By Bill Barnwell
[email protected]

Since the videotape controversy was already discussed in a post on Football Outsiders (and Patriots Daily) this week, this week’s column will be a bit of a respite from Videogate.

The Chargers have been left with a conundrum regarding the redoubling of their skill position assets twice now in the last several years. First, Drew Brees emerged as an excellent NFL quarterback just as the Chargers nabbed the promising Philip Rivers in a trade with the Giants (that also netted them Shawne Merriman, in one of the great draft-day swindles of recent memory). When Brees’ contract expired, the Chargers let him walk away to New Orleans without any compensation. While Rivers has been mostly superb in his time as an NFL starter, Brees was an MVP-caliber performer last year. Had the Chargers dealt him after 2004, they could have recouped at least something for the player. Instead, general manager A.J. Smith decided that there was more value in Brees’ skills for a year as opposed to what he could’ve acquired in return in trade (whether it be draft picks and/or veteran players in addition to cap space).

Another somewhat similar situation brewed this past offseason, as Chargers backup RB Michael Turner was a restricted free agent. As per the rules of restricted free agency, the Chargers were allowed to tender him a contract at one of several levels. Turner received a $2.35 million tender, the highest available and accordingly, the one with the most compensation due the Chargers were a team to sign Turner away from them. The Chargers would have received a first- and third-round pick in exchange for Turner had he signed elsewhere; while there were trade talks around the running back, nothing was consummated, and Turner signed his tender offer and is continuing to backup LaDainian Tomlinson this year.

Now, while people may be aware that Michael Turner is a fine running back, allow me to point out how fine he actually is. Turner’s career numbers through three seasons and one week are astoundingly good; he’s averaged 5.9 yards per carry, exceeding Tomlinson’s yards per carry by more than a yard each full season.

That sort of argument, while a point in Turner’s favor, is a misuse of statistics. Namely, Tomlinson gets the ball in situations where he couldn’t possibly gain significant yardage (e.g. inside the five and in short-yardage situations). That’s where DVOA, our pet stat at Football Outsiders, comes in. DVOA measures how a player does each play versus what the league average is, accounting for down and distance, the yardage between the offense and the end zone, and the defense being faced. In addition, Tomlinson carries the ball much more frequently than Turner, which needs to be accounted for — there’s a benefit to having a back who can carry the ball 300 times at a rate better than a guy like Kevan Barlow. We define “replacement-level” as the level of a player the caliber of Barlow, freely-available talent, and then measure a player’s value on a per-play basis as opposed to that freely-available talent cumulatively over the course of a season.

Somewhat surprisingly, while Tomlinson’s DPAR obviously far outweighs Turner’s, Turner’s DVOA is still better than Tomlinson’s.

As you can see, while Tomlinson was the best back in the league on a cumulative basis last season according to DPAR, Turner was the best back in the league on a per-play basis. It’s, in fact, the best DVOA for a back with more than 50 carries in the eleven years we’ve got DVOA numbers for.

While DVOA is a more accurate indicator of performance than unadjusted yards, again, we see that Turner’s still performing better than Tomlinson on a per-play basis. There’s a second set of reasons for that, none of which are easily quantifiable or even provable. He gets more rest. He doesn’t start, and comes in when the defense is tired. The defense doesn’t prepare for him the same way they do for Tomlinson, and they don’t adjust accordingly. There’s probably some truth in those things, but there’s every reason to think Michael Turner’s a pretty good running back.

There’s a reason to think that he’s not, though, and his name is Richard Huntley.

Some of you may remember Huntley; he was a relatively nondescript running back for a few years in the NFL, playing for four teams. He was drafted by Atlanta in the fourth round in 1996, spent a year there, was waived, and then went to Pittsburgh, where he sat on the practice squad for a season. In 1998, he had 55 carries for 242 yards; decent numbers, but a product of context and full of lots of third-and-long useless yardage, as was reflected in his -35.2% DVOA. 1999, though, brought a new Richard Huntley to the fore. He gained 6.1 yards per carry on 93 carries, became a solid receiver in the rushing game, and put up a 21.9% rushing DVOA, good for fourth in the league. The Steelers responded by giving him a three-year, $4 million contract and a chance to compete with Jerome Bettis (who was in the final year of his contract) for the starting job in training camp. Bettis won out, but as if to prove his 1999 was not a fluke, Huntley’s rushing DVOA in 2000 rose to 30.3%, good for fourth in football. Bettis’ DVOA was significantly lower, at 10.7%, but that was still good enough for seventh in the league.

Huntley was cut after the season and signed with Carolina, where he would challenge the oft-injured Tshimanga Biakabutuka for the starting gig. In traditional fashion, Biakabutuka got hurt and Huntley was the starting back for most of the season. Huntley’s line: 165 carries, 658 yards, a -25% DVOA, and -6.2 DPAR — in other words, replacing Huntley with the best free agent you could find at the minimum salary would have been preferable to actually using him. Carolina went 1-15 that year, George Seifert was fired, and Huntley had three more carries in his career before he was out of football.

Huntley’s an example of something DVOA can’t account for, but a scout or an observer with access to DVOA can: The rest of the offense. As useful as DVOA is, it can’t account for the quality of an offensive line or a quarterback’s ability to put a running back in a good situation more often than not. It’s just impossible to get a first down on third-and-8 running the ball every time. Huntley played with a very good offensive line in Pittsburgh. He certainly did not in Carolina. In Pittsburgh, his quarterback was Kordell Ste…people thought he was good then. In Carolina, his quarterback was Chris Weinke. The situation in Pittsburgh was just more conducive to being a successful running back than in Carolina. DVOA can help strip some of that information out, but not all of it.

So, then, Huntley presents the cautionary tale in thinking that signing a successful backup from a pretty good rushing team is a good way to upgrade your running back spot. Of course, there are positive examples too. What we can do to more accurately ascertain whether the new running back was an improvement on the old one is to judge their DVOA versus that of the starter’s the previous year’s. While Huntley’s -25.0% DVOA was certainly abysmal, Biakabutuka’s DVOA the year before was an even more abysmal -26.1% DVOA. We track a statistic called “Success Rate” which measures what percentage of the time a running back has a “successful carry” — meaning he got a chunk of yardage significant enough to push his team closer to a first down than closer to losing the ball. The average starting running back succeeds about 43% of the time. In 2000, Tshiminga Biakabutuka succeeded 20.5% of the time. That’s astoundingly poor. Huntley got that up to 39%, which is at least remotely close to competency.

Perhaps the best way to see what teams might be getting into if they sign Michael Turner after this season is to look at the performance of teams who have acquired another team’s backup running back (defined as the back with the second-most carries on the team) and made them their starters. We’ll then track their performance the year after and compare it both to how they performed the year prior and how they did relative to the back they replaced. Since we only have DVOA and DPAR for seasons from 1996-2006, this analysis will only include backs from those seasons.

1. Lamar Smith (1997-98 and 1999-00)

Lamar Smith was one of two backs (both of whom were named Smith) to pull this move twice in his career. Starting off his career with Seattle, Smith was an average back by all measures — he averaged right around 4.5 yards per carry, and his DVOA in 1996 and 1997 was right around there: 3.2% and 0.2%. Nothing awful by any means, but not a star about to breakout, either. The Ditka administration in New Orleans brought him in to replace the awful Ray Zellars-Mario Bates hydra of suck, and Smith only made it to 138 carries. His DVOA, a miserable -38.6%, was actually worse than Zellars’ -34.2% the year before, and way behind Bates’ -19.0%. The result? Mike Ditka traded his whole draft for Ricky Williams (who put up a -30.6% DVOA his rookie year), and Smith returned to his backup role for a year.

Smith then moved onto Miami, where Jimmy Johnson was fooling around with Cecil Collins, J.J Johnson, and the last vestiges of Karim Abdul-Jabbar’s career. He made Smith his starter and Smith proceeded to not only bump his DVOA back up to a very respectable -1.6%, he had one of the great out-of-nowhere fantasy season of all-time, with 309 carries for 1139 yards and 16 touchdowns. He improved on Collins’ -18.5% DVOA dramatically. A year later, he averaged only 3.1 yards per carry, and in 2002, Ricky Williams replaced him again.

2. Charlie Garner (1998-99)

Garner’s mercurial career saw him start off as the backup to Ricky Watters in Philadelphia; when Watters left, it seemed likely that Garner would get the starting gig, but he was beat out by Duce Staley. Garner took the opportunity to replace the injured Garrison Hearst in San Francisco, and had an excellent year on a terrible 49ers team (this was the year that Steve Young went down at the hands of Aeneas Williams in Week 3). Garner’s DVOA went from -15.9% to 7.6%, and he kept his DVOA pretty close to Hearst’s 1997 performance of 9.4%. On a significantly worse team (the 49ers went from 12-4 to 4-12), it was an admirable performance and the beginning of Garner’s short career as a starting running back.

3. Ahman Green (1999-00)

Very few people, by this point, remember Green starting his career in Seattle. After being drafted in the third round in 1998, he spent two years struggling to get a foothold on any significant playing time, and was then dealt to the Packers for CB Fred Vinson, a second-round pick the year before. Vinson never played a game for the Seahawks. Green gained over 8,000 yards for the Packers. Oops. Green’s DVOA as a Seahawk in 1999 was good (21.4%), but it was gained on only 26 carries and that’s not enough of a sample to be of any reliability. As a Packer, his DVOA was a solid 6.9%, which was a significant improvement over Dorsey Levens’ -13.5% DVOA the year before. It’d be hard to find any way to say this wasn’t an incredibly successful move for both Green and the Packers.

4. Priest Holmes (2000-01)

The big one. Holmes had a strange start to his career. His first year with any playing time, he ran for 1008 yards and gained 4.3 yards per carry. The next year, he was hurt and only played eight games, but gained a ridiculous 5.6 yards per carry, good for a 22.9% DVOA, second in the league. The Ravens drafted Jamal Lewis and won the Super Bowl in 2000; Holmes backed him up and had a 12.5% DVOA, fourth in the league. If Football Outsiders had been around then, Holmes would have been one of the players we championed the way we do Jerious Norwood now.

Holmes went on, of course, to gain 1555 yards behind a great offensive line in Kansas City the next year. His DVOA that season was 20%, a slight improvement over the criminally underrated Tony Richardson’s 18.1% the year before. It was the third-best DVOA in the league that year, though, and Holmes would be in that rarified air until he got hurt in 2005. He’s the inverse Richard Huntley.

5. Terry Allen (2000-01)

The running back who would not die, Allen came back from injuries to have seemingly three careers. He was solid (4.5% DVOA) as Ricky Williams’ backup in New Orleans, and when Jamal Lewis went down for the season in 2001, with Holmes gone, Allen became the starter in what was his last NFL season. His DVOA wasn’t very good at -5.8%, but it wasn’t a disaster, either, when you compare it to Lewis’ 5.5% the year before.

