host, Jess Root from cardswire.com, the USA Today NFL Wire site that covers your Arizona Cardinals. And this edition of the show is a special edition, as we have a special guest, Aaron Schatz from FTN, who has just put out the 20th annual FTN, his football almanac for 2024. Aaron, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate the time. How have you been? It sounds like you've probably had a crap ton amount of work that you've been doing for the last several months. Yeah, I was noting, as we were getting on, that I just discovered an error in the book that has to be fixed. It's like, I thought we'd fixed them all. It's a lot of work. Putting this book out, it's 450 pages of preview, and it is a lot of work. So tell us, tell us about the almanac, like what does it cover or what would my listeners want to get out of it? Because it sounds something similar to what one of my contributors for cards where Howard Balzer puts together the Lindy's Pro Football preview that came out a couple of months ago. Yeah, it's a lot like the old Bill James baseball abstracts. There's a chapter on each team with a bunch of stats from last year, advanced stats, and then projections for the upcoming year, and then fantasy football projections. There's a whole section on quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, and tight ends with projections for all of them. And all the witty writing and advanced stats that we're known for, we just stuff it all in this thing, and 450 pages. And you can either get it at ftnfantasy.com/almanac or a print copy by going to Amazon and searching for FTN football almanac 2024. Fantastic. Obviously, we'll keep things kind of Arizona Cardinals centric here. And as the as the creator of DVOA, I imagine that last year's in 2023, that the Cardinals were kind of a tale of two seasons, the pre-Kylomerary and the post-Kylomerary return. Obviously, they entered last year as a team not expected to do much. And surprise, surprise, they didn't, only four wins. And the little blurb that you had on the intro to the thing, it's in 2023, 4 and 13 means four more wins than expected. Were zero wins really expected last year? Not by us, but by a lot of people. The way people talked about the Cardinals before the season, it sort of seems like that's what people expected. So, tell us about what, you know, if you're looking at allitically, what was the season, what was the Cardinals season sort of last year in terms of things? Having been a part of that season last year, watch covering the team for so many years and last year, their defense was spectacularly bad. Their offense was surprisingly okay early, then bad. And then late in the year when Kyler came back, was, you know, by a few metrics was, I think in those eight games, he returned was a top 10 offense in terms of efficiency. And I think they were fourth in yards over the last four games of the year. But from what you calculated things, what did you see from the Cardinals a year ago? I mean, we haven't been about maybe a little bit above average once Murray returned, but, yeah, the defense was really bad. They were the worst defense in the league by our numbers. So that, you know, puts a damper on the whole season, I think, because that has nothing to do with whether Murray came back from injury. They were bad early in the year. They were bad late in the year. They were bad pretty much all around. But yes, the offense did improve in the second half of the season. They were surprisingly efficient rushing. I think people would be surprised by that. They played the hardest schedule on defense of opposing offenses, but it was bad even after you were just for that. But the offense was all right. The offense was all right. As we're looking at kind of this, the, the offense, it said a minus 4.5% correct me. So a minus on offense bad and a plus on defense, also bad, correct? Yes, because that's allowing offense. Yes. Yes. So the defense had a set was a plus 17.3% while the offense was a minus 4.5% in terms of that gave that was a total of a minus 20, 20.4% DVO, which was 29th in the league. Did you see, I don't, I don't know if you looked at that. The, you could say we could, we could almost point to the, the return of Kyler Murray, but for me, it wasn't just Kyler, because even Josh Dobbs experienced a decent amount of success offensively when James Connor was on the field. And the four games that he missed is when things sort of fell apart. It was, there were difference, what, what made, what do you think, what did you see, what, what made the Cardinals rushing offense? Was there a, I'm not going to pretend that I watched a lot of Cardinals last year when you cover the whole league, it's hard to watch everybody, but I can tell you based on stats, you know, the offensive line was pretty average. They got a lot of yardage on long runs, what we call second level runs, which is a five to 10 yards past the line of scrimmage. They were second in the NFL, what we call open field run, which is 10 or more yards past the line of scrimmage. They were fourth in the NFL. And that was a big change from prior years. So I don't know if that's likely to continue this season. Okay. What was the, what was the biggest improvement over the last half of the season offense to that they saw when, when Kyler returned? I don't have numbers in front of them. I'm sorry to know exactly what the, what the biggest improvement was, whether it was a certain down and distance or passing or, or in general. I mean, they just, they were better in the second half of the season. They were horrendous against Cleveland in week nine. Yes. The eight games after that, they were much, you know, much better. Yes. They, that was significantly better from, from that. Well, I mean, you know, they had the