Fraud Busters: Which Winning NFL Teams Are About to Hit the Wall?

Warning: The following article may contain graphic evidence that your favorite team has benefited from luck. Prolonged exposure to evidence of luck can result in such side effects as Twitter Tourette’s Syndrome, Irritable Fan Syndrome, Trophy Case Tourism and an urge to insist that “great teams find a way to win.” If any of these symptoms persist for more than three hours, take a long walk and think about something beside football for a while. 

Twenty of the NFL’s 32 teams are at or above .500 right now. That means 63 percent of the league is enjoying moderate-to-severe feelings of well-being after four or five games. Yet we all know that more than 60 percent of the league cannot be average-to-above-average because, well, that’s not how averages work. A handful of terrible teams are inflating the win-loss records of their opponents, and we are still at the point in the season when a few fluke events can significantly skew the standings.

Bottom line: Some of the NFL’s 3-2 or 4-1 teams are bound to fall off, sooner rather than later.

“Fraud” is an ugly accusation, “fluke” is a fish and “luck” is a four-letter word. Let’s use more clinical language. Some teams with winning records have benefited from non-predictive, unsustainable events. If we isolate those unique events and study their effects on the win-loss records of the league’s .500 teams, we have a good chance of identifying the lucky, fluky frauds. Whoops!

Let’s examine some of those non-predictive, unsustainable events and the teams that have gotten a boost from them. Some of these indicators are culled from years of research by Football Outsiders. Others are just applied horse sense. If a team has enjoyed several fortunate circumstances (we’re straining the thesaurus to avoid the words “lucky break”), it makes sense to approach its hot start with a little bit of skepticism.

Out-of-Whack Point Differentials

If you win more games than you lose, you should score more points than you allow. The more extreme your record, the wider the differential between points scored and allowed should be. It’s not rocket science, though it can be: Stat experts use “Pythagorean Formulas” and other heavy-duty math to define the precise relationship between point differential and win-loss record, and they then use the calculations to determine if any teams are winning or losing more often than they should.

We don’t have to get into advanced algebra after five games, when one blowout can easily affect the numbers. Here are five teams whose point totals raise serious questions:

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• Carolina Panthers: The Panthers have scored 104 points but allowed 120 thanks to blowouts at the hands of the Ravens and Steelers. Beware of any team that wins close games but loses routs; that’s a recipe for 5-11, not 11-5.

• Arizona Cardinals: A dead-even 86-86 point differential undermines their 3-1 record. On the other hand, the Cardinals may have faced the NFL’s toughest schedule so far.

• San Francisco 49ers: Tight wins and losses result in a 110-106 differential. The 49ers have also faced a tough schedule, and like the Cardinals, that schedule will remain very tough for most of the season.

• Pittsburgh Steelers: Only six points separate the Steelers' points for (114) from points against (108), despite one of the easiest schedules among winning teams.

• Buffalo Bills: 96 points scored, 89 allowed. We will see that seven-point differential disappear when we look at opponents' missed field goals.

The Bounce of the Ball

“Fumble luck” is one of the best predictors of whether a team will rise or fall. It is also a subtle and easy-to-misunderstand concept. Here is the basic version: If your defense forces lots of fumbles, that’s a skill. If your offense avoids fumbles, that’s a skill. But recovering the fumbles is not a skill; rather, it's simply a matter of whether an oblong object wobbled into the hands of a defender, wedged itself in the belly of a guard or bounced out of bounds.

So if a defense forces just four fumbles but recovers all four of them, that defense looks more opportunistic (and better) than it really is. If your team’s offense fumbled 11 times but pounced on 10 of them, it’s not because of the awesome “fumble recovery drill” you read about at the start of training camp. Your team has a turnover problem that has not yet manifested itself.

This early in the season, a slight tilt in fumble recovery rates can have a huge impact on results. We don’t want to get carried away with every team that is 3-of-3 in losing or recovering fumbles, but there are a handful of 3-2 or 4-1 teams that have enjoyed a distinct edge in fumble recoveries, an edge that could disappear with one or two bounces of the ball.

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• San Diego Chargers: The Chargers are big winners in the fumble luck sweepstakes: They have lost none of their five fumbles this season while recovering five of their opponents' eight fumbles. The Chargers got away with three fumbles in their Seahawks upset: a botched snap, a Ryan Mathews bobble behind the line of scrimmage and a botched Philip Rivers-Mathews exchange. Rivers will be taking snaps from a backup center and handing off to third-string running backs for the foreseeable future. The fumbles will happen now and then, but the Chargers cannot expect to beat their better opponents by pouncing on each and every one of them.

