Football terms: awkward terms, or ones grown hopelessly generic

We’ll start by quoting the Twitter thread between Chris Brown and Trent Dilfer, over the phrase “arm talent” (Some light editing, to improve clarity):

Smart Football ‏@smartfootball 26 Jan — Can we drop the phrase “arm talent”? What happened to “strong arm”?

Trent Dilfer ‏@TDESPN — @smartfootball “Arm talent”, a phrase I started using encompasses the ability to change speeds, trajectory & off balance. Strong=meaningless

Smart Football ‏@smartfootball 26 Jan — @TDESPN Not just you. Just not my favorite phrase; not very descriptive. Understand need for all those things but not sure “arm talent”

Smart Football ‏@smartfootball 26 Jan — @TDESPN Does it. “Talented passer” more descriptive (and grammatical) than “arm talent.” Also to be fair you define the term usually, but

Smart Football ‏@smartfootball 26 Jan — @TDESPN most scout and wannabees throw it around without any backing or understanding. Fine for you to say it’s your term for all of that

Trent Dilfer ‏@TDESPN 26 Jan — @smartfootball understandable, football phrases can be very polarizing if the picture they paint doesn’t make sense. fun conversation

Smart Football ‏@smartfootball 27 Jan — @TDESPN I agree – thanks for engaging. Wasn’t targeted at you and this is partially me as football guy and also as overly pedantic lawyer

Smart Football ‏@smartfootball 27 Jan — @TDESPN as you know, I think you do great work. Look forward to future discussions

I’ll note the phrase “exceptional control” seems to cover what Trent is trying to get at with the phrase “arm talent” as well. And this gets us back to an issue often seen in both coaching and fan circles. Ideas aren’t always born in the minds of the best writers. Some very ordinary folks come up with original, profound, or perhaps just useful concepts and they end up expressing them a little awkwardly. I can’t help but wonder how much more penetration the modern analysis of play by play data would have if we didn’t have to deal with awkward, and sometimes confusing language. If Brian Burke had used the Bill James phrase “Win Shares” instead of Win Probability Added and perhaps “Net Points” instead of Expected Points Added, how much faster would his analysis been assimilated?

In my discussions of expected points curves, I can get gnarled up in the phrase, “the value of a touchdown”, because that has two distinct meanings, depending on your point of view. If you’re thinking about adjusted yards per attempts formulas, that term refers to what I’ve called a “barrier potential” in other contexts. It’s considered the value of the touchdown because of some unfortunate language and usage in The Hidden Game of Football.

The other notion called the “value of a touchdown” is the average score of a touchdown (7 points in general, by logic well discussed here) minus the yardage value of the average kickoff return. For years this was around 6.3 to 6.4 points, because the average return was to about the 27 yard line. This term has to be larger now, with the recent adjustments to the kick off line. This value has meaning in expected points curves, and the Romer/Burke model explicitly uses this notion of the value of a touchdown.

Hopelessly generic terms

The one driving me nuts these days is 5-technique, applied in sloppy fashion to a defensive end of any kind. The term gets used whether or not the defensive end is actually using a 5 technique (on the outside shoulder of the OT), a 4 technique (directly opposing the OT) or a 3 technique (outside shoulder of the OG ). Especially in drafting circles, people start talking about 5 techniques as a draftable position, as opposed to a place you line up and a way you play. More accurate, in drafting circles, would be to talk about ends capable of one or two gap technique, instead of this “5” nonsense.

The “5” nonsense is getting bad enough that confusion is being sold as fact. Despite Jene Bramel’s excellent work on the topic of where defensive linemen line up

Image taken from Jene Bramel article, Fifth down blog. Standard alignments shown. Note when DL “on” a player, the numbers are even (0,2,4,6 etc).

and with the comment:

In a majority of systems, even numbers denote an alignment that is head-up or helmet-to-helmet on an opposing offensive lineman while odd numbers denote an offset alignment, i.e. over the inside or outside shoulder of an opposing lineman.

Pro Football Focus just had to go and mess it up.

Screen capture of the link above. Note the numbering of the “on” positions goes 0,2,5,8. This would not happen but for the loss of meaning of the phrase “5 technique”.

People *pay* to be told these kinds of explanations?

Eagle Defense

John T Reed has plenty to say about the term Eagle Defense in his Football Dictionary, finally concluding that:

After looking it up in several books, I have a sense that the Eagle defense generally has something to do with shifting the defensive tackle or end outside the weak tackle or tight end and putting a linebacker over or on the weak tackle or tight end. Until the football coaching world gets more precise and consistent, the word “eagle” should be dropped.

 

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.

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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.

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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.