6. Antowain Smith (2000-01, 2004-05)

The other Smith who pulled this move twice, Antowain lost his job to Travis Henry in Buffalo and was one of the thousands of veteran refugees brought in by Bill Belichick for the magical 2001 season. His DVOA stayed remarkably similar to his performance in Buffalo, going from -9.5% to -10%, but it was a ways better than Kevin Faulk’s -20.7% the year before, or J.R. Redmond’s -19.9%. I think everyone here knows the Smith story well enough.

In 2004, he rose again! After being let go by the Patriots, he ended up in Tennessee, where he backed up Chris Brown. He made his way the year after to New Orleans in its Katrina-riddled season, where stats are pretty irrelevant. Again, his DVOA stayed remarkably consistent (-12.7% to -12.5%), and while he was slightly worse than Deuce McAllister had been the year before, there’s no real predicative value to the 2005 Saints season.

7. Richard Huntley (2000-01)

8. Trung Canidate (2001-02)

Canidate was the speed demon and late first-round pick who was supposed to make the terrifying Rams offense even more so, but he never really made an impact. He barely played in 2000 and 2002, although he was fantastic in 2001, when he averaged 5.8 yards per carry and his 24.1% DVOA was best in football. The Rams shipped him to Washington, where he served as the starter in Steve Spurrier’s offense, splitting carries with Rock Cartwright and Ladell Betts. He actually was an improvement on Stephen Davis’ -8.4% DVOA, putting up a respectable -2.2% DVOA, but he couldn’t take the workload of the starting role, Washington traded for Clinton Portis, and Canidate never played again.

9. Warrick Dunn (2001-02)

Dunn wasn’t a backup inasmuch as he was a complimentary back to Mike Alstott. He was the featured back from 1997-98 and in 2000, but was technically the backup by seven carries in 2001 by virtue of missing three games. He went to Atlanta and was a big improvement over Maurice Smith, who also had one year as a starter and never played again.

10. Amos Zereoue (2003-04)

Zereoue was hyped as a good running back while backing up Jerome Bettis, but the numbers don’t show it. His best DVOA was -9.4%, and he was usually closer to -20%. He never had an above-average success rate, and was eventually dumped off to Oakland for the first year of the Norv Turner era. Replacing Wheatley (5.3% DVOA), Zereoue’s -14.1% DVOA did not help the Raiders’ many problems one bit. He made it to three games for the ’05 Patriots and was done.

11. Thomas Jones (2003-04)

Jones is another guy who had a strange career dictated by context; he went from first-round bust in Arizona to backup material in Tampa Bay to successful back on a Super Bowl team in Chicago. He wasn’t particularly effective in Tampa Bay, putting up a -12.4% DVOA while backing up Michael Pittman (-2.8% DVOA), but the Bears acquired him to supplant the A-Train, Anthony Thomas, who had actually put up a reasonably close to average -3.8% DVOA the year before. Jones got all the way up to -2.3% DVOA before really hitting his stride in 2005.

12. Corey Dillon (2003-04)

Another well-known story to readers of this site. Dillon’s -5.8% DVOA in Cincinnati in 2003 wasn’t fabulous by any means. He got it up to 21.2% in 2004 in New England, supplanting Smith, who was also at -5.8% in 2003.

13. Lamont Jordan (2004-05)

For my money, the closest comp to Turner. Jordan put up some extreme DVOAs as a Jet: in 2001, he was at 46.6% on 39 carries; in 2002, -40% on 84. 2003 saw him actually be average, with a 4.2% DVOA on 46 carries, and then back with 93 carries in 2004, his final year as a Jet, his 36.6% was second-best in the league. By comparison, Curtis Martin’s DVOA that year was 20%, good for eighth in the league, but he led the league with 54.9 DPAR.

The salary cap-strapped Jets had no way to keep Jordan to backup Martin, even though Martin was old and likely to breakdown the next year (which he did). Jordan moved onto Oakland, which gave him a five-year, $27.5 million deal. As you might remember, he was not the best back in football again. His DVOA dropped down to 1.5%; this, however, was still an improvement on Zereoue’s -14.1%. He was hurt for almost all of 2006.

14. Chester Taylor (2005-06)

Another Raven who flew the coop. He was no Holmes, as his -8.1% DVOA as a backup in 2005 was by no means spectacular. With Minnesota needing a running back after Whizzenation, they signed Taylor and gave him the bulk of the carries behind their restructured offensive line. Taylor wasn’t particularly great for a guy who gained 1,216 yards. His -9.4% DVOA was worse than he’d been in Baltimore, and was a step down from Mewelde Moore’s 1.9% DVOA the year before. Taylor was more durable, though, which is why he got the rock.

So, then, combining empirical judgement of the results along with some of my own opinions, I count eight improvements, five declines, and three relative washes. Of course, a back with the success of Turner isn’t really comparable to the failure Ahman Green was thought to be, or the starter Warrick Dunn was. In more likelihood, you can classify Turner in a group of elite backups alongside Jordan, Holmes, and Huntley. Those players went to three teams with very different offensive lines and played accordingly. Turner’s career, and his future as a star back, depends upon the same.

By Bill Barnwell
[email protected]

Hello! Welcome to the year’s first “Outside Foxborough”. I’ll be your host, Bill Barnwell. Although the column has a new name, this is the second year I’ll be penning a weekly column looking at the Patriots from the Football Outsiders perspective.

For those of you unfamiliar with our site, Football Outsiders is a website dedicated to analyzing the NFL through viewpoints not seen anywhere else. Primarily, that’s through our work in developing new metrics and means of judging performance that are more accurate than established measures like yards. Our primary metric, DVOA, measures performance against the league-average while accounting for context in ways that those traditional measures don’t, and are a better predictor of wins than the previous year’s performance. Now that I’ve explained all that, I’ll say that this week’s column has nothing to do with DVOA. In the future, I’ll explain DVOA and our statistics further when they come into play. Although our work has been featured in places like ESPN The Magazine and The New York Times and on FOXSports.com, if you enjoy these columns and want to read more of our work, I’d recommend you go out and purchase Pro Football Prospectus 2007, our annual that features essays on each team, original research looking at those teams, player and team projections, fantasy football information, and everything else you’ll need by your side come Sunday.

The archive of last year’s columns is available here; among other things, I looked at whether Deion Branch and Adam Vinatieri were worth the money, how wide receivers from different college conferences performed in the pros, the historical injury rates suffered by the Patriots defensive backs, and whether running quarterbacks age faster than pocket passers. Several of the essays were expanded and updated for PFP 2007.

This week’s column, though, was inspired by Cut Day, and what the Patriots did to get to the 53-man limit; namely, remove all their Day Two (Rounds 4 to 7 of the NFL Draft) draft picks short DT Kareem Brown, who might also have been cut had Richard Seymour been ready to play. While three of the players went to IR, the Patriots also cut four more players. This wouldn’t be surprising for some teams, but the Patriots have been known for their drafting acumen during the Belichick era. A look at the players they selected between 2002 and 2006 on the draft’s second day reveals several key Patriots that were found on Sunday in April instead of Saturday:

Not only did the Patriots find stars like Asante Samuel and Dan Koppen, but useful role players like Tully Banta-Cain, Jarvis Green, David Givens, Ryan O’Callaghan, and Willie Andrews have all came out of the later rounds of the draft. So it would seem to be a surprise, then, that the Patriots were only able to find one active roster spot for their Day Two picks this year. (G Clint Oldenburg has already been signed onto the practice squad.) While this is a deep, veteran team, it isn’t exactly a new situation for Belichick and Pioli.

Let’s evaluate Day Two, though, and see how the Patriots have done there. It’s sort of a forgotten day in the modern draft cycle; it gets sent to ESPN2, where most people don’t watch it, 99% of mock drafts don’t talk about it, and it’s seen as somewhat of a crapshoot for most, if not all teams. Of course, it’s precisely these areas seen as crapshoots or otherwise underappreciated that smart franchises like the Patriots exploit to their advantage.

To look at how teams did on Day Two, I went through the five drafts that took place between 2002 and 2006 and evaluated the results of each of the 799 players taken as measured by their games played and games started in the years following their selection. Games played and started were counted for all teams, not just the team who selected the player. You’ll also note the “Value” column above — that stands for Draft Value, as determined by the generic NFL Draft Value Chart, which you can find here. While the specific charts vary, the chart quantifies the value of a pick and assigns each a numerical value, ranging from 3000 to the first overall pick all the way down to two for the 224nd pick. (Since each of the drafts had more than 224 picks, I assigned all picks following #224 zero points.) The chart’s origins are attributed to Jimmy Johnson, and while it stands as a decent generic base for judging potential trades, I’m sure the Patriots’ chart is different from the one being used here.

The Games Played chart is led by the team that I believe has the best scouting of any team in the NFL right now, even if they don’t often receive the credit for it they deserve. Note that the “2002″ column, for example, measures the number of games played over the past five years by people who were selected in that draft, while “2006″ measures only those players who were selected in 2006.

The Baltimore Ravens franchise is impeccable at finding talent in the lower rounds and integrating them into their lineup (Adalius Thomas comes to mind). Amongst the other top teams, you see a mix of awful teams with nothing to lose in Tennessee and San Francisco, but then a series of relatively successful franchises, including the Patriots.

Indianapolis also stands out as a franchise who have often used Day Two picks, especially on defense, to fill in gaps. Keep in mind that this is strictly games played, so all a player needs to do is play one snap to count as much as someone who plays the full game. Matt Cassel has eight games played in his career. To see whose draft picks are really making a difference, we’ll need to look at the games started figures.

Again, the same mix of teams is near the top, even though the Ravens drop slightly. The 49ers in 2002 were the last team of the Steve Mariucci era, and the number of Day Two starts from that draft is due less to the quality of the players and more to the confluence of salary constrictions and the failure of both the Mariucci and Dennis Erickson eras to draft successfully on Day One. This is the franchise that chose Mike Rumph, Kwame Harris, and Rashaun Woods with successive first-round picks. The Colts and their Cover 2 guys are second, with players like David Thornton, Robert Mathis, Cato June, Jason David, and Antoine Bethea all stepping into starting roles.

Chicago, meanwhile, has Alex Brown, Ian Scott, Nathan Vasher, Kyle Orton (hey, he started 15 games), and Mark Anderson in their haul.The teams at the bottom of the list are also a mix of surprises and usual suspects. The Broncos are generally thought of as a team that drafts well, but all they have to show from Day Two over the timeframe is Elvis Dumervil, Jeb Putzier, and the argument against you being able to gain 1000 yards behind Denver’s offensive line, Quentin Griffin.

Pittsburgh’s also been famed for their drafting abilities for decades, and they unearthed contributors like Larry Foote, Brett Keisel, and Verron Haynes in 2002; after that, though, the well has gone dry. Chris Kemoeatu is a depth guy at defensive tackle, and Noah Herron got some carries in Green Bay, but no one else has really made the breakthrough into being a steady NFL player. On the other hand, Washington’s well-known for both trading away draft picks and making sure it has a very famous starting 24 with nothing else behind it, while Oakland and Detroit are the teams you associate with futility in everything.

