Brad Oremland is a longtime commenter and a fellow football historian. Brad is also a senior NFL writer at Sports Central. There are few who have given as much thought to the history of quarterbacks and quarterback ranking systems as Brad has over the years. What follows is Brad’s latest work on quarterback statistical production.

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Best Statistical QBs of 2017

This is the third time in the last four years that I’ve written about my preferred stat for evaluating NFL quarterbacks, QB-TSP. In this post, you’ll find scores from the 2017 season, plus another way of using TSP.

If you’re not already familiar with the stat, I’d encourage you to read about how it works, but if you’re in a hurry, it is a purely statistical ranking, not my opinion. TSP measures production above replacement level, with “replacement level” defined as the level of play you’d expect from an available free agent (not your top backup). A good example last season was Jay Cutler, lured from retirement to play for Miami after Ryan Tannehill got hurt. Robert Griffin and Johnny Manziel didn’t play last season, but either one would have been a replacement player, as would an undrafted college senior. Anyone who you’re not sure whether or not they were still on a roster, like Kellen Clemens or Kellen Moore, is probably right around replacement level.

Here are rough explanations of single-season TSP and how it translates to Career Value:

* Zero TSP (0 CV) indicates replacement-level performance, on the fringe of being playable. 2017 example: Trevor Siemian.

* 500 TSP (0.3 CV) is an inconsequential season, an ineffective starter or a good part-time player. 2017 examples: Jacoby Brissett, Aaron Rodgers.

* 1000 TSP (1 CV) is an average season. The player had some value to his team, but he wasn’t a Pro Bowl-quality performer. 2017 examples: Blake Bortles, Dak Prescott.

* 1500 TSP (2 CV) is a good season, a top-10 season, a borderline Pro Bowl season. This is a positive contribution to any player’s résumé. 2017 examples: Ben Roethlisberger, Matthew Stafford.

* 2000 TSP (3.5 CV) is a great season. It’s a top-5 performance, the player almost always makes the Pro Bowl, and he’ll usually generate some all-pro support. 2017 examples: Alex Smith, Tom Brady.

* 2500 TSP (5.5 CV) is an exceptional season. These only occur about twice every three years. Most of them were first-team All-Pro, and about half were named league MVP. 2017 example: none. Matt Ryan in 2016 scored at this level, though.

* 3000 TSP (7.5 CV) is a legendary season, and the player always wins MVP. There have only been seven, the most recent being Peyton Manning in 2013 and Tom Brady in 2007.

I’ll begin with raw data: QB-TSP for the top 40 in passing yards from the 2017 NFL season. The era-adjusted score, in the final column, is the one that aligns to the categories above. [continue reading…]

Today’s post is from friend of the site Bryan Frye. You can view all of Bryan’s guest posts here, and follow him on twitter @LaverneusDingle. What follows are Bryan’s words, with minor editing from Chase.

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Last month, I had a mini tweet storm about punting value versus punting skill, where I discussed punters, how to measure punting, and how to reconcile the apparent gap between value (as measure by expected points) and perceived skill. Today, I want to revisit some of my ideas, expand on them, and offer them for debate among the smart readers of this site. I know punting isn’t the most exciting topic, even for die hard football fans, but I used to punt in Pop Warner and have always been a bit of a punting aficionado.

Methodology

First, I gathered all punts from 2009-2017. Then, I removed those that came from non-punters. Next, I excluded blocked kicks, scoring plays, and turnovers, which are rare events that dramatically skew data and may not actually be indicative of a punter’s ability. I was left with 18,375 punts ripe for examination. ^[1]Ideally, we could include hang time in the equation to see if that proves to be a significant factor. Anecdotally, a team would prefer a 40 yard punt that spent 4.3 seconds in the air to a punt of … Continue reading

To try to assign expected value to punts from a given yard line, I looked at the Expected Points Added by all punts in the data set. ^[2]For EPA, I am using Ron Yurko’s version.  I then plotted yards from end zone (e.g., kicking from your own 20 is 80 yards from the end zone) against EPA and used a sextic function to find a best fit line for what our expectations should be for a punt from a particular yard line. ^[3]The function, for those interested: y = -0.000000000743805x6 + 0.000000263921778x5 – 0.000037400877394x4 + 0.00269765455x3 – 0.105061671689785x2 + 2.1744406183205x – 20.578738996142. … Continue reading

