Hints of the 46, as the season begins.

Keith Goldner is active this season both on Advanced NFL Stats and his own blog, Drive By Football. As he has updated his Markov Chain model (see also here), I’d suggest finding Keith’s new articles on either of these two sites. In my opinion, Keith’s work on his expected points models is a must read for anyone who wants to learn analytics, because he’s perhaps the best at making sure that readers can understand how he sets his models up.

Jene Bramel is a good follow if you like in game analysis on Twitter. After the Cowboys 24-17 victory over the Giants, this tweet caught my eye, where Jene mentions a Bear front.

A Bear you say?

I never found that Bear, but at 5:18 in the second quarter – one of the more interesting drives in the game, from the standpoint of a defensive front junkie – we see this:

Two down linemen, but six players at line depth and two at linebacker depth give this front a Bear like feel.

Diagrammatic representation of the front at 5:18, 2nd qtr. Bruce Carter is the linebacker between T and TE.

Though this is formally a nickel front, and there really isn’t a 3-0-3 diamond here, there are a couple things of note. There are six players across the line. Bruce Carter is in the gap between the RDE and the R (rush linebacker), just inside the tight end. Sean Lee is at the 50 behind Bruce (a few yards in front of the left offensive tackle), and another player is in the other 50, a few yards in front of the right offensive tackle. The “lineman” in the two point stace, to the left of the nose guard in this view, isn’t playing a 5 technique as much as he is playing a 3, and the whole front looks as if Rob Ryan is guessing a run to the left side of the line.

That’s exactly what happened. The Giants ran left. Bruce Carter defeated his block and the run gained almost nothing. And it’s almost pure stubbornness to run a running back into the heart of this kind of formation.

Otherwise, I saw plenty of 2 and 3 man fronts, and at one point, perhaps a 4 man front.

After the game, I found that the day of the game, Chase Stuart had this article online, comparing the relative skills of Eli Manning and Tony Romo. And no, it isn’t the usual media fawning exercise.

Update: for more Rob Ryan fronts, this thread has screen shots of the first 10 Ryan fronts of the season.

 

The break even points on the Eli Manning and Robert Griffin III trades.

In my last post, I introduced ways to determine the risk of NFL trades, using Pro Football Reference’s average AV per draft slot metric to assess the relative risk of the trade. I wish to continue the work done in the first post, by also taking a look  at the Eli Manning trades, and also the Robert Griffin III trades.

Eli's debt will be paid off in 2 more years of his current level of play.
RG3 will have to have a Sonny Jurgenson-like career, all in Washington, to pay off the value of the picks used to select him.

In the Eli trade, the New York Giants assumed a ‘AV debt’ comparable to that of Michael Vick, and a relative risk approximately the same as Michael Vick or Julio Jones. Looking, Eli has  rolled up perhaps 87 AV at this point, netting 12-15 AV a year. So, in two years, in purely AV terms, this trade would be even. Please note  that NFL championships appear to not net any AV, so if the value of the trade is measured in championships instead, I’d assume the New York Giants would consider themselves the outright winners of this trade.

The appropriate comparison with the Robert Griffin III trade is actually the Earl Campbell trade. The risk ratio is about the same, assuming the Washington Redskins go 8-8 and 9-7 the next two years, and end up with the #16 pick in 2013, and  the #20 pick in 2014. The lowest  value the AV Given column could total is 106, if the Washington Redskins ended up with the #31 pick twice. In any event, the Redskins are betting that RG3 will have a Sonny Jurgenson-esque career, and not just his Washington Redskin career, but his Eagles and Redskins career, in order to pay back the ‘AV debt’ that has been accrued by this trade.

 

Playoffs aren’t the regular season

When you try to think of the NFL playoffs as simply an extension of the regular season, you screw up. Advantages that reliably yield wins under regular season conditions – think of the dominance of the San Francisco 49ers defense, at times, in the NFC Championship game two weeks ago – aren’t consistent enough in the post season. A lot of games are decided by, well, small effects, perhaps intangibles, at this time of year.

Part of the reason is that  the gap in the classical offensive and defensive metrics is much more narrowed in the post season; you’re looking at such small differences in net offensive potential that other elements come into play.  The other component, as far as I can  tell, is that traditional analysts, focused on the analysis of the regular season, are loathe to abandon tools that worked so well  on the 16 regular season games. If it’s 66-75% accurate during the regular season, isn’t that enough in the post season?