The interesting thing here, and what surprised me when I was doing the research, is that there’s no consistent “year-after” effect where a team in salary cap hell or otherwise awful starts 15 second-day picks for two years in the hopes that a bunch make it through. There’s no correlation between a team’s wins the year before and the number of games played or started by their Day Two picks the year after, nor is there one between Day Two picks starting and the team’s wins that season.

Now that we’ve seen which teams are successful, we can look and see which positions have the best return on value.

Generally, we see running backs, receivers, linebackers, and defensive backs offering the best return on value, while quarterbacks and linemen tend to lag behind. Well, there’s a reason for that; those four positions make up the majority of special teams players, and many teams grab their special teamers from Day Two. Again, we’ll have to look at games started to get a clearer picture.

The first thing that stands out is those fourth-round tight ends! No wonder the Patriots went after Garrett Mills. Justin Peelle, George Wrighster, Darnell Sanders, Robert Royal, Donald Lee, Bo Scaife, Putzier, Courtney Anderson, and Owen Daniels have all seen plenty of playing time as starters, while Randy McMichael has started every game of his professional career. Fifth-round offensive linemen include Koppen, David Diehl, Tony Pashos, Jacob Bell, and Jake Scott. The clear trend is that late-round defensive players are more likely to be successful than offensive players (tight ends excluded), with skill-position players in particular lagging behind their defensive counterparts.

As you can see from the games started chart above, the numbers do seem to trend downwards as the draft goes along, which indirectly answers another question: Is there a point at which the draft becomes a crapshoot, and picks in one round are just as valuable as those from another round? The chart indicates that the answer is no, and it’s easy to confirm by checking for a correlation between draft value and both games started and games played.

The correlations are both positive (-.28 for games played and -.23 for games started) across all draft picks; if you remove the fourth round and just run the correlation for the fifth round on, the correlations are weaker, but still trend positive. The same is true for the sixth round. This means conventional wisdom is true; the draft becomes more of a crapshoot as it goes deeper, but a fourth-round pick is still much more valuable than a seventh-rounder.

So, with all this data compiled, we can finally look and see what we’d expect the average Day Two class to do in its rookie year. The result? 30.2 games played and 10.5 games started. It’ll be hard for Kareem Brown to accomplish that all by himself, no matter how long Richard Seymour is out for.

Bill Barnwell’s ‘Outside Foxborough’ will appear every Thursday. We welcome your comments here.

By Bill Barnwell, Football Outsiders – special to BSMW Patriots Game Day

It Is Time For Stormy Weather

Oh, if only the Patriots were hosting the Chargers this weekend instead of heading to sunny San Diego. 62° is the high for Sunday in San Diego; Foxboro, a measly … 60°? El Nino aside, Foxboro’s expecting rain on Sunday; it’ll be bright and clear in San Diego.

I say “…if only…” because of the stories that would inevitably pop up if the Chargers were, in fact, traveling to a blustery Foxboro as opposed to the comfort out West. You know, the ones that would insinuate that Philip Rivers’ fingers would freeze off and that he’d be left crying in a ball on the sideline, quality control assistants cuddling with him, since he’d never been exposed to cold weather before? They always struck me as kinda ridiculous. It’s football! Sure, I don’t like playing football in the extreme cold very much, but I’m not a professional! They can figure it out, right!

What was given as proof of these statements, in the times where they were one, were stats about how the Buccaneers had never won a playoff game above 32°, or that the Packers had never lost one below it, or similar numbers. The figures were obviously a small enough sample and subject to enough bias that they were easily questionable.

So then, when I looked at the Patriots trip to San Diego, I wondered if the opposite was true; if warm-weather teams actually suffered when heading to colder ground, would cold-weather teams suffer when warmed up? Or, alternately, would they play better?

I took every playoff game from 1985 through 2005, outside of Super Bowls, and compiled the results of all 216 games. From there, I added the average January dry bulb and wet bulb temperatures for each city, home and away. In the case that a team played in a dome, I instead replaced the dry bulb and wet bulb temperatures with a dome constant that we’ve found at Football Outsiders to be the most accurate. This was done because teams who play in a dome, after all, would not be used to playing in the cold weather even if their city was cold outside of the dome (see: Peyton Manning).

I then separated the games into three groups. Cold games involved a road team traveling to play in a city where the average wet bulb temperature in January was 25 degrees colder than that of its home. Warm games were the opposite; they involved a road team traveling to play in a city where the average January temperature was 25 degrees warmer than that of its home — for example, the Patriots’ trip to San Diego. All other playoff games were adjudged to be Neutral weather games.

What I found? For one, that riding the winds to success has shown some validity for the playoffs:

The data clearly suggests that cold-weather teams hosting its warm-weathered brethren perform better than the average.

While the sample is too small to draw a strong conclusion, the data also suggests that the opposite isn’t true: in fact, warm-weather teams seem to be at a disadvantage when facing cold-weather teams!

There is always the possibility that what’s being produced in the data isn’t necessarily because of the separations being made — instead, the results above could have been produced by the cold-weather teams simply being more successful than warm-weather teams. Is that the case?

To check that, I’ll rely on each team’s Pythagorean Winning Percentage. (For more information, please click here.) The median dry bulb temperature for each of the 216 teams was 43°. I used that as the point of delineation in separating the teams into Warmer and Colder buckets. Their performance?

As you can see, the warmer teams performed equally as well as the colder teams did, which would eliminate some fears about selection bias in producing the playoff performance results up above.

Is the sample large enough to be able to make strong statements about the weather and how it affects playoff performance? Probably not in the case of cold weather teams visiting warm areas, although it seems pretty apparent that the home teams in those matchups don’t enjoy any advantage by staying warm. When it comes to warm weather teams heading North and East, though, the last twenty years show that they’re most likely to be packing up their lockers Tuesday morning.

By Bill Barnwell, Football Outsiders – special to BSMW Patriots Game Day

The David Carr Conundrum

It’s hard to write a column about the Houston Texans without taking a look at the decision they made with regards to this year’s draft. Everyone who’s going to read this knows the story: they passed up Vince Young and Reggie Bush to stick with David Carr and Domanick Davis, and selected Mario Williams. At the time of the decision, I mostly agreed with this — running backs are fungible properties and I felt that Carr hadn’t been given a chance to shine. The only difference between the Texans’ decision and my own would have been the selection of D’Brickashaw Ferguson instead of Mario Williams. Both have struggled in their first year. Davis was placed on IR before the season with a knee injury that failed to heal; even so, the Texans rush attack is the 17th best in the league according to Football Outsiders’ DVOA metric, which measures their performance in each down, distance, and opponent situation versus that of the rest of the league. Perhaps more interestingly, their pass offense grades out as 13th — above-average! When you consider that Houston’s rush offense was 13th last year and its passing attack 31st, that appears to be a huge step forward.

Still, though, DVOA is just a metric and should be used in combination with observation and other data. If you’ve followed the Texans this season, what you’ve heard are increased rumblings, much like last season, about David Carr’s job security. Several weeks ago, he was benched halfway through a game after turning the ball over twice for Sage Rosenfels. Now, I don’t mean to disparage Mr. Rosenfels, but it’s Sage Rosenfels. This was not Gary Kubiak benching Carr so that he could get a rookie some game experience; he was benching his starting quarterback for his older, veteran backup. Speculation as to whether Kubiak was just living out some bizarre punitive fantasy involving a benching of John Elway is ridiculous, but Kubiak was clearly unhappy with the play of Carr. Further discussion of Carr’s impending dismissal has come out since then — do a Google News Search for Carr and most, if not all, of the articles will point the Texans “mistake” out.

The thing is, looking at Carr’s statistical line, it’s hard to reconcile that with what people are saying. He leads the NFL in completion percentage at 69.4%; Drew Brees, in second at 66.4%, is closer to eighth than first. While you can make a case that this is due to Houston’s offensive style, it’s some evidence that Carr is at least doing a decent job of performing within the system he plays in; it’s not as if he’s wildly inaccurate. Let’s then look at his yards per attempt, to see if he’s actually getting the ball anywhere:

As you can see, his numbers were going up from year-to-year at a pretty steady rate (the average yards per attempt for a starting QB, since the merger, is 6.88) — until last year, when his numbers went down to the levels of his rookie season. When I was compiling this data, I began to notice that Carr was one of the few quarterbacks that had this happen to him, and that this might say something about a quarterback’s professional feasibility.

I took every quarterback since the merger and eliminated all seasons where they didn’t throw at least fifteen passes a game and/or played fewer than eight games — since we’re looking at a rate stat, it’s okay if we include the strike years in this. From there, I simply subtracted their yards per attempt in their first season from their fourth, getting rid of the quarterbacks who hadn’t had four starting seasons in the process. Here are the quarterbacks who saw little to no change in their Yards per Attempt over those four seasons:

As you can see, it’s not a terribly impressive group — the names that you would find impressive, the Dan Marino, Mark Rypien, and Warren Moon’s, for example, all have significantly superior levels of yards per attempt than Carr to begin with. It’s simply hard to improve when you are already averaging 8+ yards per attempt. Terry Bradshaw looms as someone who improved significantly in his sixth year as a starter, but he appears to be one of the exceptions to the rule.

Here’s a list of the ten most and least improved quarterbacks when it comes to yards per attempt:

A player like Steve Young is a little misleading because he was playing in a different offense by the time he had his fourth season, but there’s nothing stopping the players on the bottom half of the list from going to a different offense and improving, either.

See that column to the right that I added? That’s the number of games each player played after his fourth starting season in the NFL. The players on the top of the list played 573 games after their fourth seasons; the players at the bottom of the list, 333. (The + symbols are for Donovan McNabb, Jake Plummer, Kurt Warner, and Aaron Brooks, all of whom are still playing in the NFL; if anyone wants to make a nifty prop bet with me, I’ll take Donovan McNabb having more starts than the other three combined for the rest of their respective NFL careers.)

The 20 guys most similar to and David Carr? Their games played numbers after starting season #4 are below.

They averaged 63 games played after their fourth season, nearly seven more than the players whose yards per attempt improved dramatically, but 30 more than those who saw their numbers decline dramatically.

So, then, it’s really hard to make a case that Carr’s yards per attempt stagnating after last season would be a dramatic point against him being a NFL-caliber quarterback.

What then, do we say about David Carr’s chances? Why is he so maligned? Interceptions? Can’t be. Starting quarterbacks since the merger throw an interception, on average, once every 30.93 throws. Carr threw an interception every 38.46 throws in 2005. Fumbles? Maybe, but is that Carr’s fault or the shellacking he takes? His offensive line, according to Football Outsiders Adjusted Line Yards metric, has ranked 32nd, 25th, 30th, 32nd, and this year 27th in protecting Carr from harmful DL waves. With that in mind, it’s hard to point out anything that Carr really does too incorrectly, and points even further to the benefits of having selected D’Brickashaw Ferguson in this year’s draft — even if Ferguson would’ve struggled in a similar manner in Houston, it would at least give David Carr a chance.