Punting Value Versus Punting Skill: In Theory

I tend to think of punters in two categories: coffin corner punters and distance punters. Coffin corner punters are known as technicians for their incredible ability to spot the ball seemingly wherever they want to. They are, based on my analysis pretty clearly the more skilled punters. Distance punters often put up big kicks because they play on bad teams that punt often from deep inside their own territory. They are seen as the brute force, unskilled bangers of the punting community. There are also guys like Johnny Hekker, who can do it all with aplomb, but special cases are exactly that – special. For most of my life, I have been on the side of the technicians and derided the big-legged guys who seem to lack control over their kicks. However, evidence suggests that, while the booming kicks may take less finesse, they may contribute more toward winning games.

Coffin corner kicks require a deft foot, but they also tend to produce less value from an EPA perspective. This is because the kicks often come from midfield or opponent territory, where EPA often advocates trying for a conversion or field goal. Punting sacrifices possession of the ball for field position, and because it is similar to a turnover, it is difficult to achieve a high EPA on any punt. This is especially true when teams opt to cede possession of the ball at the expense of a scoring opportunity. The red trend line on the chart below represents the expected point value of a punt from the corresponding yard line. Notice that the red line drops below zero inside of a team’s own 10 yard line and once a team reaches its own 45 yard line. This means EPA sees the idea of punting from within 55 yards from goal as an automatic negative, making it impossible for even the best punt to produce positive EPA in that situation. ^[4]With the exception of a muffed punt, but I haven’t seen any credible evidence suggesting forcing turnovers is a real punting skill and not just a product of chance. Also note that going for it from … Continue reading [continue reading…]

It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.
— Father Dennis Edward O’Brien, USMC

Today is a day that we as Americans honor and remember those who lost their lives protecting our country. As my friend Joe Bryant says, it’s easy for the true meaning of this day to get lost in the excitement of summer and barbecues and picnics. But that quote helps me remember that the things I enjoy today are only possible because those before me made incredibly selfless sacrifices. That includes a number of football players who have lost their lives defending our country.

The most famous, of course, is Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals safety who chose to quit football to enlist in the United States army. On April 22, fourteen years ago, Tillman died in Afghanistan. Over thirty years earlier, we lost both Bob Kalsu and Don Steinbrunner in Vietnam. You can read their stories here. For some perspective, consider that Hall of Famers Roger Staubach, Ray Nitschke, and Charlie Joiner were three of the 29 NFL men who served in the military during that war.

An incredible 226 men with NFL ties served in the Korean War, including Night Train Lane and Don Shula. Most tragically, World War II claimed the lives of 21 former NFL players.

• Nick “Mike” Basca
• Charlie Behan
• Keith Birlem
• Al Blozis
• Chuck Braidwood
• Young Bussey
• Ed Doyle
• Grassy Hinton
• Smiley Johnson
• Eddie Kahn
• Alex Ketzko
• Lee Kizzire
• Jack Lummus
• Roy “Bob” Mackert
• Frank Maher
• Jim Mooney
• Gus Sonneberg
• Len Supulski
• Don Wemple
• Chet Wetterlund; and
• Waddy Young

Jack Chevigny, former coach of the Cardinals, and John O’Keefe, an executive with the Eagles, were also World War II casualties. The Pro Football Hall of Fame has chronicled the stories of these 23 men, too. Lummus received the Medal of Honor for his bravery at Iwo Jima, and you can read more about his sacrifice here. In 2015, the Giants inducted him into the team’s Ring of Honor.

[continue reading…]

On Monday, I published updated (through 2017) career passer ratings that are adjusted for era. Last year, I published the single-season ratings, so I wanted to update that post today.

Passer rating is a bad stat, and era-adjusted passer ratings have all of those same flaws, too. But EA-PR is without question better than passer rating, and since passer rating is such a ubiquitous stat, I wanted to post all of the EA-PRs so you could have them at your disposal (the table below has over 7,700 rows!).