In my  opinion, the answer is no. Regular tools fail because the playoff system has already selected for teams  that are good at scoring and preventing scoring. Those teams are, to a first approximation, already well matched. You can’t use regular season tools reliably.  You have to  analyze  for playoff specific causes of wins and losses.

This is the only reason I can  come up with for the recent analyses of the strength of schedule metric. Analysts have  noted (see here and here) that it is negatively correlated with winning. This year has particularly potent effects, using Football Outsider’s definition of the SOS metric. Jim Glass, in the FO article, nails the effect on the head when he states:

The fact that stronger teams play easier schedules and weaker teams play tougher ones results trivially from the fact that teams cannot play themselves. As teams cannot play themselves, in lieu of doing so the strongest teams must play the weaker and the weakest the stronger.

This,  of course, begs the question that my playoff results pose: if strength of schedule correlates with losing, then why do playoff teams with advantages in the strength of schedule metric win? The confidence limit  of this effect is larger than the one for playoff experience, in my measurements. Given the right experimental design, this is pretty much a given.

Back in  the early 1990s, I used to call this  the “NFC East effect” and it seemed as obvious to me as the  nose on my face. The NFC East was the toughest division  in football. Whatever team won the NFC East was bound to win the Super Bowl because they had faced such incredibly  hard competition, that anyone else was a patsy by comparison (with the possible exception of the San Francisco 49ers). And whether any division could again gain such dominance, I don’t know. The salary cap has made it hard to hold such powerful teams together.

I’m posting now because the 2007 (and now 2011) New York Giants are a poster child for this phenomenon. My formula gave the New York Giants a 61% advantage in the 2007 Super Bowl. It is giving the Giants an advantage in this Super Bowl as well, by 66%. By traditional metrics, the 2011 Giants shouldn’t have survived so much as  their first playoff game. They managed, this year, to win three. The largest  measurable advantage they had  in this year’s playoffs is their exceptional strength of schedule.

So, win or lose, the question is still out there. If regular season stats are so important, why are the Giants winning? And if you’re using a “regular season” model to  predict playoffs, perhaps you need to step back and start analyzing the playoffs on their own, without preconception.

 

2011 Season Conference Championship Round: NY Giants favored throughout playoffs

After the Giants victory over the Packers, I finally got up the nerve to say what my system has been saying from the start, that my predictive system markedly favors the Giants throughout the entire playoffs.

Going all the way?

The deal, of course, is a heavily favored team can lose. A team seeded 1 or 2 and favored by 70% in every game only has a 34% chance of making it through 3 games. The nature of the playoffs make it difficult for any team, even a really good team, to win it all.

That said, the Giants are favored by 75% over the San Francisco 49ers. The only advantage the 49ers hold is home field advantage. The Giants have to be considered a playoff experienced team, and they have a massive strength of schedule advantage, the same advantage that will give them precendence over either New England or Baltimore. If you choose to treat the Giants as having no playoff experience, that lowers their odds to win to a mere 58%.

Favored in the Conference Championship Round:

Giants over 49ers: 75%
NE over Ravens: 59%

Favored in the Super Bowl:

Giants over NE: 66%
Giants over Ravens: 64%
NE over 49ers: 64%
Ravens over 49ers: 65%

Odds of winning the Super Bowl:

Giants: 49%
NE: 24%
Ravens: 18%
49ers: 9%

For contrast, we’ll calculate the Pythagorean odds for these teams as well, ignoring the effects of strength of schedule, and playoff experience.

49ers over Giants: 86%

NE over Ravens: 61%

49ers over NE: 61%

And the 49ers are favored to win the Super Bowl, via Pythagoreans, by 52%.

Of course, if you’re taking these kinds of offensive metrics seriously, please note the odds of the Giants having made it this far was only 7.4% (Originally calculated as 5.4%). Consider those odds, please, before writing my little predictive system off.

 

NFL Playoffs 2012: #4 seeds at the #1 seeds

Both the Giants and Denver have won today, eliminating all wild cards and leading to two #4 seeds playing at the #1 seeds. In the case of the Giants, using my formula, we have the question of whether they truly have playoff experience. If they do not, then Green Bay is favored, on average, by 56%, though the relative error of strength of schedule results allow for Green Bay being favored by as much as 73% to the Giants being favored by 63%. If the Giants are treated as if they have playoff experience, then there is a wide range of results, from Green Bay being favored by 55% to the Giants being favored by 78%, with the average result being the Giants favored by 63%. Note that home field plus Pythagoreans would favor Green Bay by 83%.

