LBT split a surprisingly strong GEH team with a 0 cap differential, and it was an eye-opener to me at least. I keep getting reminded of last season when everyone rated LBT highly but then they just never got off the ground. I hope that isn't the case this season.
For NIP, they got swept by MB8 in Week 1, but they were missing two of their starters. They dropped seven spots in the community power rankings too, but I think that's an overreaction. They'll rebound quickly, will they do that here?
Two NIP halves, then two tied halves gave this sweep to NIPs and reassured the community that the previous week was just a fluke. LBT played hard, and managed to tie two halves, so that's nice. They even had the game tied on aggregate in G2H2, going up 2-0 within the first three minutes, but then NIP slowly chipped away at the lead and managed to pull it back and tie it up at 3-3.
jig was the best offender on the tiles for NIP, with 10 caps and 477 hold, leading both teams in that metric. Cobra supplemented that performance with five caps and 298 hold of his own, which is about the same production that JSwan had last week as well, so it's like they haven't skipped a beat on the offensive side. Smooth and bergieberg had solid performances as well, but they didn't cap as much and were trailing both NIP offenders in hold. The NIP offense definitely had the advantage here.
The NIP defense looked rejuvenated with juke juice back in, and the stats show it. slime_god after having just 464 prevent last week, nearly doubled it with 827 prevent this week. juke juice also had 697 prevent and 38 returns, so this defensive partnership is very solid. Both NIP defenders out-prevented chucky, who had the most prevent this week for LBT with 669 prevent. He did have 62 returns though, which is nice. Ralph had 542 prevent and just 29 returns, which is actually three more than his return amount last week. The defense for NIP did a good job on the prevent and also still out-returned and out-tagged LBT, so they also got the advantage here.
You can see that NIP led LBT in almost every stat category in Table A. The only exception being F/G, with LBT being near the top with a 0.2657 and NIP being near the bottom with a 0.3403. Due to NIP's F/G being pretty high, you can see then why LBT has the better RIB% and QR% than NIP, with a 6% difference in RIB and 8% difference in QR. The one issue is that NIP leads in almost every other category here. They had more hold, more tags and returns, more prevent, more prevent, better H/G, even more good handoffs despite the high F/G ratio. The biggest issues from LBT this week that probably ruined their chances of getting at least a split was their lack of prevent and a below average Chain% while also letting up a pretty high Chain% against NIP. NIP's Chain% was 73.61%, while LBT's was just 49.73%, which actually was the second-worst out of all the teams this week. You can't have low prevent if you're also giving up good handoffs at a clip of 75%, because the flag's just going to be out all game.
This also probably hurt the LBT offense's chances of really working on the NIP defense and trying to get out. They were stuck on OD a lot of the time, which is dispiriting when you just want to try and grab. Even with fourth-lowest F/G ratio this week, their H/G was pretty low at 6.185 seconds per grab, which ranks as the third-lowest. You can't be having that when NIP has the highest H/G of the week with 9.066 seconds per grab, which is very high. Overall, it just seems like NIP had the edge over LBT in almost every category, and they were rewarded with a sweep.
For my Player of the Match, I'm taking jig here, due to his offensive output this week. He had 10 caps and 477 hold, which ranked 2nd and 4th this week, respectively. He had a score rate of 18% and also had a H/G of 8.52, which ranks fourth among offenders this week. He was a shining spot last week against MB8, and he deserves this card for this week as well.
CONCLUSION
A sweep for the NIPs sees them back in the middle of the standings on an upward trajectory, meanwhile LBT falls to 1-3 and there are some concerns about the strength of this team. The starters returned for NIP and together they are a pretty solid team. I didn't think that juke juice would be playing defense and Cobra would be playing offense, but they did pretty well, and the juke juice / slime_god defense is solid. For LBT, there have been issues surrounding both sides of the field. Ralph Wiggum getting a combined 54 returns in two weeks is a little worrisome, as well as mediocre H/G and hold numbers from the offense for two weeks straight. Maybe they've just played solid defenses, but I mean LBT's offenders need to be able to handle them if they want to make a deep playoff run.