Below are the era-adjusted passer ratings for every player in every season since 1932.  Here’s how to read the table below, which is fully sortable and searchable.  Sid Luckman has the best single season, playing in the NFL for Chicago in 1943.  That season counted for 11.58% of his career pass attempts (useful if you want to calculate a player’s career passer rating), as he threw 202 passes, completed 110 of them for 2,194 yards with 28 TDs and 12 INTs.  That was enough attempts to qualify for the passer rating crown; his actual passer rating was 107.5, and his Era Adjusted Passer Rating was 135.0, the best ever. [continue reading…]

You probably know that Jerry Rice gained 1,139 receiving yards at age 39 with the Raiders in 2001, easily the most of any player at age 39. Only two other wide receivers (Charlie Joiner, 440 yards; Joey Galloway, 173 yards) gained any yards at all at age 39.

You probably know that the next year was Rice’s most remarkable feat. Nobody in NFL history other than Rice gained any yards at age 40 or later, but that year, Rice gained 1,211 yards in Oakland in 2002.

You probably also know that Rice didn’t stop there: he gained 869 yards in 2003 at the age of 41.

And you know that Rice also played at age 42, where he gained 429 yards.  By way of reference, Larry Fitzgerald will be 42 in 2025, by which point in time he may already have been in Canton for a year.

So yes, Rice gained more receiving yards at age 39, 40, 41, and 42 than anyone else in NFL history.  But you probably already knew that.  But did you know that three other times Rice gained more yards than anyone else at any age in NFL history?

Rice gained 1,499 yards in 1994 at age 32, the most in NFL history.  In fact, 1499 yards remains the most by by any player not named Rice at age 32 or older.

Rice then gained a whopping 1,848 receiving yards in 1995, at 33 years old, at the time an NFL record and still the most yards by any player older than 27 years of age.

Oh, and at 36, Rice picked up 1,157 receiving yards, the most of any player at that age, too.

So the single-season record holders in receiving yards at age 32, 33, 36, 39, 40, 41, and 42 are all Rice.

Only two other players hold the record for most receiving yards at age X for two different ages (no other player has done it for three).  Can you name them?  While you think about that, the graph below shows the receiving yards leaders by age:

[continue reading…]

Yesterday, I looked at passing first down data, with an emphasis on percentage of passing plays (including sacks) that went for first downs.

The 2016 Atlanta Falcons had an incredible offense.  Like, a really, really good offense that had lots of eye-popping statistics. Here’s another one: the Falcons picked up 239 passing first downs on 537 pass attempts plus 37 sacks. That means Matt Ryan and company picked up a first down on 41.6% of all passing plays.  That’s the fourth best rate in NFL history.

The best rate belongs to the 2004 Colts, at 44.0%.
The second-best rate belongs to the 2013 Broncos, at 42.2%.
The third-best rate belongs to the 2006 Colts, at 42.1%.

Any guesses what those three teams have in common?

The 2004 Colts had Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison, Reggie Wayne, Dallas Clark, and Brandon Stokley.

The 2006 Colts had Manning, Harrison, Wayne, and Clark, too.

The 2013 Broncos? They had Manning, Demaryius Thomas, Eric Decker, Wes Welker, and Julius Thomas (Stokley was on the 2012 Broncos).

So maybe it was the quarterback.  The table below shows the top 100 teams in percentage of team passing plays that went for a first down. [continue reading…]

In the middle of the 2017 season, I wrote a bit about completion percentage and first downs. Here’s one of my favorite charts to explain the evolution of the passing game in the NFL: the blue line shows completion percentage for each season in the NFL since 1960, a number that is steadily rising. The orange line shows first downs gained on completed passes in the NFL since 1960, which has been steadily declining:

How about first downs per pass play (including sacks)? That’s a number that’s been pretty consistent: it’s been between 28% and 33% every year, and while it’s showing a slight increase over time, it’s pretty slight. [continue reading…]

Yesterday, I discussed the average amount of yards lost on sacks over NFL history.  The average has been stable at around 6.5 since 1993, although it was much higher (for reasons still to be determined) in older periods.  Today, though, I want to look at the relationship between sack yards lost per sack and other variables for individual quarterbacks.

I looked at all quarterbacks with at least 224 pass attempts since 2002. The graph below shows those 522 quarterbacks and how they fared in both sack rate (X-Axis) and yards per sack lost (Y-Axis):

As you can see, there is not much of a correlation there (-0.10), although there is a slight relationship that as sack rate increases, sack yards lost per sack goes down.

