SmashMouth

Nine weeks can tell us a lot about the NFL season. It doesn't seem like a lot, but nine weeks were enough for us to take Jared Goff for real as a franchise quarterback. They were enough to convince us that the Jaguars had a defense capable of getting into the heads of Ben Roethlisberger and A.J. Green. They were even enough to turn the Giants into a cautionary tale against believing in teams that forgot about fielding offensive lines.

Quantitatively, the halfway point of the NFL season gives us an opportune time to both look back and project forward. Eight or nine games don't sound like much, but when you consider that we've seen more than 1,000 total snaps from most NFL teams, the sample is bigger than it seems on the surface. Stats aren't going to tell the whole story, but by using the right stats, we can gain some meaningful insight into what has happened this season. More important, we might even be able to muster up an idea of what's going to happen next.

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