• Buffalo Bills: The Bills offense has fumbled five times this season but lost none of them. The team fumbled three times against the Lions alone. Fred Jackson lost the ball deep in his own territory in the first quarter but jumped on it. A shotgun snap squirted past Kyle Orton, but he chased it down to keep the Bills in field-goal range. Marquise Goodwin lost the ball out of bounds at the end of a deep pass late in the game, just before a game-tying touchdown. Any one of these fumbles could have spelled a Bills loss to the Lions if a defender had reached it first.

• Houston Texans: The Texans defense is great at forcing fumbles, and recovering seven out of 10 is not too far from statistical expectations. Similarly, the offense is emphasizing ball control, and two lost fumbles out of six is not on the fringe of probability. But the Texans have recovered six fumbles from truly generous offenses (Raiders, Redskins, Cowboys). J.J. Watt and company will keep generating occasional takeaways, but not at this level, while Ryan Fitzpatrick’s fumbles are bound to catch up with him.

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• New England Patriots: The Patriots have fumbled eight times but lost three of them. Their opponents have fumbled seven times but lost five of them. So a potential turnover negative has become a turnover positive for the Patriots, thanks to the machinations of Madame Probability. The Bengals were particularly gracious in coughing up three fumbles on Sunday night, all of which wound up in Patriot hands. When New England tried to fumble one of its recoveries right back to the Bengals, the ball floated harmlessly from Jamie Collins to Alfonzo Dennard. This is not the kind of thing you can count on happening week in and week out.

• Bad Fumble Luck: This is a good time to point out that the Broncos and Giants have been on the wrong end of the bouncing-ball phenomenon. Opponents have fumbled four times against the Broncos but recovered all of them. The Giants have lost five of six fumbles while recovering just two of their opponent’s five. Both teams will start to look even better if central tendency begins exerting its influence.

• And What About The Cowboys? They have fumbled nine times and lost five of them. There is nothing lucky or unlucky about that: They are a team with fumbling issues.

Less-Than-Quality Wins

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Strength of schedule can be a house of cards after five games. If we are not certain how good these 4-1 and 3-2 teams are (or how weak some of the 2-3 and 1-4 teams are), how can we credit one team for beating another?

So let’s keep the strength-of-schedule conversation simple so we do not make a bunch of erroneous adjustments. We can all agree that the Jaguars, Rams, Raiders, Buccaneers and Titans are pretty terrible teams. They are perennial doormats who are already juggling quarterbacks and coaches. Beating them is no great accomplishment; losing to them is a sign of a potential problem.

When it comes to beating up on weaklings, “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em” is a good rule of thumb. A blowout victory against a terrible team is actually a sign of quality: Check out any Super Bowl contender, and you will find a couple of lopsided wins against awful opponents on their resumes. So we are not going to fault the Colts for beating the tar out of their bad divisional opponents—it is bound to happen again before the season ends. It’s the close games you should worry about; no true contender should need to “find a way to win” against the Jaguars.

The following teams have suspect wins or outright losses against bad opponents on their records:

• Pittsburgh Steelers: The Steelers lost to the Buccaneers and needed a late-game pick-six to put away the Jaguars.

• New England Patriots: Going down to the final seconds against a Raiders team looking for an excuse to fire its coach is not a great sign.

• Carolina Panthers: The season-opening 20-14 win over the Buccaneers was not as close as the score (and Cam Newton was hurt), but it was still close.

• Philadelphia Eagles: Sunday’s close call against the Rams revealed a variety of underlying problems that were covered up by turnovers and blocked punts.

• Dallas Cowboys: Needed a comeback to beat the same Rams team that almost came back against the Eagles.

Hidden Special Teams

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If your opponent misses a chip-shot field goal or two, chances are your team’s awesome field-goal-blocking strategy had little to do with it. Bad weather could be a factor, but there has not been much of that yet. You probably just faced an opponent with a lousy kicker, and an untimely miss or two kept you in the game.

Sometimes, a team faces two or three opponents with weak kickers or punters early in the season. The advantages go beyond missed field goals, to short kickoffs and shanked punts; again, the team’s own special teams has little to do with the opponent’s miscues. Football Outsiders keeps track of Hidden Special Teams yardage, and while the calculations for Week 5 are not finished, here are the teams that have caught some breaks in the kicking game:

• Carolina Panthers: Robbie Gould missed a 35-yarder in the second quarter for the Bears on Sunday. The kick would have made the score 24-7; the miss gave the Panthers life when they were playing terribly, and they drove down the field to cut the Bears' halftime lead to seven. The Panthers also enjoyed two early-game misses by the Lions, America’s one-stop shop for awful kicking. A 24-7 Panthers win was much closer early in the game, and six Lions points might have changed the outcome.