What about running quarterbacks — do they have longer average yards lost due to sacks? Anecdotally, it feels like no: Michael Vick was at 5.9, Randall Cunningham 7.3, Cam Newton is at 7.6, Steve Young 5.7, Steve McNair 6.2, Donovan McNabb 6.4, Russell Wilson 6.4, and Tyrod Taylor is at 5.4.  What about over a larger sample?

Here is the same graph again, but instead of sack rate on the Y-Axis, I’ve plotted a measure of rushing prowess.  What measure? I used rushing yards per pass attempt, which should give some measure of running quarterbacks.  For example, last year, the top three players by that metric were Newton (1.53), Wilson (1.06), and Taylor (1.02). The top two years go to Vick — 2.81 in ’04, and 2.68 in ’06.

The correlation coefficient here is -0.20, indicating a weak negative relationship: as rushing prowess goes up, yards per sack lost goes down ever so slightly.

How about sack yards lost and completion percentage? Well, there is no correlation there at all.

What would you like to see in Part III?

Let me tell you something I bet you didn’t know about Byron Leftwich: he was sacked 92 times in his career. There were 44 quarterbacks from 2003 to 2012 with 1500+ passes; of that group, Leftwich ranked 17th in sack rate at 5.4%.  But here’s something I bet you didn’t know about Leftwich: on his sacks, he lost just 452 yards, and averaged just 4.91 yards lost per sack. That is the lowest average in NFL history (well, at least since the merger, but likely in history; see graph below) among quarterbacks with 1500+ attempts. ^[1]Note: From 2003 to 2012, Jeff Garcia averaged just 4.86 average sack yards lost, so Leftwich ranked second during this time. Leftwich’s career spanned this decade, but Garcia entered the league … Continue reading

We don’t spend much time looking at yards lost per sack, and perhaps with good reason.  Here are the 10 players with the lowest average yards lost per sack since 1970 among passers with 1500+ attempts, all of whom lost under 5.7 yards per sack:

• Byron Leftwich
• Rick Mirer
• Jeff Garcia
• Ryan Fitzpatrick
• Matt Cassel
• Charlie Batch
• Dave Brown
• Rich Gannon
• Jeff Hostetler
• Rodney Peete

That’s not exactly a who’s who list of the best quarterbacks in NFL history.  I’d like to spend more time looking at average sack yards lost and see what is there, so I’m going to open this up to the smart readers in the comments.  So let’s start with an interesting graph: here is the average yards lost per sack for each year in NFL history beginning in 1960: [continue reading…]

Background reading (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V: Career Era-Adjusted Passer Ratings Through 2016, 2017 Era-Adjusted Passer Ratings). You can also view the single-season era-adjusted passer ratings here.

The NFL’s passer rating formula can be broken down into the following.

A = (Cmp% – .30) * 5
B = (Y/A – 3.0) * .25
C = TD% * 20
D = 2.375 – Int% * 25

Passer Rating = 100 * (A + B + C + D) / 6

Let’s use Tom Brady as an example.  He has a completion percentage of 63.93 (making A = 1.696), a yards per attempt average of 7.514 (making B = 1.128), a TD percentage of 5.54% (making C = 1.108), and an INT percentage of 1.82% (making D = 1.921).  If you sum A, B, C, and D, multiply by 100, and divide by 6, you get 97.6, which is Brady’s career passer rating.

Last year, I derived the formula to create era-adjusted passer ratings.  This is necessary because the league averages in these variables — particularly completion percentage and interception rate — have changed dramatically over the last 50 years.  For example, when passer rating was created in the early 1970s, the average completion percentage was 50%.  So instead of taking each passer’s completion percentage and subtracting 0.30 (before multiplying by 5), we take each passer’s completion percentage and subtract from that the league average in a given season minus 0.20.  This makes a completion percentage of 60% in the 1970s equivalent to a completion percentage of 70% when the league average completion rate is 60%.

We can do that for all the four variables, and keep the same formula/structure largely in place.