advantage of playing Philadelphia, for example, when Philadelphia was completing, so. And, and well, the one of the fun things that we saw last season is that, um, San Francisco, like Arizona sort of broke San Francisco's rush defense that week, because from that point on, it was far below average the rest of the way. And I don't know the cardinal success where they were without J. Von Hardgrave. They were without Eric Armstead, that game. So there were reasons why they ran, but like San Francisco's rush, rush defense was broken after they played the Cardinals. No, I don't know broken. That's a little extreme, but in terms of comparatively to earlier in the season, there, the rush defense was much, much worse after that. Tell it from, from your perspective, Kyler Murray as a quarterback over his first few seasons, what, what have you seen from him quarterback wise? Well, the, the thing is that he was really good up until like in middle of 2021. And he hasn't been as good since, both before and after the injury. Um, his past DVOA last year was exactly average, zero. So you, you want, you want to believe that the old Kyler is in there somewhere, like the guy from 2000, from the first part of 2021, but he just hasn't been that guy for the last couple of years. Looking ahead to the 2024 season, um, the, the mean projection that you all have, uh, in the Almanac is 6.6 wins, um, with a 45% likelihood of being in that six to eight win range. Uh, what, what, what, what leads to those sort of projections? So part of it is that the quarterback projection for the Cardinals that we do separate from the team projection is not as high as you would expect because of the fact that Murray hasn't been as good the last couple of years as he was before that. There's also, we write about it in the chapter. There's an interesting effect in our projection system where all else being equal. Teams that draft or receiver high tend to actually drop a little bit on offense and then go up in the second year. And I know that sounds counterintuitive and there certainly are examples of teams that had rookie wide receivers come in and go gangbusters and their whole offensive prove. But overall, even if the rookie wide receiver plays well, those offenses tend to take a little bit of a step back and then take a big step forward when that receiver is in their second year. So, you know, the Cardinals drafted the first receiver in the whole draft to go. So they kind of fall into that little bit of the system and you want it to save them from all the other stuff that they did, but they didn't add a lot of other talent. They, and the quarterback projection is not as high as it feels like it should be. And so their offense projects to decline a little bit and then their defense projects to get a little bit better because it was worse than the league last year, but they have the sixth hardest projected schedule in the league. So that's the other problem is they have a tough. They are in a tough division. They play the AFC East, which is a tough division and they just have a tough schedule. Yeah, they absolutely, especially the, I believe five out of the first six games of the season against teams who were in the postseason a year ago. That's everyone, everyone but Washington in week four. And they, and it lightens up when once they hit December, like middle of November, December, but by then if, you know, the season might be already be broken. Well, it seems like it lights up, but they still in December, they still have to play CA at all the Rams and the 49ers and those are all good teams. They are. What is sort of Kyler's projection? Like he was at a even zero last year, exactly average. And I would agree, like if you, if you looked at his play, just the eye test from his return to the end of the year across there, he played quite averagely. His last three games were really good, but he played pretty league average. It wasn't what you want from a franchise quarterback, but he was also first, first time in that offense coming off the knee injury with no off season reps. What, what do you project from him? It is, is it, you said it's not as high as it could be. How, what are, what does, what do you expect from him in a little bit below average? You, he was a little bit below average in 2022. And he was average last year. So you sort of expect average or a little bit below. And then the receiving cord, which is an interesting note that with the addition of, of Harrison, but the receiving core last year was, was bad. Does that play any difference? So historically, obviously what you're looking at the model says that they'll do you a decline. Do you think that that, that the Cardinals might be a slight outlier in that fact because all the receivers were so bad last year? Correct. Yeah, I mean, maybe, but we don't know. I mean, you know, is they Jones a big improvement on more? I don't know. It might be a little bit, well, I mean, I'm not going to pretend I'm not a believer in Harrison's talent. He, he's very, very good. Like, I, you know, I'm not saying they shouldn't have drafted him, certainly. Um, I'm just saying that the, you may not see the effects right away. If you were looking on that, I also kind of look on the betting side. The, the projections are for 2024, um, 6.6 wins, which is just ever so slightly above, most over, under projected wind tolls of six and a half. Yeah. So yeah, I wouldn't touch it. Although I do like, I do, do like the fact that you look at that they, they have nearly have like it's 45% likelihood of being in that six to eight range, which is kind of where I expect, I expect this team to be a seven to nine win team this year purse. That's my personal projection for them. If we, if we look division wise, what, what do we look and expect? Are