Andy Reid’s Lead Foot

The latest from the sports data science guy at KC Sports Network, Joseph Hefner

We all know the feeling. We’re playing a mediocre team we should we should dominate, and instead, it’s a slugfest that’s just way closer than it should be. The final minutes of the fourth quarter are ticking down, and we’re all holding our breath, waiting to see if we’re gonna be able to hold on and win. Probably against the Colts. Or the Titans. Or Raiders. Or Broncos. 

All the while we’re wondering why this continues to happen to us. Why doesn’t Andy Reid just call the good plays? Why doesn’t he just put the pedal to the metal and smoke these fools! Why can’t Andy Reid’s lead foot find the gas? Does he even have one? Lead foot, more like a feather foot, am I right?

Is this a real phenomenon, or is this just something that every fanbase believes about their team? That’s the question I want to explore today. Let’s take a look at some data and see what we find.

To explore this question, I decided to use Vegas point spreads as a proxy for how good (or bad) the Chiefs are relative to their opponent. If the Chiefs are favored by 10+ points, their opponent is probably pretty bad.

Vegas Win Probability (WP) is a stat that essentially takes the point spread and converts it to a 0-100 percentage scale. So if you have a WP of 60%, Vegas expects you to win that game 60% of the time. 

Notice first off that this is the Patrick Mahomes era (2018-2022). Notice also that the Chiefs are the winningest team—by a large margin—during that era. All Andy Reid does is win games and host AFC Championship Games.

But what I really want you to look at are the 5 buckets. In games where the WP is between 21-40, a team would be expected to win around 30% of those games. Reid/Chiefs win 57% of them. That’s insane. In the tossups (41-60% WP), Reid wins 63%.

In fact, he wins more than he’s expected to in EVERY SINGLE BUCKET! He’s good, folks. It’s true if I include the Alex Smith years here as well, though not as stark as it is with Mahomes. Mahomes definitely makes him better.

In the “gimme” games (61-80%), only two teams win more often than Reid. And finally, in the “You absolutely cannot lose these games” (81-100% WP) bucket, which are the ones I think we’re mostly talking about, Reid wins 95% of the time. We’ve lost one (1) game out of 19 total games in that category (2020 Week 5 vs OAK, lost 32-40).

We don’t lose the games we shouldn’t. Or, at least, we lose them much less than the rest of the NFL. That’s at least half the myth proven false, I think. Every team loses games to bad teams. Any given Sunday, and all that. Reid/KC is better at not doing that than most of the other teams.

I didn’t want to stop there, though. I wanted to see if our wins are closer than they are expected to be, if we as a fan base really ARE holding our breath more in those “gimme” games than other teams, even if we usually prevail.

Again, I turned to Vegas point spreads. This time I used the spreads as-is, rather than converting them to percentages. The point spread makes a solid proxy for how many points a team is expected to win (or lose) by, so teams that cover the spread at a higher frequency are probably winning pretty comfortably.

In this next graphic, I calculated how often a team covers the spread, in various point spread buckets (10 = 10+ point underdogs/favorites, 3.5 =  3.5 to 9.5 point underdogs/favorites, 0 = -3 to +3 point spread). These 5 buckets generally correspond to the 5 Vegas Win Probability buckets in the previous graphic.

Chiefs drop from first overall in the Win Percentage graphic to fifteenth in this one, with 6 other teams tied for that same spot. Reid/KC covers the spread at about a league average rate. For the team with the most overall wins in this time range, that’s a bit surprising.

All of the other top 10 teams in overall wins have a better cover percentage than the Chiefs except Seattle, who are tied with us at 49%. If we limit it to just games with 10+ point spread for the favorite, Chiefs are 18th, with 6 of the other top 10 in wins teams ahead of us.

I think we can probably look at this and say that yes, we do have more reason to hold our breath against bad teams than a good portion of the rest of the NFL, especially the other upper tier teams. We don’t put away opponents as often as these other teams do.

So is this a smoking gun? Is the foot of our glorious leader not solid lead? I’m honestly not sure. I think there’s enough here to say that there’s at least some smoke to this half of the myth. Stay tuned next week, where I’ll dig a bit more into this.

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