As you can see, Houston’s had the worst offensive line in football over the last five years for pass blocking. Note that the teams around them have also struggled to throw the ball effectively. Is that a coincidence? It might take a Pro Bowl performance by David Carr in Miami for the Texans to find out.

By Bill Barnwell, Football Outsiders – special to BSMW Patriots Game Day

Chris Chambers, for some reason, has developed a reputation that he is a elite wide receiver waiting to break out, a player held back solely by poor quarterbacks and lack of support across from him. Brandon Funston, when talking about the Daunte Culpepper trade, wrote, “First and foremost, [Culpepper] inherits one of the most talented receivers in the league in Chris Chambers, a player that can make tough, acrobatic catches in traffic and has a knack for the goal line. His skills work well in a vertical passing game and he’s never played with a QB that can throw the deep ball like Culpepper. Chambers had his best fantasy season in ‘05, but a healthy Culpepper would make him even better. Their connection could very well be reminiscent of the hay days of Culpepper and Randy Moss in Minnesota.” Let’s just save ourselves the time with that last statement and talk about Chambers the player, in and of himself. There are some clear trends to be seen with Chambers when you look at his DPAR and DVOA:

There is no doubt that, particularly after 2003, there was a good amount of evidence pointing towards Chris Chambers’ becoming a star WR; since then, though, he has basically fallen off of a cliff.

What’s really interesting is the catch percentage on the right – despite the dramatic variance in Chambers’ play according to DPAR and DVOA, he is essentially catching the same percentage of balls regardless.

Simply put, regardless of how ugly a quarterback or how decrepit a team a WR is surrounded by, elite WRs simply catch a higher percentage of the balls thrown to them than Chris Chambers does. Take a look at last year’s WR numbers. Steve Smith was a one-man offensive machine for Carolina with limited, at best, help from the rest of his team, in addition to being a much more dynamic deep threat than Chambers. He caught 69 percent of the passes thrown to him. Santana Moss, in much the same vein as Smith, caught 63 percent of the passes thrown to him. Some of those were screens, of course, but that’s not an issue with Hines Ward, who had almost nonexistent help from the wide receivers opposite him during the regular season and was at 61 percent. And this wasn’t a single-season thing; going back to 2004 and beyond, those WRs that are consistently defined as the elite of the game, or even those who are a step below them – the Joe Horns of the world – catch right around 60 percent or higher of the balls thrown to them. Chris Chambers has yet to have a single year like that.

Of course, in 2006, the old Daunte Culpepper hasn’t shown up, but Joey Harrington has replaced him and been, at least, marginally competent; he ranks 21st in the league by both DVOA and DPAR. Chris Chambers, on the other hand, is another story altogether.

Even after his 8 catch, 121 card game against Jacksonville last week, Chris Chambers rates out as the worst wide receiver in the NFL this season. Out of 80 wide receivers who have had 39 passes thrown in their direction, Chambers is ranked 80th in DPAR and 77th in DVOA. He’s had 122 passes thrown in his direction and caught 52 of them – that’s 43%. It really stands out when you look at the wide receiver page and you see that the players who are around his level are all marginal WRs (Brandon Lloyd, Alvis Whitted, Marcus Robinson), guys at the end of their careers (Rod Smith), or young players who are stuck playing with Michael Vick (every Atlanta wide receiver). None of those guys have seen the ball very often — the 10 guys above Chambers in DPAR, on average, have had 53 passes thrown in their direction. Chambers, again, has been the target of 122 passes. Other people who have seen that number of balls in their direction: Chad Johnson, Terrell Owens, Andre Johnson, Anquan Boldin, Donald Driver, Torry Holt. To a man, each of those wide receivers have numbers that make Chambers’ look shambolic. None have caught fewer than 52% of the balls thrown towards them, and they’ve had to play with Drew Bledsoe, David Carr, Kurt Warner, Matt Leinart and the poorly-calibrated JUGS machine that is Brett Favre.

So, I guess, you could argue that Joey Harrington is worse than all those quarterbacks this season. Well, let’s take a look at those WRs who are, in fact, stuck with QBs as crummy as the ones Chambers has been stuck with. I’ve linked the quarterbacks that Chambers has played with with their closest comparable quarterback over the last five years with similarity scores for those quarterbacks. Using this information, I’m going to take the QB whose numbers were most comparable to the Dolphins’ QB that year, and then find out how his top WR fared that year, comparing him to Chambers’ numbers for the same year in the process. (Since we only have catch data on the website from 2000 on, I will be dealing strictly with comparable quarterbacks from that time period.) You may notice that there’s one quarterback who shares, well, a certain kinship with another.

It seems absolutely unfathomable to me that anyone who watches him on a regular basis could make a case that Chris Chambers is a star receiver. Chambers has had to deal with some poor quarterbacks, indeed, but if he were really a stud stuck with mediocre talent all around him, he wouldn’t be this bad. There simply is not a wide receiver in our database (looking back to 1997) who has played this poorly in what should be the prime of his career and recovered to be an elite wide receiver. When Gregg Easterbrook was railing against the evils of SportsCenter several weeks ago, he didn’t point out one of the real flaws that SportsCenter’s introduced: false perception. You can watch a highlight package of Chris Chambers plays and think he’s amazing. If you watched him for a season, you might be able to forget about the drops or the mistakes. You’d have to watch that highlight package quite a few times, though. Chris Chambers has a better chance of being out of football in three years than he does of appearing in a Pro Bowl. If that seems absurd to you, I’d reply by saying that nominating the worst wide receiver in the league to go to the Pro Bowl would be an equally absurd proposition.

By Bill Barnwell, Football Outsiders – special to BSMW Patriots Game Day

Surely, there’s got to be someone left on Detroit Lions’ President and General Manager Matt Millen’s side. D.J. Gallo probably doesn’t want Millen to be fired. Well, and Ted Thompson. Actually, you can do a whole NFL Network commercial parody around that with NFC North personalities alone. You don’t need to tell Brett Favre twice that Matt Millen’s an excellent general manager. Lovie Smith knows he’ll need to spend a whole half-hour gameplanning against this mess of a franchise. Fred Smoot’s been preparing his boat all week. Najeh Davenport hasn’t come out of the sorority closet all week. Lions football. Now, on the NFL Network. OK, maybe Najeh’s not in the NFC North anymore, and maybe that joke is busted. But you know if you saw it on TV, you’d laugh heartily.

As the Pats prepare to host the Lions this week, there are a lot of ways to take a look at the visiting team and how their plan has been miserably executed over the last several seasons. I could go the gimmicky route of hindsight and list all the players the Lions could’ve chosen with their high draft picks, but that’s really unfair. Sure, the Lions could do a better job of scouting, but it’s hard to say that a player who went onto success somewhere else would have succeeded on the Lions; after all, it could have been the poor coaching of one of the three staffs that have presided over the team during the Millen Era.

Alternately, I could point out that the 80 teams who have drafted a wide receiver in the first round since 1979 have won a grand total of eight games more (or, yes, .1 wins per team) in that wide receiver’s third season (at which point you’d be hoping that this stud wide receiver you drafted was making a difference) than the team did in the year before they drafted that wide receiver. That number is lower than any other position except for interior linemen and defensive backs, which would seemingly point to the drafting of wide receivers in the first round as being a relatively fallacious decision, but that research is a little too dependent upon the rest of the team to be conclusive. So let’s not bash Matt Millen for wanting to draft a wide receiver in the first round. Well, at least once.

Instead, what I want to evaluate is whether there’s anything in history that tells us whether the wide receivers Matt Millen chose — the infamous trio of Texas’ Roy Williams, Michigan State’s Charles Rogers, and USC’s Mike Williams — had pedigrees that would have made them advisable draft selections. I’m going to look at all the wide receivers who were drafted from 1983 (the draft from the year following the bye) to 2001, and evaluate how they did in their first year, their first three years, and their first five years (2001 will be the endpoint so that we can look at five years’ worth of statistics for those players). We’ll look at the first five years since that’s when Millen could’ve definitively expected the players to be Lions property; obviously, from there, the players could’ve moved on if so enticed. Following that, I’ll break the players down into groups to see if we can find out anything in particular about them that would make them stand out.

To do this, I’m going to use the really nifty draft history available from, shockingly enough, DraftHistory.com. I’ve cross-checked that with the excellent player database from Pro Football Reference, and compiled data from other sources on the net with regards to injuries and conferences.

First, let’s take a look at how wide receivers selected in the first round do. Keep in mind that all the numbers I’ll list are the cumulative statistics of all wide receivers from that Conference over the specified timeframe, divided by the number of wide receivers that fit said criteria, providing an average performance by each wide receiver over that time frame as opposed to a seasonal average.

As you can see here, the sample is somewhat limited by the fact that there have only been 61 wide receivers chosen in the first round over that timeframe. What this points to at least anecdotally, though, is that Big 10 receivers (like Rogers) tend to perform significantly better than receivers from the Pac-10 (like Williams) or the SEC. The lone Big 12 receiver in the sample, by the way, was Rae Carruth.

The list of SEC receivers from that timeframe is pretty staggeringly bad, actually. It includes busts like Clyde Duncan (who compiled all of four catches in two seasons with St. Louis), Ricky Nattiel, Reidel Anthony, and Marcus Nash, and mediocrities like Willie Gault (chocolate swirl smoothness notwithstanding), Tim McGee, Wendell Davis, Alvin Harper, Ike Hilliard, and Travis Taylor. The only SEC guys who really lived up to their draft status were Anthony Miller, Eric Moulds, and eventually, Eddie Kennison.

The Pac 10 also didn’t provide particularly fantastic talent. While Keyshawn Johnson was undoubtedly an excellent selection over those first few seasons, Mike Sherrard’s numbers were pretty poor, while Aaron Cox was an outright bust. Sean Dawkins, Curtis Conway, Johnnie Morton, and J.J. Stokes all had solid performances over those five seasons, but the four combined averaged 47 catches and 648 yards a season — adequate numbers, sure, but you’d want more out of the playmaker you drafted with your first round pick. The last Pac 10 wide receiver to go in the first round was Reggie Williams in 2004; it’s safe to say he hasn’t shown any signs of stardom so far.

The Big 10, meanwhile, can name five first-round wide receivers better than anyone the SEC produced in that timeframe: Al Toon, Andre Rison, Joey Galloway, Terry Glenn, and David Boston (in his first five seasons, at least). Furthermore, O.J. McDuffie, Derrick Alexander, and Plaxico Burress all had numbers as good as Miller, Moulds, and Kennison. Only Kenny Jackson, Mark Ingram, and Thomas Lewis would be characterized as Big 10 draft busts at WR. Of course, Rogers would ensue to be a bigger bust than all of them, but with this in mind, it’s reasonable to say that First Round-caliber Big 10 WRs have some pedigree attached to them.