In the Case of Denver versus New England, New England has playoff experience and home field in their favor, and Denver played a tougher schedule. New England is favored by my scheme by 69%. Home field plus Pythagoreans would favor New England by 88%.

 

Playoffs: ATL versus NY Giants – Over what span is playoff experience important?

Way back in 2011 I did a study of factors that were statistically significant in determining playoff wins. There were three: home field advantage, playoff experience, and strength of schedule. And because playoff experience was such an obvious factor in those logistic regression studies, one question I didn’t ask was how far back do you need to go with regard to playoff experience to judge whether a team “has it”. Two years? Three years? Four years? This is important in the case of the New York Giants, because they won a Super Bowl in 2007 and lost in the divisional round in 2008. So, they have deep playoff experience from 4 years ago and also some from 3 years ago. They barely missed the playoffs two years ago and a year ago, were not a playoff factor.

My study however fixed the range of playoff experience at two years, so my formulas are valid for that period. So, to look at the important factors with regard to  these two teams, plus Pythagoreans:

New York Giants: Playoff Exp 3 yrs ago, Home, SOS = 1.96, Pythagorean=49.0%

Atlanta Falcons: Playoff Exp last year, Away, SOS = 0.28, Pythagorean= 58.9%

So, if we calculate odds using Pythagoreans and the 60% HFA that playoff teams have had over the past 10 years, you get that the ATL-NYG game is even. If you instead use my strict formula, and deny the NYG any playoff experience advantage, then the New York Giants would be favored by 53%. If you grant that the NYG have playoff experience, and recalculate these odds, then the probability of the Giants winning rises to 71%, one of the highest in this round of play. This is in part due to home field, but also due to the Giants having played the hardest schedule of any playoff team.

To repudiate another notion, that  the Giants and Dallas are simply two peas in a pod, that you could roll the dice and choose one over  the other, look at the stats of the New York Giants, Dallas, and say, the Atlanta Falcons against teams with a record of 0.500 or more. Against 0.500 or better teams, Dallas was 1-8. It scored 172 points against those teams and gave up 246 points, for a Pythagorean of 0.282. That Pythagorean should have been good for 2.5 wins, which means the team underperformed its own Pythagorean against winning teams.  While a lot  of Dallas fans will point fingers at the defense (Pro Football Reference had Dallas ranked as the 27th best in pass coverage, prior to week 17), overall consistency also needs to be looked at and addressed.

By contrast, the Giants were 6-4 against 500 or better teams, scored 270 points against 256 given up, and had a .535 Pythagorean against good teams. This is a team whose performance improves when facing good teams, and who outscored their Pythagorean against good teams.

The Falcons record against 0.500 teams or more is 3-5.  They scored 156 points against these teams versus giving up 207 points. The team Pythagorean against good  teams is 0.324, which totals to 2.6 victories against better teams over 8 games. They performed roughly as expected.

Update (since I don’t know where else to put it): before the NYG-DAL game, Cool Standings was projecting a 62% chance of a Dallas victory (and thus playoff prospects). That prediction only made sense if Cool Standings were ignoring home field advantage in their analysis. It’s something to think about.

 

Tim Tebow, Eli Manning, and notions of clutchness

The fans were all nestled, all snug in their beds, while visions of clutch quarterbacks all danced in their heads.

Tim Tebow has managed to capture the imaginations of many announcers, fans, and analysts, including the eye of one Benjamin Morris. Ben posits, among other things,  that Tebow is being held back by his own conservatism,  that an inability to take passing risks in the first three quarters of the game is tossed aside in the fourth and some more true representation of his passing skill emerges.

This isn’t the first time that Ben has speculated on the nature of young quarterbacks and interceptions (This link is the most important, but also see here and here). One contradictory notion  that has come out of his analyses is that a lot of interceptions early in the career of a quarterback tends to be a good thing. It suggests a quarterback with exceptional skills testing those skills out — the idea that a talented cook has to get burned by his own grease to learn his chops spills over into the quarterbacking world.

A related question, important to NFC East fans, is Eli Manning clutch? This question was raised this year by Eli Manning’s exceptionally high ESPN QBR ratings relative to other metrics. People really got upset, claimed that the ESPN QBR was “busted”. But perhaps the ‘clutch’ factor actually saw something in Eli.