Here are the new formulas for each of the four variables:

A = (Cmp% – (League_Avg_Cmp% – 0.20) ) * 5
B = ( Y/A – (League_Avg_Y/A – 4.0) ) * .25
C = TD% * 20 + (1 – 20 * LgAvgTD_Rate)
D = 2.375 – (Int% * 25 + (1.375 – 25 * LgAvgINT_Rate) )

Then we sum A through D, multiply by 100, and divide by 6.  The table below shows the career era-adjusted passer ratings for the 186 passers with at least 1,500 attempts. Here is how to read the table below. Otto Graham is the career leader in era adjusted passer rating (this analysis includes AAFC and AFL data — we are only adjusting for era in this analysis, not strength of league). He threw 2,626 passes in his career, began in 1946 and finished in 1955, had an actual passer rating of 86.6, and an era adjusted passer rating is 95.2. Graham, of course, is in the Hall of Fame. [continue reading…]

Last year, I wrote a six-part series on adjusting passer ratings for era.

Background reading:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V (Career Passer Ratings)

Part VI (Single Season Ratings)

Passer rating is made up of four variables: completion percentage, yards per attempt, touchdown percentage, and interception percentage.  The reason passer rating needs to be adjusted for era? When it was derived, in order to get an average rating in each of the four variables, a passer needed to complete 50% of his passes, average 7.0 yards per pass, have a touchdown rate of 5%, and have an interception rate of 5.5% (yes, INT rates used to be higher than TD rates).  But those numbers — 50%, 7.0, 5%, 5.5% — were pegged in the 1970s and are not dynamic.  However, I came up with a formula that matches the intent of passer rating but just ties the variables to the league average in any given season. You can get the formulas and read more background in the linked posts.

Now, in 2017, the four averages were 62.1%, 7.02, 4.24%, and 2.46%.  One thing to keep in mind: these adjustments will not change the order of passer ratings in a given season.  So Alex Smith, Drew Brees, Tom Brady, Carson Wentz, and Jared Goff remain the top five; the way the formula works, it just subtracts a fixed amount from each passer’s actual passer rating.  In 2017, that amount was 20.26 during a poor passing season; it was 22.59 lower than actual in 2016. [continue reading…]

In 2017, Tom Brady led the NFL in pass attempts while playing for the 13-3 (0.813) Patriots. Since 1950, there have been just three quarterbacks to lead the league (combining the AFL and NFL) in pass attempts while playing for a team with a winning percentage of 0.813 or better. Can you name them?

[continue reading…]

It has become part of conventional wisdom, I think, to suggest that teams are using running backs as receivers more than ever before. But that continues to not be supported by the evidence. Last year, I looked at the average receiving yards gained in each season by “running backs” in the NFL. Yes, I put running backs in quotes because I didn’t actually look at running backs because, well, positional designations can be a bit tricky the farther back in NFL history you go.

But here is what I did do, and let’s use 2017 as an example. Last year, Kareem Hunt led all players in rushing yards with 1,327. That represented 2.4% of all rushing yards in the NFL last season by all players who gained at least one rushing yard. Hunt was also a good receiver, adding 455 yards through the air. So when figuring out how many receiving yards the “average running backs” gained, 2.4% of that figure will be assigned 455 yards. Todd Gurley rushed for 2.3% of all NFL rushing yards and had 788 receiving yards; therefore, 2.3% of the “average running back” will be credited with 788 receiving yards. Le’Veon Bell was at 2.3% and 655 yards. Add those three together, and 7.0% of the receiving yards by the average running back will be based on an average of 633 receiving yards.

That’s a lot, but there were also eleven running backs with 750+ rushing yards and less than 250 receiving yards: LeGarrette Blount, Latavius Murray, Jordan Howard, Marshawn Lynch, Jay Ajayi, Bilal Powell, Isaiah Crowell, Alex Collins, Dion Lewis, C.J. Anderson, and Frank Gore. In 2016, the “average running back” had 228 receiving yards; in 2017, that number jumped to… 231 receiving yards. By comparison, in 2002, it was 292 receiving yards. [continue reading…]

Statistically, Jameis Winston had a strong 2017 season. Winston was above-average in completion percentage, yards per attempt, net yards per attempt, passer rating, and Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt. Overall, Winston ranked 11th in ANY/A and 14th in passer rating, but that might undersell him. That’s because Winston was also the game’s preeminent downfield thrower in 2017. His average pass traveled 10.62 yards in the air, by far the longest in the NFL (Carson Wentz was second at 9.91, followed by Russell Wilson at 9.75, Carson Palmer at 9.36, and Tom Brady at 9.09). Winston also led the NFL in average air yards on completions, at 7.97 (Wentz was seond at 7.79, followed by Palmer at 7.53.)

