Quick Slant: SNF - Hammer, Meet Nail
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant Game Environment Colts Chiefs November 23, 2025, four days before Thanksgiving. It’s 20-9 with 8:43 remaining. The Colts have led all day. They enter 8-2, their record dragging lukewarm preseason expectations toward the realization that Indianapolis might be among the AFC’
Quick Slant: TNF - The Housewarming Party
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant * Game Environment * Lions * Bills Before they made football, Detroit and Buffalo made things. At the eastern end of Lake Erie, Buffalo made steel, cold as a gravestone; grain, gently sleeping under sunshine. They made automobiles and airplanes, chemicals and electrochemicals under the raw weight of
Quick Slant: MNF - The King is Dead, Long Live the King
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant * Game Environment * Broncos * Chiefs “The king is dead; long live the king.” It’s a wonderful sentence, on its face absurd – a juxtaposition of grammatical opposites, a paradox paired to break ground on something strangely profound. Credited to the accession of Charles VII in 1422,
Quick Slant: SNF - Choose Your Shade of Blue
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant * Game Environment * Cowboys * Giants I stared at my wife. We didn't say anything, but we spent the next 20 seconds having the same silent conversation: Is this really the best use of this $80? I smiled gently. She caught it and grimaced back.
Quick Slant: TNF - This Same Sacred Ground
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant Game Environment 49ers Rams On August 7, 1858, Melbourne had sprouted from a muddy colonial outpost into a gold-rush boomtown, swollen with ships, money, migrants and men who had come from half a world away to make their fortunes. The sod had been turned
Quick Slant: NFL Kickoff Game - Right Where We Left Off
Mat Irby’s Quick Slant * Game Environment * Patriots * Seahawks Everything faded from nothing at once, and I just came to – slight at first. Pressure, tugging, sterile light, moisture, heat, mechanical whirring, chatter, my growing form – it all rose. Then out. Asleep. Back again. Terrifying silence, the first I’d ever
Mat Irby's Apex Score: Tight Ends
If you’ve been sticking with me lately, you’ve seen me slowly roll out a metric I’m calling Apex Score. The idea behind Apex Score is to boil indicators of future upside down to a single number. This, alone, may be foolish. I’ve gotten really deep into
Mat Irby's Apex Score: Quarterbacks
In the last two weeks, I’ve written damn near 15,000 words about WRs and RBs, going round-by-round to compare Apex Scores to ADP in search of market inefficiencies. This time, I’m doing things differently. * Introducing Apex Score: Quantifying Upside and Beating Redraft ADP at Running