• Philadelphia Eagles: Yes, the Eagles have outstanding special teams this year, but they have also enjoyed blocked punts and kicks against opponents who give such things away in bunches (the Redskins, for example) while benefiting from some short kickoffs and wobbly punts. Let’s face it: The Eagles are not going to block a kick every week for the rest of the season.

• Buffalo Bills: Alex Henery missed three field goals for the Lions on Sunday, two of them 44- and 47-yarders. Between the fumbles and missed field goals, Sunday’s Bills victory was a textbook unsustainable event.

• Cincinnati Bengals: The Bengals have gotten terrible kicking from Mike Nugent, but they also caught a break when the Titans' Ryan Succop missed two makeable early field goals to spark a Cincinnati rout. Opponents are also averaging just 33.7 net yards per punt against the Bengals; it’s the kind of weird little stat that can tilt early games in strange ways.

• Denver Broncos: Young kickers Cairo Santos and Chandler Catanzaro missed field goals against the Broncos in competitive Chiefs and Cardinals games, respectively. Every point counts against Peyton Manning.

The Likely Suspects

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Several teams appear more than once on the above lists. Others do not appear at all. Combine the “good fortune” indicators with a dead-reckoning appraisal of the upcoming schedule, and these six teams are most likely to tail off badly in the weeks to come.

1. Carolina Panthers: An injury-riddled team getting by with toughness and some fluky plays, the Panthers face the Bengals (at Cincy), Packers (at Lambeau), Seahawks, Saints and Eagles in the next five weeks.

2. Pittsburgh Steelers: The Steelers are surviving on tight wins against bad opponents. After a trip to Cleveland (which is no longer a cakewalk), a home stand against the Texans, Colts and Ravens will sort out the AFC also-rans. Right now, the Steelers look like they belong at the back of that pack.

3. Buffalo Bills: The most fortunate of the 3-2 teams by many measures, the Bills get the Vikings and Jets after hosting the Patriots. They could linger above .500 for a while, but it will not last.

4. Philadelphia Eagles: The Eagles have scored seven return touchdowns this year. That’s not a sustainable victory model. The Giants, Cardinals in Arizona, Texans in Houston and Packers at Lambeau loom on the horizon.

5. Houston Texans: Like the Eagles, the Texans get more mileage out of defensive returns and blocked kicks than a team can count on for the long haul. The Texans have a favorable overall schedule, but with no quarterback and an offense that struggles to reach 17 points, upcoming meetings with the Colts, Steelers and Eagles look tough. For many teams on this list, staying above .500 means beating up on each other.

6. New York Giants: The Giants have not caught too many obvious breaks to start the season, but the upcoming schedule offers little relief: at Philly, at Dallas, a bye and then Colts-Seahawks-49ers. Escaping that gauntlet with a .500 record would be a feat.

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On the flip side, here are six teams likely to build upon their early-season success:

1 and 2. Seahawks and Broncos: You probably figured that.

3. Dallas Cowboys: The Cowboys are a fashionable “tail-off” candidate, and they will fall in Seattle next week. But the Cowboys are not benefiting from much probabilistic fluff right now. They should go 2-1 in a three-game Giants-Redskins-Cardinals home stand, then beat the Jaguars and enter the bye 7-3.

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4. New England Patriots: They are sounding the “all is well” bells from church towers around New England, and while the factors above suggest that all is not quite well, hosting the Jets and Bears after visiting the Bills should keep the Patriots at a manageable 6-2 or 5-3 record for ManningFest 2014 in Week 9.

5. Arizona Cardinals: Upcoming Redskins and Raiders games will help the Cardinals catch their breath and sort out their quarterback situation.

6. San Diego Chargers: A few breaks on fumble bounces aside, the Chargers are a very good team. A trip to Oakland and a visit from the Chiefs could make them 6-1 for their showdown with the Broncos.

What about the rest? Sometimes a 3-2 team is just a .500 team that has not had a chance to lose its third game yet. Other teams are just too unpredictable to evaluate based on a handful of indicators. There is no reason to crown or bury any winning team just yet, but a few teams are running out of smoke and mirrors. They must get better in a hurry, because no one stays lucky forever.

Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report. All stats courtesy of Football Outsiders.