Winston was throwing longer passes, which hurt his passer rating and completion percentage, but helped his team. Winston picked up a first down on over 40% of his pass attempts, the highest rate in the NFL last season:

And Winston was excellent on third downs, which is a pretty key component of producing an efficient offense. In fact, he ranked 2nd among starting quarterbacks:

So why were the Bucs so bad in 2017? Was it a case of Winston having very good stats but not playing well? I don’t think so. To start, Tampa Bay had the worst defense in the NFL according to DVOA. And the Bucs had very bad special teams, including a disastrous kicking game. Finally, while Tampa Bay ranked 9th in pass DVOA, the Bucs ranked 25th in rush DVOA. The Bucs ranked 30th in rushing yards by running backs (1168) and 29th in rushing yards per carry by running backs (3.53). [continue reading…]

All football historians know about the 1978 rules changes. Here’s an except I wrote about how those changes changed the NFL forever:

There were two key rules changes enacted in 1978. The first prohibited bumping, chucking, or otherwise making anything other than incidental contact with a receiver beyond five yards from the line of scrimmage. The second allowed offensive lineman to be able to extend their arms, and push with open hands, allowing for better blocking and fewer holding penalties. With those rules in place, quarterbacks needed fewer blockers and receivers needed to be less skilled to get open. As a result, three and four wide receiver sets become more common, and the fullback was phased out…. From 1970 to 1977, non-starting wide receivers consistently produced just under 10% of the team’s total receiving yards; by 1990, that number had doubled, and has shown no signs of subsiding.

So what was the impetus for those changes? The 1977 season, which was a passing nightmare. In 1976, teams averaged 4.07 Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt, defined as (Gross Passing Yards + 20 * TDs – 45 * INTs) divided by (Pass Attempts – Sack Yards Lost). Now a 4.07 league average ANY/A wasn’t high – the ’60s NFL saw an average ANY/A of 4.59 — but it wasn’t notably low, either. In fact, 1976 was a slightly better passing environment than the trailing five year average of 4.01. Then, 1977 happened: teams averaged just 3.55 ANY/A, the lowest mark in the NFL since 1953. This was a dramatic decline in passing production of 0.52 Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt.

Fast forward 40 years. In 2016, the league-wide ANY/A average was 6.22, a shade off of the 6.26 ANY/A average in 2015. In fact, 2014 (6.14 ANY/A), 2015 (6.26), and 2016 (6.22) are the three best passing seasons in NFL history. There was little reason to expect 2017 to be any different, but it was: the NFL average ANY/A dropped to 5.91 last season, a decline of 0.31 ANY/A. That was the single largest year-over-year decline since 1976-1977. [continue reading…]

Former 49ers and Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith has a well-earned reputation for being overly conservative. Smith was known as a low-risk, low-reward passer for years: he avoided interceptions but took a ton of sacks and threw a lot of short, safe passes. In 2011 with the 49ers, he ranked 30th in average pass length; he didn’t have enough passes in 2012 to qualify, but in 2013 with the Chiefs, he ranked 36th in how far his average pass traveled. In 2014, he ranked 33rd, and he repeated that ranking in 2015. In 2016 he ranked 29th, before vaulting to 22nd last year.

From 2011 to 2017, Smith threw 43 interceptions but took an incredible 260 sacks! That means over the last seven seasons, Smith has been sacked over 6 times as often as he’d thrown an interception (6.05 to be precise). Among the 32 quarterbacks who have thrown the most passes since 2011, only three others have even a 4:1 sack:interception ratio. Two of them are two of the best quarterbacks in the NFL in Russell Wilson (4.4 to 1) and Aaron Rodgers (5.20 to 1).  And there are some extenuating circumstances in both cases.

Wilson has played behind terrible offensive lines and scrambles often, which inflates his sack rate. Rodgers has been arguably the best quarterback in the NFL over the last seven years and has a tiny interception rate, although taking too many sacks is a legitimate criticism of his game. But neither passer is a dink-and-dunk type: both rank in the top 8 in yards per completion since 2011 (Rodgers averaged 12.0 yards per completion, Wilson 12.2) while Smith ranked in the bottom 8 with an 11.2 average.