The four guys in the “Other” category didn’t do too poorly for themselves, either — outperforming most of the major conferences! Want to know why? Those four guys are Jerry Rice, Randy Moss, Shawn Collins, and Sylvester Morris. You may not remember the latter two too well; they combined for 16% of the group’s catches. So, essentially, if you’re going to draft a player from a small school in the first round at WR, well, make sure he’s really good before you do it. See — tautology!

Expanding the player pool to all wide receivers chosen on Day 1 of the draft (in the first three rounds) pushes everyone towards the center of the pack.

You’ll note the solid performance of the players from the Independent teams; since teams are organized into the conferences they played in at the time, that includes guys like Michael Irvin, Ernest Givins, Brian Blades, and Isaac Bruce — players who would make any conference look good. Big 10 wide receivers still look like a winning proposition, but you’ll notice that the Pac-10 suddenly looks very solid as a receiver factory. That’s because the Pac-10 produces some nifty players in the second and third rounds at wide receiver, guys like Vance Johnson, Flipper Anderson, Jerome Pathon, Dennis Northcutt, and Ed McCaffrey. To compare, while the SEC produced Robert Brooks, Peerless Price, Frank Sanders, Carl Pickens, and Darrell Jackson in the second and third round, they also gave eleven players to the NFL who would end up with fewer than twenty catches.

It’s when you look at the statistics of all the wide receivers selected over a five year span, though, that three groups stand out.

The Big 10 has to be considered the predominant producer of wide receiver talent in the country based upon this data. Later round Big 10 wide receivers that became contributors included Derrick Mason and Tim Dwight (Round 4), Calvin Williams (Round 5), Mark Jackson (Round 6), Tai Streets and Ernie Jones (Round 7), Curtis Duncan (Round 10), and Anthony Carter (Round 12).

The Big East isn’t too shabby, either; besides first rounder Marvin Harrison, it’s produced the woefully underappreciated Kevin Johnson, Antonio Freeman, and depth guys like Horace Copeland, Jerry Porter, and Qadry Ismail. That being said, Harrison’s numbers do skew a somewhat small sample size.

What the numbers show here is that the Big 10 is a good place to look if you want to get a wide receiver, and if you have a wide receiver you have some regard for, his presence in the Big 10 might be a sign that he’ll be useful in the future. So, strangely enough, Matt Millen’s selection of Charles Rogers may actually, at the time of his selection, have been the most defensible of the three if you judge from history. As for Roy Williams, it’s hard to say because the recent shift to the Big 12 leaves data for that conference pretty incomplete. Recent first round draft picks from the Big 12 include Matt Jones, Mark Clayton, and Rashaun Woods, which doesn’t hold out much in the way of future suggestion that they’ll be regarded highly.

And now, a data dump.

By Bill Barnwell, Football Outsiders – special to BSMW Patriots Game Day

Expatriots

When the Invisible Turf Monster caused David Givens and his ACL to part ways last week, I was shocked to even discover that David Givens still existed; while Tennessee appears to be a black hole for all success and notoriety right now (unless you are practicing for your mixed martial arts debut on unsuspecting opposing players), I still would’ve periodically expected to read something about a player who received a $24 million contract this offseason and was seen as a legitimate loss to the Patriots’ offense. I started to think about the other ex-Patriots who’d lost their way: Damian Woody getting benched for being unable to control his weight in Detroit, Lawyer Milloy going from being a reason to hate your coach to becoming a league vagabond, or Ty Law’s year barely holding his head above water on a Jets team trying to drag him to the bottom. While Law did have 10 interceptions last season, there were other metrics compiled by Football Outsiders that showed his slippage from the league’s best. He stopped 41% of the passes thrown in his direction, a number that ranked 80th amongst starting defensive backs in the league; he allowed 7.2 yards per pass attempt in his direction, which ranked 33rd. What I thought would be interesting to do for this week’s column would be to take a look at the ex-Patriots and see how they’re faring this year on foreign soil, using some of the advanced metrics at our disposal at Football Outsiders. I’ll explain each of them as they come up.

Joe Andruzzi (CLE)
Andruzzi’s currently playing left guard for the Browns, who currently have the worst offensive line in all of professional football according to FO’s Adjusted Line Yards. This stat measures the effectiveness of an offensive line in opening holes for a running back versus the effectiveness of a running back in simply being fantastic; as a result, offensive linemen are given less credit for plays where the result is a 30-yard-run and they’ve stopped blocking after six yards than on a play where the run goes for five and they’ve done all the lifting. The results are then compared to the average result against that down, distance, situation, and opponent, and then normalized so that the average team gains the average amount of yards (4.08) that an NFL team does on every play. The Browns, as I mentioned, sit dead last with 3.48 yards per rushing play. The weakness of the line? Left tackle Kevin Shaffer, who may legitimately be a worse run blocker than Richard Seymour. While Seymour is pouting. Shaffer’s .90 adjusted line yards behind him at left end are a ghastly figure, the lowest seen in some time. Furthermore, the Browns are last in the league at runs in the middle of the line, which could be expected due to the problems they’ve had in keeping a center healthy. Behind left tackle, the Browns are 20th in the league — so Andruzzi isn’t necessarily the weak link of the line, certainly, but he doesn’t appear to be great shakes, either.

Tom Ashworth (SEA)
Ashworth has been filling in at right tackle for Sean Locklear, who has been troubled by ankle injuries and the urge to beat up his girlfriend in public so far this season. In that sense, Ashworth is a huge upgrade on Sean Locklear as a human. On the football field? Ashworth’s been a bit of a mess. While Seneca Wallace has taken the blame for Leonard Little’s sack and forced fumble that was returned for a touchdown against the Rams last week, some of the blame has to realistically be placed on the guy Little blew right by, Ashworth. Furthermore, the Seattle offensive line play has gone down dramatically with the loss of Locklear and Steve Hutchinson’s poison pill move to Minnesota; the Seahawks, according to our adjusted sack rate statistic, rank 29th out of 32 teams in pass protection so far this year. Adjusted Sack Rate, much like Adjusted Line Yards, considers the context of opposition, down, distance, and situation so that the protection of teams who drop back 45 times a game (why hello Joseph Harrington!) can be compared to those teams that run the ball 40 times (and you’re doing well, every Jets opponent!) Furthermore, while the Seahawks rush offense ranks tenth in runs at right tackle, they are 24th in runs at right end, plays where Ashworth would be needed to block his end straight up while a guard pulls behind him, or alternately where he might be needed to get to the second-level and clear out a linebacker to make a two- or three-yard gain a seven- or eight-yard one.

Deion Branch (SEA)
Is Deion Branch’s season this year a wash? Are the Seahawks paying him like it is, or expecting it to be a wash for him? It’s hard to say. So far, Branch hasn’t been particularly impressive even whilst learning the offense in Seattle. Looking at the DVOA statistic that measures how Branch does versus an average wide receiver in the same situation, Branch’s -1.1% performance puts him 47th in the league for all wide receivers; it’ll be interesting to see whether that goes up in the second half and Branch returns to being a favorite of the statistic.

Matt Chatham (NYJ)
Establishing a hierarchy of emphaticity for “whoo’s”. Good for Matt. Still a solid special teams player, but the Jets run defense is the worst that the NFL has seen in six years. Not really Chatham’s fault, though.

Christian Fauria (WAS)
Fauria has struggled with an ankle injury in recent weeks and is yet to catch a pass this season in the Redskins offense, which I believe is some sort of mistaken performance art project using the screen pass and Santana Moss as a Christ-like figure.

David Givens (TEN)
See beginning. Givens caught eight passes in five games.

Brandon Gorin (ARI)
Gorin, traded in the offseason for a conditional pick, suited up for the first time last week against the Cowboys in a reserve role. He’s buried on what’s probably the most famously bad offensive line, after the Bears-Cardinals game, in years. On the bright side, he knows who the Bears are; on the brightest side, that joke is officially dead.

Damon Huard (KC)
Hey, finally some nice things to say! Huard was the sixth best quarterback in the league this season according to our DPAR statistic, and that’s even without playing in the first couple of games; his DVOA, which only counts the plays he was involved in, has him fifth. DPAR, by the way, measures the total number of points scored due to plays that the quarterback threw or ran with the ball versus that of a freely-available “replacement level” quarterback (insert your favorite ex-Steve Spurrier QB here). I say “was” instead of “is” because Huard is about to lose his job back to Trent Green, but he’s basically set himself up to be a highly-regarded backup quarterback for as long as he wants to be, and judging from his performance, a starting quarterback in those areas where God has scorched the earth. You know, like Oakland. Oh, and wherever Joey Harrington goes.

Bethel Johnson (MIN)
Last year, Minnesota ranked 12th in kick returns according to our adjusted kick return statistics, which account for location and measures kickoffs versus the average return. This year, employing Johnson as their primary kick returner, they’re tied for ninth. He doesn’t contribute anything to the passing game, but as a kick returner, Johnson’s fine.

Dan Klecko (IND)
Slightly less noticeably booed than Adam Vinatieri upon his return to New England, Klecko has played in six games and made two tackles. Much like I said about Matt Chatham earlier, Klecko’s an uninvolved part of one of the worst rush defenses in all of football.

Adrian Klemm (n/a)
The resurgence of the Packers’ offensive line (eight in the league in Adjusted Line Yards, and second in Adjusted Sack Rate) has gone on without Klemm, who was cut by the Packers before the season started. He hasn’t caught on anywhere, and he may have played his last NFL game.

Ty Law (KC)
As I mentioned earlier, while Law had a gaudy interception total last season, that may have had something to do with the fact that teams weren’t particularly concerned about throwing in his direction. This year, though, Law is doing much better. Football Outsiders tracks how teams do whilst defending the opposition’s #1 WR, #2 WR, other WR’s, tight ends, and running backs, relative again to situation and context. This season, the Chiefs are first in defending against #1 WR’s and 10th against #2 WR’s. I haven’t seen enough of the Chiefs this season to say whether Law is matching up against the opposition’s #1 receiver often or not, but either way, he and Patrick Surtain are clearly both having very effective seasons.

Willie McGinest (CLE)
Even though he hasn’t been playing with them this season, McGinest joined the rest of the Patriots linebackers in taking a comfortably large step back this season. While he won’t be appearing on the side of a milk carton like Mike Vrabel shortly will be, McGinest has struggled with injury this season and has only 16 tackles and 2 sacks in 7 games. On the other hand, McGinest can still serve as an assistant coach for Romeo Crennel whilst hurt, so there’s some added benefit there.

David Patten (WAS)
Patten went from being a nifty deep threat with the Patriots to being the worst regular wide receiver in all of football in 2005, according to both DPAR and DVOA. This year, Patten’s played in four games and caught one pass for 25 yards. His lack of proclivity is disappointing for someone with his surname.

