Mike and I have had numerous conversations over the course of the past few days about how football is going to be the most difficult of the three major sports for us to analyze insightfully. A 53-man roster, numerous offensive and defensive formations, specialty players, and very few concrete measures to indicate who’s doing a good job and who isn’t…not exactly a recipe for solid evaluation.
Obviously, there are a plethora of traditional stats out there…but how many of them are actually useful? To me, this is a puzzle, wrapped inside a riddle, boxed in an enigma, carted to its destination in a mystery, dropped off on the doorstep of a quandary, picked up by a conundrum, and probably ultimately thrown in a dumpster shaped like a question mark. You know what I’m saying.
Let’s take a few examples, starting with QB. This season, I will be able to look at The Great Quinn’s completion percentage to find some indication of how he’s playing (my guess right now? Average at best). But that’s certainly not the whole story. His TD to INT ratio will help, but only to an extent. INTs can be a deceptive statistic since the pick is as likely to happen because of something the receiver did or didn’t do than because the QB botched the play. How many times have we seen a decent enough pass thrown to an open guy only to have the ball ricochet off his hands or chest and into the arms of a defender who was out of position to make a play on the ball initially? Clearly, those types of bad breaks are not the QB’s fault, yet they get penalized for them statistically.
On the flip side, just because a quarterback doesn’t throw for a lot of touchdowns doesn’t mean that he’s not playing well. In theory, he could be passing for 300 yards per game, taking the offense down to within the opposing team’s five yard line every possession…but if the RB punches the ball into the end zone on 1st and goal, the quarterback doesn’t get any credit in one of the most frequently used metrics of performance at his position. (Obviously, this is an unlikely scenario, but it does point out a blind spot in the system.)
So if touchdown / interception ratio is flawed, what else can we use? Quarterback Rating? Don’t even get me started. That’s an entire post in itself.
Long story short, even when talking about the premier offensive position in the game, I’m not confident that the numbers are really giving me the full story. Not a good place to start for the sport as a whole…
If trying to analyze offense is bad, though, the traditional resources for evaluating defense are even worse. I feel completely rudderless in trying to gauge the performance of, say, individual members of the defensive line. Sacks are great, but how many sacks is a DT really going to get? And tackles made seems to be about the most useless statistic in any of the major sports. Tackles blown would be more telling, but I don’t know of anyone keeping that stat right now (at least, not in a forum where it’s available for public consumption).
Case in point: in 2008, Shaun Rogers - universally acknowledged as a legit Pro-Bowler and one of the best DTs in the league - had 76 tackles (61 solo), 4 passes defensed, 4.5 sacks, 2 blocked kicks, 0 interceptions, 0 forced fumbles. In other words, he gave the Browns 4.75 tackles (~4 solo) per game, defensed one pass and got one sack every 4 games, blocked a kick once every 8 games, and obviously never intercepted a pass or forced a fumble during the entire season.
Apparently, this is enough to make him not just very good but dominant. But on paper, it doesn’t look like much, does it?
Another case in point: I was about to tack on another sentence about how Rogers’ stats especially don’t look as impressive when you take into account the proportion of minutes that the Browns’ defense spent on the field in comparison to their offense…but I looked around to try to find out what those number were, and I couldn’t dig them up anywhere. Go figure. Considering that we didn’t score an offensive touchdown for the last 6 games (37.5% of the season), I’m willing to assume that I’m correct in remembering that the defense was on the field a hell of a lot more than the offense…not to mention a hell of a lot more than they should have been.
Anyway, with Browns training camp set to start this Friday, the NFL season is about to kick into high gear. I will continue to post about Mangini’s squad frequently (I can’t speak for Mike or my dad - I think I’m more inclined to pay attention because I’ll have a fantasy team that I have to look after and the Browns are an excuse to go to a bar on Sunday morning, which, the way my schedule is right now, is the first day of my weekend). But unlike in basketball or baseball, I don’t have a great deal of confidence in the validity of my observations. The theme of this blog so far - as can be seen in Mike’s post on OPS, below - has been that we try to look at sports from a different angle than what most other writers and fans are doing. We hate to make statements that can’t be backed up. And we’re normally uncomfortable with the idea of just evaluating based on what we “see” during the games.
In light of all of that, this post is a one-time disclaimer for all future NFL posts to come: the tools that we have to look at the NFL right now are not great. But I promise you, fans of Jose Mesa Is Dead (yes, all 6 of you) that I will do my best to be insightful when it comes to the NFL - but that if I find I can’t do it, I will go out of my way to make up for it by trying to be entertaining. With what Manginius has been up to so far, I feel like there may be more material on that front anyway.
Stay tuned.
-T