there, is there any team in, in, are the San Francisco 49ers projected to be as good? Are the Rams projected to be better? And what it, I know it's hard to know from, from what we're doing, but what is, what is Seattle expected to look like this year with the new coaching staff and we have the, we have the 49ers with the best projection in the league. So, I mean, they project to be number one on offense, top 10 defense, tough schedule, but just a really good team overall. Rams project to be about where they were last year. You know, good offense, average defense without Aaron Donald or special teams, but special teams is a big black box this year because of the new kickoff. So nobody knows what it's back. And we have Seattle just slightly behind them. We like their defense to improve this year. We like the Seattle defense to improve this year with some of the younger players that they have and their offense to be fairly average. Over the performance from last season, what teams do you expect to, which are expected to be overachievers or or take jumps and who is expected to be under achieving based on y'all's model? Well, there aren't a lot of big changes from last year. There really weren't a lot of teams that added a ton of talent or reduced, like, lost a ton of talent. I mean, the big one that stands out is the Jets because of Rogers replacing the horrible quarterbacking that they had last year. And then we have Pittsburgh declining. I think their defense not as good their offense. We had their offense higher than you would expect last year because of the tough schedule that they played. So we have their offense not as good this year either. But most teams we have about where we had them in our projections last year. I mean, not in our projections and our final numbers, which means, you know, we had Philadelphia lower than their when Ross lost records. So they come out lower in our projection than conventional wisdom, but it's no different than how we had them last year. Houston, you have at 10.4. How much did they overachieve, I guess I had like I could wander down to that page, but how much did they outdo? Oh, I guess that would be a team that would be improving because we had them 12th in DVOA last year and they project third this year. So yeah, we have them improving. It's a lot of young talent getting better. So yeah, they had they were 10 or something. So so you you actually expected, oh, okay. No, we didn't expect I'm talking about. We had them 12th in the final ratings for the season. No, we didn't expect Houston to do what they did last year. That that they won the lottery, basically. Right. Right. C.J. Stroud was absolutely insanely good. But yeah, so it and even even still at 10 and 7, they did outperform their their Pythagorean wins of 9.2. Do you recall what they're what they were projected to be? Oh, low, because you can't project it. You cannot project a rookie quarterback to be good. It's the same thing we have going on this year with Chicago and Washington. Right, that makes sense. You just can't project a rookie quarterback to be good because the average performance by a rookie quarterback is bad and sometimes and sometimes it's good. But it's like very hard to predict. Excellent. From the fantasy side of things on for the Arizona Cardinals, who are good? Is James Connor a good fantasy pick? Is Trey McBride a good fantasy pick this year? I think McBride is. I mean, Connor is he'll get touchdowns, you know, and and I don't think he'll have quite the numbers he had last year, but you know, he's got value. But I think McBride might be the most valuable fantasy player on the Arizona Cardinals. And in terms of rookie people, like in dynasty, people will probably love Marvin Harris. Oh, you want Marvin, absolutely. Oh my God. But but you're one. How much is he worth year one? I have found that rookies in drafts I've been in so far are all overrated. Like, I mean, we have Harrison projected high, like 1,100 yards, like really, really high. But he's like, rookies still seem to be going earlier than they should be. Like, not all rookies perform like that as rookies. Yeah, I mean, just a handful of others. There's no, we can't we can't again. You're not getting Marvin Harris at a discount in any way. No, that makes absolutely absolute sense. Awesome. Any just overall fantasy, is there a particular player that you view as a fantasy sleeper and maybe a fantasy guy that is overrated before we turn things before we wrap things up? No, I don't, you know, I asked Jeff Radcliffe, who did our fantasy projections, who we have very different from conventional wisdom. And we don't really have anyone this year that stands out like that. Excellent. Again, this is Aaron Schatz from FTN. FTN, you can find the FTN football almanac 2024 on ftnfantasy.com or the hardback or the or the print edition. You said it's on Amazon, correct? Yes, absolutely. Awesome. Well, Aaron, thank you so much for your time. That'll wrap up this edition of the Rise of Cedar Podcast. This is our Cardinal stock on the web. We'll be back with Seth Cox for our training camp information. Training camp updates will be our next show coming up next week. Thanks for listening as well. We all have somewhere we're trying to get to. As the largest energy producer in Colorado, Chevron is helping meet rising demand. And we're working to do it responsibly. Our next gen tankless facilities reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of our operations by more than 90% compared to our older designs. Working to provide Colorado with energy that's affordable, reliable, and ever cleaner. So everyone can get to where they want to be. You've arrived. That's energy in progress. Visit chevron.com/tankless. 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