It’s almost a theme with the Giants that they fall behind and Eli either scores a couple late to win the game, or scores late to tie the game and then (win/lose) in overtime, or he puts on this furious rally that almost wins the game. They beat teams they shouldn’t, based on their Pythagoreans, and then lose to football patzers.

What to make of it? My gut unchecked feeling is yes, Eli is clutch, but  his team is another question altogether. It’s difficult to know with fans, emotions get the best of them. Donovan McNabb becomes Donovan McFlabb, good analysts try to prove that Jon Kitna is a better quarterback than Tony Romo, etc.

Thinking without benefit of numbers a bit further, Eli just doesn’t get ruffled. His play doesn’t suffer any effects of pressure. And that means, no matter how inadequate the team around him becomes, he’s still dangerous.

~~~

Kindle notes: just bought a Kindle Fire, and like it a great deal. It’s a better email platform than many web based email services, so it is  useful to forward  mails from those services to this device. I wish I could plug my  camera into the Kindle and upload photos, but  that will probably have to wait until Android 4 becomes a common base OS for these kinds of portable devices.

~~~~

Twitter notes: For those familiar with Smart Football, he tweets well, and is a useful feed if you’re at all interested. Trent Dilfer does quite a bit of good analysis via tweets. Surprisingly good is Doug Farrar, whose player analyses I tend to respect. I haven’t read much of Doug’s blog, Shutdown Corner, but given the character of his tweets, it might be worth a gander.

 

The purpose of the running game: as Bill Parcells was, Rex Ryan is.

In Brian Burke’s recent roundup, he references a Fifth Down blog article on Rex Ryan’s philosophy of offense, one where running is heavily emphasized and the yardage? Not so much. He then says that as an offensive philosophy, it seems to be “ridiculous”, except in the metaphoric sense of a boxer, with a jab, using the run to keep an opponent off balance, so that he can lay out the “killing blow”.

I tend to think that Brian’s boxing metaphor is, at best, an incomplete picture. For one, he doesn’t see the jab as a knockout punch, but for Muhammad Ali, it was. Another point is the jab is fast, elusive, confusing. By contrast, the run is a slow play, and there is nothing particularly elusive or confusing about the run. Rex-like coaches often run when it is most expected.

The way Rex is using the run, in my opinion, is closely tied to the way Bill Parcells used to use the run, especially in the context of Super Bowl 25. This New York Times article, about Super Bowl 25, details Parcells’ view of the philosophy neatly.

Parcells' starting running backs averaged about 3.7 ypc throughout his NFL coaching career.

To quote Bill:

“I don’t know what the time of possession was,” the Giants’ coach would say after the Giants’ 20-19 victory over the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXV. “But the whole plan was try to shorten the game for them.”

The purpose, of course, is time control, optimizing time of possession, and thus reducing the opportunity of the opposing offense to have big plays. It’s a classic reaction to an opponent’s big play offense, to their ability to create those terrific net yards per attempt stats [1].

Note also Rex is primarily a defensive coach. If the game changing, explosive component of a football team is the defense, doing everything to suppress the opponent’s offense only hands more tools to the defensive team. It forces the opponent’s offense to take risks to score at all. It makes them go down the field in the least amount of time possible. It takes the opponents out of their comfort zone, especially if they are used to large, early leads.

The value of time, though, is hard to quantify.  Successful time control is folded into stats like WPA, and thus is highly situation dependent. The value of such a strategy is very hard to determine with our current set of analytic tools. Total time of possession no more captures the real value of time any more than total running yards captures the real value of the running game in an offense.

Chris, from Smart Football, says that the classic tactic for a less talented team (a “David”) facing a more talented team (a “Goliath”) is to use plenty of risky plays, to throw the outcome into a high risk, high reward, high  variance regime. The opposite approach, to minimize the scoring chances of the opposition, is a bit neglected in Chris’s original analysis, because he assumed huge differences in talent. However, he explicitly includes it here, as a potential high variance “David” strategy.

It’s ironic to think of running as the strategy of an underdog, but that’s what it is in this instance. New England is the 500 pound gorilla in the AFC East, ranked #1 on offense 2 of the last 4 years, and that’s the team he has to beat. And think about it more, just a college analogy for now: what teams do you know, undersized and undermanned,  that use a ground game to keep them in the mix? It’s the military academies, teams like Army, Navy, and the Air Force, using ground based option football.