Tyrone Poole (OAK)
I had no idea Poole was still in the league. None. Poole’s been a backup cornerback for the Raiders; while the Raiders’ defense has been solid this season, they’re 22nd in defending passes against the opposition’s #3, #4, and #5 wide receivers. He hasn’t hurt himself yet, though, which at least saves on physio costs.

Antowain Smith (n/a)
Smith was cut by the Texans at the beginning of the season and hasn’t caught on anywhere. He hasn’t officially retired, but when all Google News turns up for you are items from press releases about how you’re being passed for team records, you’re done.

Adam Vinatieri (IND)
Accounting for the effects of playing in a dome half the time and the distance of his kicks, Adam Vinatieri’s been the 12th best kicker in football this season on field goals. Of course, the one game-winning kick he had to make, he did so without fail, leading to Bill Simmons’ peak in the 2006 season. On kickoffs, though, Vinatieri was expected to be an improvement on the weak-legged Mike Vanderjagt; instead, though, the Colts have had the worst performance on kickoffs in all of football; the team has lost 8.9 points worth of field position since the beginning of the season. The Patriots, meanwhile, have gained two points of field position; that’s an eleven-point swing, and something to think about when analyzing the Gostkowski-Vinatieri tradeoff that not many people do.

Ken Walter (n/a)
Genesee County, Ohio Bowling Results, courtesy The Flint Journal:

Whitey Craine Memorial – Bryan Reagan 299-775, Bob Wirsing 298, Jesse Koch 289, Spider Edwards 771, Justin Crosby 279-752, Ken Walter 278-739, Larry Hubbard 704, Tim Bailey 279, John Ross Jr. 277, Tracy La Rose 288.

Ted Washington (CLE)
Is still enormous. Plays nose tackle for the Browns, who are 24th in the league in rush defense DVOA. Will remain enormous for foreseeable future, die, disintegrate into large pile of ash. So, he’s pretty much remained the same.

Damien Woody (DET)
Sprained his foot in Week 5 and was placed on IR. The Lions were 0-5 at that point. Woody has as many catches as Mike Williams, though, so presumably Matt Millen is pleased with his performance. In slightly worse news for Woody, the AOL Sports Blog noted last month that he’s being sued for $250,000 by a woman who claims Woody promised her financial security, marriage, and her own business to break an engagement to another man. The high point of the lawsuit, though, was the woman’s insistence that she’d agreed to have extensive dental and cosmetic surgery at Woody’s request. At that point, though, Woody was probably just trying to see what he could get away with, right?

Fred McCrary (ATL)
McCrary is the reserve fullback for the for the Falcons, who have the sixth best rushing offense in all of football. This is the antithesis of the Klecko and Chatham notes, except their almost perfectly-equal irrelevance to their teams’ success or failure.

By Bill Barnwell, Football Outsiders – special to BSMW Patriots Game Day

Watching Trees Decompose

Last week’s injury to Rodney Harrison was the latest in a seemingly-interminable series of injuries that has decimated the Patriots secondary for the better part of three years. The reason why this injury bug has bitten the Patriots secondary repeatedly isn’t in the numbers: educated guesses, though, would seem to indicate one or more of the following things are the case:

• Several members of the Patriots secondary are old and/or injury-prone.
• The Patriots face so many passes by virtue of being ahead in games so frequently that their defensive backs are more likely to get hurt.
• There is something about the way the Patriots secondary trains and/or is used in games that makes them more injury-prone than normal.
• The Patriots have happened to hit three years of bad luck when it comes to the health of their defensive secondary.

I will admit that, personally, I am inclined to think that the third choice above is the primary answer, with choices one and four having some relevance as well. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to ascertain what the root causes of the Patriot training or defensive back usage are that would lead to such injuries without doing seriously intense microanalysis, including analyzing how the Patriots train, something I obviously cannot do. At some point, though, Bill Belichick has to give some serious thought into analyzing what he can do to ensure that his defensive backs stay healthy — whether more liberal substitution, a change in how they build up their health for the season, a different offseason program, something! Because, as I’m about to show you, the Patriots defensive secondary is the most injury-hit in all of football by a substantial margin.

At Football Outsiders, we’ve compiled a database containing all player injuries from 2002-2005. Now, it’s very important that I make two notes — first, while the database should be complete, it is entirely possible that a minor injury here or there could be missing. That’s mainly because, second, the injury database is based upon the weekly injury reports issued by the NFL. Of course, Bill Belichick is famed for, let’s be honest, blatantly manipulating the injury report. He’s not the only one, but he may be the most prominent. To correct for this, we’ve also noted what players listed on the injury report actually did that week — whether they started, substituted, or didn’t play at all.

As a measure of whether Bill Belichick is any more of a liar than the average NFL coach, let’s take a look at the what he’s most famed for — listing guys as questionable whether they’re going to be playing or not. From 2002-2005, Belichick has named 78 defensive backs as questionable in his injury reports, the most in the NFL. On the other hand, there have been 1099 defensive backs in the NFL over that time frame that have been listed as questionable. Below, you can see the percentage of those players listed as Questionable who started, came off the bench, or didn’t play at all:

As you can see, the differences aren’t that dramatic — a slightly higher percentage of Patriots defensive backs listed as questionable ended up not playing, with slightly fewer starting altogether. With that in mind, I think it’s reasonably safe to assume that Belichick’s manipulation of the injury report is slightly overstated, at least for defensive backs.

So now, let’s see if the numbers match up with perception. I noted how many times a defensive back appeared on each team’s injury report from 2002-2005, including players listed on injured reserve. I separated the players into those listed as Probable, Questionable, Doubtful, and Out/IR. Furthermore, since a player listed as Out or on Injured Reserve is much more likely to be injured (remember Troy Vincent, now) than one merely Probable, I calculated a simple weighted score for defensive back injuries, with a “Probable” injury worth 1 point, “Questionable” worth 2 points, “Doubtful” 3, and “Out” or “Injured Reserve” worth 4.

The results? Patriots defensive backs have been significantly more injured over the last four seasons than any team in football.

As you can see, the Colts, surprisingly enough, had the most injuries to their defensive backs over the four-year span, but that was due to a dramatically high number of players listed as Probable. If you look at the weighted score, no one comes particularly close to the Patriots.

The remarkable thing is that nearly all of the figure comes from the last two years — the Patriots were only 19th in weighted injuries in 2002, and 24th in 2003 (when they listed DBs as questionable 18 times but not a single one as Probable, Doubtful, or Out); they were 3rd in 2004, and in 2005, they were remarkably…sore.

The Patriots are the only team to have two appearances in the top five — the 2002 Bengals are 10th. Furthermore, the second-place ’05 Broncos are closer to seventh than they are to first in weighted injury points.

I wondered about the second possibility I listed at the top of the article; do the Patriots suffer more injuries because they’re ahead in games and, therefore, have their defensive backs doing more work than other teams — or, alternately, have more defensive backs on the field than other teams because they’re in more passing situations?

The answer is no. The correlation between passes attempted against a defense and a team’s weighted injury score for their defensive backs is .002. Between passes attempted against and sheer number of injuries, that correlation rises all the way… to .01. The two items have nothing in common.

So then, there’s evidence that over the last four years, the Patriots defensive backs have been the most injury-riddled in football. How about 2006, you ask? Well, we don’t have all the injuries compiled as of yet to compare the Patriots against, but going through the injury reports for this season, they’ve already compiled 76 weighted points through the first nine games (including this week’s report) of the season. That leaves them on pace to record 135 points for the season, which would’ve been in the top 5 for weighted DB injury points last season; furthermore, with Randall Gay on IR and Rodney Harrison out indefinitely, that number is likely to rise. Forget an injury bug; the Patriots secondary, at this point, is begging for an exterminator.

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By Bill Barnwell, Football Outsiders – special to BSMW Patriots Game Day

On Football Outsiders, we have a pet thread for irrational arguments about the relative merits of Tom Brady and Peyton Manning; in our traditionally uninflammatory manner, we refer to this thread as the “Official Thread for Irrational Brady-Manning Arguments”. The thread has become so big as to bog down our server and force the appearance of a newly-minted second thread, just in time for this week’s upcoming Patriots-Colts game. Six posts into this now 405-strong thread, I joked that there should be a thread comparing Matt Cassel to Jim Corgi. While measuring their grip strength on clipboards and their ability to avoid local impersonators (ala Brian St. Pierre), I realized that it’s a little strange that two teams with such strong playoff hopes have so little in experience behind their two franchise quarterbacks. Now, I’m not saying that Sorgi and Cassel aren’t any good — obviously, their franchises have enough confidence in them to have them as the primary backups. That being said, while the cap-crunched Colts might not have the money to stick a veteran quarterback underneath the limit, the Patriots clearly do. So then, clearly, the Patriots think that having a veteran quarterback behind Brady is either unimportant, unnecessary, or both. Well, let’s use history to see if there’s any basis for such a decision.

I took a look at every quarterback since the advent of the bye week to try and find those quarterbacks who had been similar to Brady or Manning — quarterbacks who’d spent at least two years as a steady starter before being rushed off the field for a majority of a season, all while playing for the same franchise. Usually, this was due to injury, but in other cases (Jeff George in Atlanta, for example), quarterbacks were suspended or benched. From there, I tried to find quarterbacks who had backups that were similar to Cassel or Sorgi: guys who had the bare minimum of playing time, if even that much at all.

What I found was that such a thing occurring is pretty dramatically rare — there’s only six times a remotely similar switch has occurred in NFL history. The six:

Drew Bledsoe (2001 Patriots)

You may have heard of this one already.

Gus Frerotte (1998 Redskins)

Frerotte was replaced by second year QB Trent Green halfway through the first game of the 1998 season; he’d make token appearances in Weeks 5 and 6, but Green was the starter for virtually the entire season. The Redskins went from winning 8.5 games in 1997 (the tie being the infamous “Headbutt” game) to 6 in 1998 under Green, but only scoring eight fewer points.

Tommy Maddox (2004 Steelers)

Another success story. Maddox, hurt against the Ravens, came out for Ben Roethlisberger. The Steelers didn’t lose again until they ran into Tom Brady.

Dan Marino (1993 Dolphins)

If Brady or Manning were to get hurt, their team’s situation would be most similar to this one; a player with Hall of Fame numbers being replaced by a middle-round draft pick not expected to be a star — in this case, Scott Mitchell. While Mitchell’s Dolphins only scored nine fewer points than Marino’s, they also lost two more games than they had the year before. In addition, Scott Mitchell does not own a steakhouse inside the Hooters Casino.

Phil Simms (1982 Giants)

I’m not sure if you remember this, but before the punditry and Chris Simms even having a spleen to lose, Phil Simms used to be a pretty good quarterback. Ok, so maybe you remember that. Before that, though, you probably don’t remember that he used to be a pretty bad one. During the 1982 preseason, he tore up his knee against the Jets in much the same fashion that Jason Sehorn would sixteen years later; Simms would miss all of 1982 and most of 1983 recovering from his injury. In his stead, the Giants turned the ball over to Simms’ backup Scott Brunner, who already had 300 NFL attempts in his first two seasons; given the starting gig in the strike-shortened season and in 1983, he took a team that had been 9-7 in 1981 and saw them go 7-17-1 over the next two seasons, going from 22nd in points under Simms to 15th in 1982, but then back down to 25th in Bill Parcells’ rookie season. Simms’ return in 1984 led to three straight winning season and the Super Bowl in 1986.