The fourth quarterback is Smith’s old teammate, Colin Kaepernick (5.70 to 1). Even as a young player, Kaepernick always took a lot of sacks, and like Wilson, his scrambling inflated his sack rate a bit. Kaepernick averaged 5.3 sacks for every interception in 2012, then 4.9 in 2013, 5.2 in 2014, 5.6 in 2015, before catapulting to 9.0 in 2016, a year that may have been influenced by his political stance. But even still, Kaepernick wasn’t really a great match for Smith because he averaged 12.1 yards per completion, the 6th-highest rate since 2012.

So over the last 7 years, it’s pretty clear that no quarterback embodied the risk-averse style of player quite like Smith. With a ton of sacks, not many interceptions, and a low yards per completion average, Smith was the most conservative passer in football.

But over the last three years, Tyrod Taylor has taken the crown. In fact, Taylor is more Alex Smith than even Alex Smith! I looked at the 32 quarterbacks with the most pass attempts since the start of the 2015 season. Among that group, Taylor ranks 2nd in interception rate at just 1.29%, but he also ranks last in sack rate at 9.1%! The scramble factor is an issue here — by scrambling when a play breaks down instead of throwing it away, Taylor’s sack rate isn’t quite as bad as it appears — but only two of the other 32 quarterbacks have a sack rate within even two percent of Taylor’s. [continue reading…]

Yesterday, I posted the implied SRS ratings from the Vegas lines released this weekend covering the first 240 games of the season. This is one of my favorite exercises of the year — the Vegas ratings are a great tool to use a starting point for all sorts of projections — so I’ve decided to turn this into a two-part post.

Vegas does not include week 17 point spreads, but we can generate them based on the ratings we have now generated. And we can also perform a much more substantive strength of schedule calculation than the one you typically see. This year, the Arizona Cardinals have the toughest schedule in the league. The table below shows each team’s SOS for all 16 games in 2018:

Arizona’s road schedule is particularly brutal: the Cardinals are 6.5 point underdogs (yes, in large part because the Cardinals are expected to be bad) in every game on the road this year. ^[1]Aand while there’s no line out for the week 17 game in Seattle, the implied ratings tell us that the spread would probably be Seattle -6.5 or Seattle -7. In addition to tough road games against the Seahawks, Rams, and 49ers, Arizona has to visit the Chargers, Chiefs, Falcons, Packers, and Vikings!

Meanwhile, the Texans and Patriots have the two easiest schedules in the NFL. Both teams get the Jets, Dolphins, Bills, and Colts — six for New England, four for Houston of course — while the Texans also get home games against the Browns and Giants. In addition, the Patriots have just five games against top-14 teams, while the Texans have just four games against top-12 teams.

Oh, and don’t pay any attention to articles that claim that the Packers have the hardest schedule in the NFL in 2018. Yes, Green Bay’s opponents this year won 138 games in 2017, the most of any slate of opponents. But that includes games a bunch of games against teams who are expected to be worse than their 2017 record, like the 8-8 Cardinals, the 9-7 Bills, the 7-9 Redskins, and two games each against the 9-7 Lions (21st in the SRS) and 13-3 Vikings (3rd in the SRS). Green Bay’s schedule is actually easier than average — the Packers are road dogs to the Patriots, Rams, and Vikings, but are otherwise favored in every other game (it helps, of course, that the Packers are expected to be very good). Only six of the team’s 16 games are against teams with a positive SRS. [continue reading…]

Ever year, CG Technology releases point spreads for all NFL games during the first 16 weeks of the the season. And as I do every year, I then use those weekly ratings to figure out what the Vegas ratings are for each team.

What we do is take the point spread in each game, adjust for home field (except for the four international games), and then determine how by many points Vegas thinks Team A is better than Team B. When the Patriots are favored by 8.5 points in a road game against the Jets, we can take this to mean that Vegas thinks New England is 11.5 points better than New York. When Vegas says New England is a 7-point home favorite against the Texans, that tells us that Vegas thinks the Patriots are 4 points better than Houston. That’s just two games, of course: Using the iterative SRS process, we can generate season ratings based on the 240 point spreads involved. Here are those ratings, again as of May 13, 2017.