[1] The down side of a loose attitude towards first and second down yardage is that it places an emphasis on third down success rate, and thus execution in tough situations.

 

Is the Miami 4-3 a 2-3, and just who is your nickel front daddy?

I can’t say for certain if the 1991 Super Bowl (highlights here, DVD here) contains the oldest nickel front in the world, as there is a side of me that  thinks the Miami 4-3 is a thinly disguised 2-3-6 – think about it, using what kinds of players are placed where, as opposed to what kinds of names the positions are called. Isn’t a Miami 4-3 equivalent to this:

And not all that far removed from this:

Just sayin’.

In the book “Education of a Coach“, by David Halberstam, a book about Bill Belichick, and a decent read, Halberstam goes into great detail about  the base nickel front that Belichick used in the 1991 Super Bowl. And yes, isn’t this, the first offensive play of the Bowl, an argument that Belichick is your nickel front daddy?

I say, who is your nickel front daddy?

Halberstam says this defense was, in modern terms, a 2-3 dime. Of course,  with Lawrence Taylor as the rush linebacker, it was a rather stout 2-3.

Miami 4-3 notes..

• This thread from Football Futures, I think, is one of the better reads on the Miami 4-3.
• Coach Hoover: Miami 4-3 versus the flexbone.
• Coach Huey: Miami 4-3 compared to the K State 4-3.
• Fifth Down Blog on the 4-3 (including the Miami). The whole guide summarized here.
• Linebackers in the Miami 4-3.

 

NFL books – “The Glory Game”, by Frank Gifford

There is a sense of embarrassment that pervades Frank’s book, one that could perhaps be explained by the fact  that David Halberstam was planning on writing a book about the 1958 NFL championship game. But it seems deeper than that. He talks about the salaries the pros made in the 1950s, the failures on the field, the sense of embarrassment that he couldn’t win for his dad, his peripatetic childhood. As a focused study of the game, well, it isn’t. It’s an older man’s book, broad in scope, a little rambling and talkative.

And in that is the strength of the story, which captures a snapshot in time that doesn’t exist anymore. No, I haven’t read extensively about 1950s football, and for someone who hasn’t, it can be a fascinating glimpse at their lives, the character of 1950s New York City. Further, Frank talks candidly about the failures in leadership of the period, strips away common myths about the way the champion Giants worked, and in doing so, exposes the growing character of two towering football figures, Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry.

Cowboys fans might find this bit of text fascinating:

For my first two years , I played defense more than offense, which meant I was playing with Landry, who was even then a player-coach. So I knew how rigid, strict, and unyielding he was as a coach.

Actually,  in  one game against the Redskins, I made an interception and lateraled the ball to Tom, who ran it in for a touchdown. On the following Tuesday, we watched the film.

“Gifford, was that the coverage?”

“I know, Tom, but they were in a Brown right, L-split,” I started to explain, “and-”

“There are no ‘buts’”

“But what if –”

“There are no what-ifs”

If you didn’t play the defense Tom’s way, end of conversation.

“He had a computer mind”, is how Huff remembers Landry. “He studied the opposition’s offensive frequencies in various situations, and he taught them, and you studied them. He’d always say, ‘You have to believe, You  gotta believe. I’ll put you in position to make the play, trust me.’ If you weren’t in position, and making the moves he’d given you, he’d give you ‘The Look’. He didn’t have to say anything: you could read his mind, and what he was saying was ‘You dumb-ass.’”

Vince Lombardi? Gifford expresses a great deal of skepticism about Lombardi’s portrayal in Maraniss’s book, because Frank never saw Lombardi as dictator.  Lombardi was, Gifford claimed, a much more approachable man when Vince was their offensive coach.

And so it goes. The book is peppered with those kinds of details. As an example, Lenny Moore always kept a miniature bible in his thigh pad. Perhaps the most evocative writing is a description of the 1950s New York City night life, dominated by saloons, and the search for places where someone could pick up some or all of the player’s tab. After such a fine bit of work on the times, the setting, the game itself tends to fade into the background. Perhaps, this game has been so intensely covered that most of us in the hard core fan category could recite the ebb and flow of the game by heart.

Please note there is a coauthor, Peter Richmond. It’s a tribute to Peter that the book sounds as if Frank is narrating the text.