Vinny Testaverde (1999 Jets)

I’ll always remember Vinny’s catastrophic knee injury. I was in the ESPN Zone in New York for its preview day, the day before it opened. “Preview day” means that the restaurant was in pre-launch mode, and while it was only serving three items, those items were all free. In addition, the games and assorted junk inside the ESPN Zone was also all free to use. This, I should warn you, is the only way you should ever experience the ESPN Zone. Comped.

If you are going to pay, though, make sure the quarterback of the local NFL team suffers a catastrophic knee injury while you’re watching on a movie theatre-sized screen. In the annals of “great sports injuries I’ve seen for the first time on a giant screen”, this is #2 behind the Mike Cameron-Carlos Beltran collision I saw on a giant sports book screen during my first trip to Vegas last year. I saw that one at 3 AM, screamed, and got a look of death from an eighty year old woman playing slots. What a wonderful place.

Oh – the Testaverde injury. Sorry. Testaverde was replaced, initially, by Rick Mirer. Mirer was acquired by the Jets from the Packers before the season started, and replaced Testaverde in the first game when he went down. By Week 6, though, the Jets were already casting glances in inexperienced Ray Lucas’ direction. Lucas was the full-time starter by Week 10, and ended up logging a majority of the snaps after Testaverde’s injury. The Jets were 6-2 in his starts, 2-5 under Mirer. It was a four-game difference from the 12 games they’d won the year before.

Are there any patterns to really draw from here? It’s hard to tell because of the small sample size. On one hand, Brady and Roethlisberger were brilliant; on the other, Mitchell, Mirer/Lucas, Green, and Brunner were all steps down from their more experienced counterparts. Again, it’s understandable that the Colts might not have a choice but to stick with Sorgi for salary reasons; the Patriots, though, have a pretty flimsy excuse. Is Pierre Woods really so valuable that he has to be on the active roster? Can Neil O’Donnell be taught to be a kick gunner? While the Patriots don’t want to worry about the answers to those questions, a Brady injury, whether at the beginning of a season or the latter part of this one, could blight their playoff hopes too dramatically for even Bill Belichick to overcome.

By Bill Barnwell, Football Outsiders – special to BSMW Patriots Game Day

Last week’s column, looking at reception-crazy running backs, noted that teams that used “playmaker” running backs who led their teams in both rushing attempts and receptions won fewer games than the average team. Now, this would seemingly make the Arizona Cardinals, New Orleans Saints, and right analog stick in Madden 2004 all quite unhappy, but let’s not confuse correlation with causation and say that having a LaDainian Tomlinson or Tiki Barber on your team makes them worse. Well, not yet.

I found last week that teams won, on average, 7.73 games when a running back led the team in receptions. Drilling down some, I found that teams who employed a secondary running back to lead them in receptions won 8.34 games, over a half win better than the average. I mentioned that playmaker-led teams performed slightly worse.

There have been 79 instances since 1978 where a running back led his team in both rushing attempts and receptions. Those teams won 7.25 games per season, a full-game worse than the John D. Williams and Dave Meggett-style offenses, and more than a half-win below the average NFL team. How could that be? These teams had players good enough to be dynamic threats both behind the line of scrimmage and out in the flat, and they were somehow still crummy?

I was still skeptical. There’s gotta be some advantage to having a playmaker on your team. I thought about LaMont Jordan, who’d been close to the team lead in receptions for the Raiders last season. He had 70 receptions while Jerry Porter had 76, but had a below-average DVOA (Football Outsiders’ metric measuring Jordan’s performance versus the league-average in the same situations — for further explanation, please read our Methods page) because he wasn’t doing anything with them; a lot of the time, he was catching meaningless dumpoffs on third and long and going a few yards, and he rarely, if ever, broke a long gain, leading to a low 8.0 yards per catch average. (For reference, the average running back who led his team in receptions averaged 8.89 yards per catch over the course of the study.) I wondered whether there were certain running backs who were just padding their stats with dumpoffs and other assorted flotsam, while running backs who were breaking big plays shouldn’t be associated with them. I took the ten running backs with the highest yards per catch average and the ten lowest and compare them below.

There are definitely sample size issues here, but a three-win-per-season difference is pretty gigantic. I found that yards per reception correlated with team wins for these 79 players at .29, a decent-sized correlation when it comes to football data; for the larger group of running backs who led their teams in receptions, that number went down to .21. I still wasn’t convinced I’d found the solution, though.

Since the numbers being analyzed here aren’t too complicated — yards, receptions, touchdowns, and carries — I decided to pull out the fantasy point metric again to see if it revealed anything. Just as a reminder, the formula for fantasy points is that used in most leagues I’ve seen and participated in: (((Receiving Yards + Rushing Yards) /10) + ((Rushing TDs + Receiving TDs) * 6) + Receptions). LaDainian Tomlinson’s brilliance on the waggle, sadly, will not be included for study.

The correlation between the 79 running backs’ fantasy points for the season and their team’s number of wins was .38, much stronger than the yards per catch correlation of .21. So now, something had been revealed that seems somewhat obvious: if a player is going to lead your team in carries and receptions, he best be getting a lot of yards and touchdowns, or your team’s not going to do very well.

I wondered whether either was more important, and separated the fantasy points into fantasy rushing points and fantasy receiving points. Fantasy rushing points correlated to wins (.34) higher than receiving points (.21), but that would also intrinsically follow — after all, teams that are losing throw the ball more than they run it, while teams that are winning do the opposite (that is, unless you’re Philadelphia). That being said, I checked whether carries correlated to wins, and for the 79 running backs who led their teams in carries, the correlation was only .21, so it was more so what the running backs were doing with their carries than the fact that they were getting them at all.

As I said at the beginning of this piece, it’s very important to not confuse correlation with causation. With that in mind, I think what history is telling us here is that having a playmaker on your team isn’t a bad thing — you just have to make sure that he’s a good one.

By Bill Barnwell, Football Outsiders – special to BSMW Patriots Game Day

This week sends the Patriots to the one of this season’s surprise packages in the 4-2 Minnesota Vikings. Well, surprising to me at least — I picked the Vikings as the team most likely to have the 2007 #1 overall selection in the Football Outsiders Season Predictions. While four of the ten FO writers participating chose the surprisingly competent Bills, two others chose the Raiders, who may already have Brady Quinn jerseys in stock. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Raiders sign Jonathan Quinn and have him wear the same jersey number that Brady Quinn does, just so they can start selling that jersey now. Alternately, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Raiders sign Jonathan Quinn because they are, unfortunately for Raiders fans, the Oakland Raiders.

Let’s try and keep things pleasant, though. The Vikings have played above expectations by employing, according to Football Outsiders’ DVOA statistic, the third-best defense in football so far this season. Unfortunately for them, it’s had to overcome the 24th best offense in football. One of the strange things about the Vikings offense is that, right now, their leading receiver is a halfback, Chester Taylor. Granted, he has 21 receptions, and two other players have 20 and 19 receptions, respectively, but he’s the leader right now.

I should give a disclaimer here: I love running backs that can catch the ball — for about six straight years, I’d make sure to grab Larry Centers with my last pick in fantasy football. By mid-season each year, whoever’d drafted Rashaan Salaam or Curtis Enis or Anthony Thomas (do you see a trend here?) would need a second running back and would pay far over the odds to get him. This happened every year without fail. What I noticed, though, was that while Centers bumped around from team to team, his teams usually didn’t do very well: he only played on three teams with a winning record in 14 seasons, one of which being the 2003 Pats, where he really played a peripheral role.

With memories of Larry Centers getting dealt for Jerry Rice running through my head, I decided to go back and take a look at teams who’d had their running back be their leading receiver, to see if the teams had anything in common. I also wanted to see if teams that used a running back as their most frequent (if not primary) receiver enjoyed success on a regular basis or struggled, to see if the Vikings’ frequent use of Taylor might portend future struggle.

My hypothesis was that teams that used running backs as their leading receivers did so because they had poor talent at wide receiver and/or couldn’t keep their quarterback upright long enough to throw the ball downfield, resulting in short dumpoffs for little-to-no-gain. I didn’t think that teams were designing their playbooks to be built around throwing to their running back, and as a result, having a running back who caught the ball more than anyone else on your team would be a reference point similar to teams that have been using non-Tim Wakefield knuckleballers in the last fifteen years; the only way that Jared Fernandez or Steve Sparks have gotten innings this decade is by pitching for really bad teams that just need to throw someone out there, so in the same way, the only way these teams could advance the ball even a little bit would be to dump the ball off to their running back for a few measly yards on third and long.

Starting off at the advent of the sixteen-game schedule, I located every team since 1978 (short 1982 and 1987) that has had a running back lead it in receptions. Somewhat surprisingly to me, that resulted in 146 different teams, or nearly six full teams a season. I never realized that so many teams had a running back catch the most balls for a single season! There are some situations in which the same players repeatedly pop up: LaDainian Tomlinson and Tiki Barber, for one. On the other hand, though, there are some weird players like former Falcons running back John Settle. In 1988, he led his team with 68 receptions; no one else had more than 37, and even that was fellow backfield mate Gene Lang! The next year, Lang and rookie Keith Jones had more catches than Settle out of the backfield, while Shawn Collins and Michael Haynes caught more balls whilst split out. To go from first on your team in receptions to fifth is a pretty dramatic drop.

What I found out about the teams is that they weren’t very different from the average NFL team. The 146 teams I looked at won an average of 7.73 games per season, only slightly less than that of the average NFL team (factoring in the effect of ties, NFL teams win a hair-on-Matt-Hasselbeck’s-head sized amount less than eight games per season). So, clearly, using your running back more often any of your wide receivers to catch the ball isn’t much of an impediment to winning games.

Lots of the running backs, I found, were stars who simply got the ball running and receiving a whole lot: guys like Walter Payton, Eric Dickerson, Marcus Allen, and Roger Craig in the eighties, and the aforementioned Tomlinson and Barber in the modern day. The Vikings are employing Chester Taylor in this way, as he has 137 of the team’s 165 carries. Centers, though, never led his team in rushing; the only year he came close was 1996, when he had 116 carries to LeShon Johnson’s 141. I wanted to isolate players like Centers, who were used specifically as the pass-catching backs on their team, in order to see if that disproved my hypothesis further.

Of those 146 teams, 67 of them employed a back as their leading receiver who was not their leading rusher. Those teams won an average of…8.31 games per season, over a half-win per season more than those 79 teams that used a single player to lead them in both rushing and receiving. Could that be due to fatigue on the part of that star player? Perhaps. That’s something I’ll look at later on this season. I was really surprised, though, to see these teams employing secondary halfbacks as their top receivers winning more games than teams who used one all-purpose guy as their featured receiver.

