TRADING THE NFL

TRADING THE NFL

I kick off the blog with a great guest post regarding the intricacies of trading the NFL, written by good friend JW and edited by myself.

1 )Introduction

The NFL is made up of 32 teams, split into 2 conferences the NFC and AFC. Each conference is divided into 4 divisions of 4 teams each – North, South, East and West.

Regular Season

The regular season runs for 17weeks from September to end of December in which each team will play 16 games – one week off is scheduled for each team.

The 16 games played are scheduled each year and are calculated as:

6 games – Home and Away against the other 3 divisional opponents

4 games – On a 3 year rotational basis against other teams in the same conference

4 games – 4 teams from divisions in the other conference on a 4 year rotational basis

2 games  - 2  Intra-conference games based on a teams prior year performance

          Organisation of the Play – Offs and Super Bowl

At the end of each season 12 teams will make the Play Offs in January and ending with the Superbowl in early February.

The twelve teams are selected as follows:

8 Teams – the winners of the 8 divisions make the play offs whatever their record
4 teams – 2 teams from each conference team with the best overall regular season record.

Each of the conference teams are seeded 1 – 6 based on their regular season performance to schedule the Play – Off matches. All Play  - Off games are all intra conference apart from the Superbowl.

The Play – Offs

Wild card Weekend – The 4 teams which have made the play offs based on their performance play the 4 lowest seeded division winners. These are intra conference games – so only AFC teams will play AFC teams, etc.

Divisional Championship Weekend – the 4 winners from the Wild Card weekend will play the remaining 4 divisional winners – i.e the 2 best divisional winners from each conference have a week off during wild card weekend.

Conference Championship – the 4 teams remaining from the Divisional Championship weekend (2 from each conference) will play off to find the Conference champions for the AFC and NFC.

The Superbowl – The game between the AFC Championship winner and the NFC Championship winner.

The Draft

The owners of the National Football League teams own a franchise sold by the NFL.

A team may only have a maximum 53 players on its active roster, of which 46 can be named for a game. Of these 46 – 11 players will be on the field – depending on whether they are the Offensive or Defensive team. Any number of substitutions may be made at any time during the game.

A NFL team will be made up from Contracted players and those selected in the College Draft. The College Draft happens once a year in April / May and constitutes 7 rounds of selections made by the NFL teams. Each round consists of 32 ‘picks’ from the 32 NFL teams. The order of the ‘picks’ is determined by a NFL team’s performance the previous year – i.e the worst performing teams get first ‘pick in each round. A team may improve its ‘pick’ position with another team by trading say a

seasoned player for a more favourable ‘pick’ position.

A NFL team will also have a number of contracted players (senior players), it may also hire ‘out of contract players’ from other teams as well as trade players with other teams. These forms of contracts and trades are the only way a consistently successful team is able to compete with the poor performing teams who are obtaining the best young talent from the college draft. It should be noted here that each NFL franschise is faced with a Salary cap – i.e. for 2013 the Salary cap was $120ml – the salary bill cannot be more than this is in the financial year. In addition to the $120ml cap – franchises are also allowed a further allowance of for the new drafts – i.e. there is a separate cap for the draft picks.

Points Scoring and other anomalies.

The NFL does not like tied games – if the scores are tied after the 4^th quarter – there is an automatic “Overtime” quarter of 15 mins. The first team to score a touchdown wins the game. If Team A score a field goal on its possession, Team B on its possession must score a field goal to continue the game. If after 15 mins the team are still tied – a draw is the final result. BF determines the result after overtime, the match result is declared void if a tied game. In 2014/2015 out of 256 games – there was only 1 tied game.

Touch Down – 6 points + 1 point for conversion. A team may decide to go for 2 points on conversion by running the ball into the end zone

Field Goal  - 3 points.

Safety – 2 points – when the Offensive team is tackled or downs the ball behind their goal line.

Each team is allowed three time outs per half.

At the end of each half play is suspended (general time out) with 2 minutes remaining in the half.

An Offensive team has 40 seconds to snap the ball from the end of the previous play – which means that at the end of full time if a team that is in the lead has possession it can effectively end the game with 40 seconds remaining by kneeling the ball at the next play.

2) Statistics for the NFL

There are a large number of statistics available for the NFL the most important of which are:

NFL Match Day Weekend – Pre-Game Stats

Each regular season week the NFL provide summary stats for game that weekend and during the game provide a simulation for each match. The stats go back to 2001  http://www.nfl.com/scores#. In respect of these stats I am specifically looking at overall performance of the Defense and Offense matchups as well the performance of the ‘most valuable players’ – Quarterbacks/Receivers/Rushers.

The starting Quarterback (QB)for each NFL team is of upmost importance, If any of the starting QB’s are sidelined for the better teams this will certainly cause drifts in the pre-play price . It may take a while to filter through to BF – but it will happen.

NFL Pundits– Pre – Game Stats

There are many of these I use ESPN http://espn.go.com/nfl/picks - they seem as good as any and it gives me a feel if there is a potential diversion in opinion on the favourites which tends to suggest swings pre-play.

At the start of each game week ‘The Bleacher Report’ details a review of most of the games and gives its prediction for each game.

Important Stats for In Play.

With all team games  -anything can happen so there is no ‘golden stat’ that will earn a profit – rather the stats should be used as indicators for potential entry points.

Prices will change on any of the following events:

1)    Teams lose / gain / retain possession

2)    Penalty yards for infringements

3)    Red Zone plays – where the ball is within twenty yards of the goal line.

4)    Field Goal attempt instead of a Touchdown

5)    Injury to the main QB/Receiver/Rushers

6)    At 1^st and 2nd half Kick Offs.

There is a large amount of stats available on the internet for the NFL, so I suggest you just use one as you can get buried in stats. The most important stats from a trading perspective cover items 1), 2) and 3) above. These stats cover:

1)    Number of first downs gained and allowed in the season

2)    % of 3^rd down conversions gained and allowed in the season

3)    % of 4^th down conversions gained and allowed in the season

4)    Penalty yards gained / allowed in the season

Stats on the above for each NFL team  - split for Offense (gained ) and for Defense (allowed) can be found at: http://espn.go.com/nfl/statistics/team/_/stat/downs.

Use of these stats will be clearer once we consider the different trading opportunities / strategies but that is for another post.