No one, though, holds a candle to Centers when it comes to this situation. He led teams in receiving but not rushing seven times in fourteen seasons, including four consecutive years with some miserable Cardinal teams in the mid-nineties. No other player can match those numbers. Some of the closer ones include:

Kimble Anders, Kansas City (1994, 1996, 1998)
You’ll note from the years above that Anders led the Chiefs in receiving every other year over the course of six seasons. Those seasons, they won 9, 9, and 7 games, respectively. The odd-numbered years surrounding them? They won 11, 13, 13, and 9. Oops. Anders isn’t exactly the most representative of these backs when it comes to seeing his team’s performance improve, I guess. Anders was actually outgained by fellow backfieldmate Todd McNair in 1995, but was in the shadow of wide receivers otherwise. All in all, Anders was a very useful role player on the team — not only did he catch balls, but he was regarded as a solid fullback, averaged 4.6 yards a carry over his career, and made three Pro Bowls. When the Chiefs tried to make him their starting running back in 1999, Anders suffered an injury in the second game of the season (while running for 142 yards against Denver on Monday Night) and went on IR. The next season was his last.

Keith Byars, Philadelphia (1989, 1990, 1991)
One of the most versatile players in the modern NFL era, Byars actually led the Eagles in rushing his rookie season (1986) as well as in 1988 (where he actually also led the team in receptions as well); in 1999, he had 133 carries as Anthony Toney (172 carries) took over for him as the starting running back, and over the 10 seasons remaining in his career, Byars had 287 carries. Meanwhile, Byars was catching more passes than Cris Carter, Fred Barnett (who he tied in 1991), and Calvin Williams as he was the point man on an offense that was 3rd in points scored in 1990 — of course, into 1991′s life, the proverbial Rich Kotite fell. Well, the actual Rich Kotite. The Eagles had double-digit wins each year of the Byars-receiving era.

Ronnie Harmon, San Diego (1991, 1992, 1994)
Harmon’s tenure saw rapid shifts in both system (former BC man Dan Henning being replaced in 1992 by Bobby Ross) and success (from 4 wins in 1991 to 11 in 1992, 8 in 1993, and then 11 again in 1994), but Harmon remained a useful cog in what was a rather successful Chargers offense under Ross. Also worth noting is that Harmon’s catches were more successful than that of most running backs; while the average running back who led his team in receptions averaged 9.15 yards per catch, Harmon averaged 10.4 for his career, and 10.25 from 1991-1994.

John Williams, Seattle/Pittsburgh (1988, 1990, 1992, 1994)
Even weirder than Anders, John Williams managed to pull this feat off for four consecutive even-numbered seasons, and managed to do so on two coasts. In fact, it’s pretty rare that these sort of players lead two teams in receptions but not rushing attempts; only Williams, Centers, and Richie Anderson can say they’ve done it. (Centers, by the way, did it for three different teams, the only person to do so.) Williams wasn’t like Harmon, Byars, or Anders, serving as a fullback who only occasionally saw a carry, but instead was a legitimate running back, averaging 152 carries per season over his first seven years in the NFL. He saw the last six seasons of the Chuck Knox era, and quickly became a significant part of the offense, backing up (the old) Curt Warner and becoming an excellent receiver out of the backfield, averaging over 11 yards per catch in 1987 and 1988.

In 1989, meanwhile, Williams was only one catch short of Brian Blades, which put him into the rarefied air of Centersville; strangely enough, though, his yards per catch dropped from 11.2 to 8.6 and stayed around there for the rest of his career. Williams stuck around for the beginning of Tom Flores’ nihilistic football statement that was the early-nineties Seahawks, but once Rick Mirer began to get entrenched as Seahawks QB, Williams moved to Pittsburgh, where he repeated the feat out of the backfield whilst backing up Barry Foster and Bam Morris on a 12-win team. That year, he outcaught both Charles Johnson and Yancey Thigpen. The next year, the Steelers brought in a similar player in Erric Pegram, and Williams was out of the league in 1996.

If anyone’s similar to Centers statistically, it’s Anders; they both didn’t average very much per catch and they both were given aborted runs as the starting halfback, but stylistically, they were two very different players. In addition, Anders spent his entire career playing for a pretty consistently good Kansas City team, while Centers spent his career floundering in Arizona and Buffalo, finally winning his ring in 2003.

So, what did the research show here? So far, I think it’s safe to say that using a running back more often than any of your wide receivers doesn’t prevent your team from victory. That being said, I think the research about running backs who lead their team in both categories might reveal something interesting about “playmakers”, and might be a sobering thought for Reggie Bush and Chester Taylor.

By Bill Barnwell, Football Outsiders – special to BSMW Patriots Game Day

Resuming normal service this week, I’m going to take a look at something Bill Simmons brought up in his column about the struggles of Daunte Culpepper, struggles which led to Culpepper’s benching last week before his game against the Patriots’. In the column, Simmons writes the following:

Running QBs are like professional wrestlers and porn stars. In other words, it’s such a taxing profession on so many levels, and you end up taking such a pounding, there’s only a five- or six-year shelf life before things turn sour.

Lamentations of Gino Hernandez and Traci Lords aside, I thought about the idea for a minute, and it didn’t seem too absurd. I felt even more agreeable to the idea after Simmons provided actual data – granted, cherry-picked data, but that’s still eight or nine years ahead of Joe Theismann – in the defense of his argument.

Now, I’m aware that the internet backlash to our dear friend Mr. Simmons is mighty strong right about now, particularly after a rather desultory comment towards the sports blogosphere in a recent chat. Now, Bill Simmons is about eight thousand times the writer I am – he can say whatever he wants. That being said, isn’t that a little like NFL announcers insulting fantasy football players? It just seems strange to insult your core constituency. I mean, you don’t see Dennis Hastert saying people who go to church on Sunday are dorks, right? I digress.

Interested in its validity, I decided to do a more rigorous test of Simmons’ theory and what it might mean for the career paths of quarterbacks. I had to put several limitations on the quarterback pool to make sure we were working with the quarterbacks Simmons is talking about, which meant I filtered the sample down to quarterbacks had both:

• Started their career during or after 1978 (the advent of the sixteen-game schedule), and
• Thrown more than 1500 career attempts (since we’re not comparing Danny Kanell to Dameyune Craig here, but instead legitimate starting quarterbacks and their career paths, which requires several years of data to work with)

That brought the pool down to 83 different quarterbacks. I toyed with different ways of delineating the quarterbacks into mobile and immobile groups, not wanting to just separate the two willy-nilly. What I found worked best was using the number of rush attempts per game a quarterback had on a season-by-season basis, and then separating players from the mass as such.

I defined a “rushing” quarterback as one who averaged more than 4.5 carries per game for any two seasons in his career. That yielded a list of quarterbacks I was pretty comfortable with:

Not particularly coincidentally, this includes each of the players that Simmons provides as examples of the running quarterback problem in his column. It’s also worth noting that Michael Vick doesn’t appear in this group because he falls 67 attempts short of the 1500 pass qualifier. If he’d made it past the bouncer, he would’ve easily qualified for this group.

The flat-footed quarterbacks, on the other hand, were even harder to define; after all, it’s very easy for a quarterback to rack up very few carries per game by simply not playing — alternately, it’s easy for a quarterback to get three or so carries a game solely by downing the ball as a backup. With that in mind, I made the qualifications slightly harder for this group. The quarterbacks listed below had five seasons where they averaged below 1.75 carries per game, throwing at least 150 attempts in each. That yielded a group of, well, guys with creaky knees.

I am sure there are arguments you can make for putting a particular quarterback not listed here in one group or the other, but I think these are two pretty representative groups of quarterback.

After separating the groups, I calculated the performances of each quarterback in the respective season of his career – that is to say, I calculated how each quarterback did in the first season of his particular career, added that to the performance of every other quarterback in their particular career, and then produced an average result for all the quarterbacks in their first seasons. I did that for every group of seasons available, stretching all the way to 19 (Dave Krieg and Vinny Testaverde, before you ask) before I was done. I calculated this for all quarterbacks (incorporating all 83 quarterbacks), the running quarterbacks (listed as “Fast” in the charts below), and the slow ones (listed, as you might expect, as “Slow”).

I’ll include all the results in a table at the end of the article, but I chose to focus on three aspects of performance: yards per attempt, QB rating, and since the original article was about Culpepper’s fantasy dropoff, fantasy points.

As you can see, the performance of the faster quarterbacks cut out after season 15, since none of the rushing quarterbacks in the study have made it that far. This may be because seven of the eleven quarterbacks in the group are still active, and haven’t had a chance to make it to their fifteenth season as of yet. Regardless, what the data shows is that the quarterback performances are actually almost the opposite of what Simmons mentions in his column: the running quarterbacks underperform both the average quarterback and the slower quarterback until their sixth season, at which point they spend several outperforming the quarterbacks until a big drop around Season 11 (which includes a mediocre Steve Young season, a mediocre Jeff Blake season, Mark Brunell’s first aborted season with the Redskins, Randall Cunningham’s final half-year as an Eagle, and Steve McNair’s last year with the Titans. In other words, Donovan McNabb is in trouble when 2009 rolls around). You could chalk this up to a number of things — maybe the running quarterbacks are adapting to an NFL system, or becoming “pocket” passers, but I wasn’t expecting that data trend whatsoever.

QB Rating shows a variation on the story.

This time, the faster quarterbacks have a better showing, but they still don’t branch out from the pack of other quarterbacks until Seasons 6-10 roll around. Could it be that speedier quarterbacks elude sacks and throw fewer interceptions than slowpokes? The following chart shows the average number of attempts it takes a quarterback in each of these groups to throw an interception, followed by each group’s cumulative average:

Pretty obvious that rushing quarterbacks do throw fewer interceptions than pocket passers — a relatively hidden advantage of their performance up to this point.

Finally, to answer Simmons’ question, do these stud quarterbacks actually perform worse after a few years in fantasy points?

The short answer is, well, it’s debatable. The running quarterbacks don’t really seem to fall off a cliff in five or six years, like Simmons says, but he’s not far off. Somewhere around eight to nine seasons appear to be the limit for rushing quarterbacks — that big jump in the last year you’ve been seeing is the confluence of Mark Brunell’s revitalization last season with the Redskins and Randall Cunningham’s gigantic 15-win season with the Vikings. What does appear to be true, though, is that rushing quarterbacks are peaking very early into their fantasy careers, while slower quarterbacks do so slightly afterwards. It’s interesting that they both see the same dropoff after eight or nine seasons, though.

I’m inclined to say that Simmons’ hypothesis, for fantasy purposes, is pretty accurate. Rushing quarterbacks peak earlier into their career than I think a lot of people, myself included, realize: a sobering thought for those with Michael Vick, and a happy one for those who have Vince Young in a keeper league.

And now, a data dump.