Here’s how to read the table below. After adjusting for home field advantage, the Patriots are expected to beat their average opponent by 6.17 points (this is their Expected HFA-Adj MOV). On average, New England’s opponents (after adjusting for *their* strength of schedule) are -0.47 points better than average, which means the Patriots are expected to be 5.69 points better than average (difference due to rounding). That’s the best in the league; the worst team in the league, perhaps surprisingly, is still the Browns. [continue reading…]

Last year, I wrote about whether sacks are more highly concentrated among a few players now than they were in the ’80s or ’90s. Spoiler: the answer was no. But today I wanted to update that post for the 2017 season.  Let’s use the Patriots as an example.  New England defensive players recorded 41 sacks, but no player filled the shoes left by the departing Chandler Jones. In fact, no Patriots defensive player had even seven sacks. Trey Flowers led the team with 6.5 sacks, and Kyle Van Noy and Deatrich Wise Jr. were the only other players with more than four sacks.

How do you calculate a team’s concentration index?  Flowers had 6.5 of the Patriots defenders’ 41 sacks ^[1]Note that the Patriots had one sack as a defense that was not assigned to any player, so the New England defense was credited with 42 sacks. For purposes of this post, I excluded sacks for all teams … Continue reading, or 15.9%.  We square that number to calculate the concentration index; 15.9% squared is 2.5%.  Do that for every player on the Patriots defense with at least one sack, and you get the following results:

New England stood out as the team with the least concentrated pass rush. And for the second year in a row, the Raiders (thanks to Khalil Mack and Bruce Irvin) stood out in the opposite direction.  Only the Cardinals — who saw Chandler Jones (after being traded from the team with the least concentrated pass rush) lead the league with both 17.0 sacks and 46.0% of his team’s sacks — had a more concentrated pass rush in 2017.

Overall, the league was slightly less concentrated (14.7%) than it was in 2016 (15.3%), but well within the normal range. Since 2002, the average team has had a pass rush concentration index of 15.0%.

There also, at least in 2017, wasn’t much of a correlation between having a lot of sacks and having a highly (or lowly) concentrated pass rush: The graph below plots team sacks on the X-Axis and Concentration Index on the Y-Axis.

What stands out to you?

As a rookie, New Orleans running back Alvin Kamara averaged a whopping 6.07 yards per carry, leading the league in that metric by just about any measure. But given the large amount of regression to the mean involved in yards per carry, what would be a reasonable projection for Kamara in 2018?

I looked at the top 50 players in yards per carry from 1960 to 2016, among players who had (1) between 75 and 175 carries and (2) had fewer than 15 pass attempts. There were 13 players who averaged more than Kamara’s 6.07 YPC average (based on 120 carries for 728 yards), and the group as a whole averaged 110 carries for 641 yards, a 5.85 YPC average. So this group was slightly less effective than Kamara. The next year? They averaged 115.3 carries for just 503.8 yards, a 4.37 yards per carry average. That’s a drop of 25%; if Kamara had a similar drop, he would be at 4.53 YPC next season.

The table below shows those 50 players plus Kamara, and how they fared the next season: [continue reading…]

A few months ago on Reddit, I saw this remarkable stat: including the postseason, Tom Brady is 19-9 in games where he throws at least 50 passes.

How remarkable is that? All quarterbacks have a 0.230 winning percentage in games where they have thrown 50+ passes, which means you’d expect a quarterback with 28 such games to win 6.4 of them, not 19 of them. Drew Brees, Peyton Manning, Dan Marino, Brett Favre, Joe Montana, and Aaron Rodgers have won 19 games when throwing 50+ passes…. but have lost 54 times, a 0.260 winning percentage.

Brady’s success in these games is so remarkable that it might be too remarkable. What I mean by that is that if the average quarterback wins 23% of the time, and the greatest quarterbacks in the game win 26% of the time, seeing Brady win 68% of the time probably isn’t evidence that he’s the greatest quarterback ever — unless he’s about ten times better than every other great quarterback. I’ll let you speculate in the comments as to why the Patriots record is so incredible in these games. The table below shows the records of all quarterbacks in 50+ attempt games (minimum 4 such games), sorted by wins over expectation of a 0.230 winning percentage: [continue reading…]

The NFL requires a player to record 6.25 carries per game in order to qualify for the yards per carry crown. Using that cutoff, here were the leaders in yards per carry during the 2013 season.

There is nothing special about a threshold of 6.25 carries/game (or 100-carries in a 16-game season).  If the cut-off was lower, we could have had any of these players be the yards per carry king for the 2013 season:

[continue reading…]

Whether it’s Mitchell Trubisky or Deshone Kizer or well, any rookie quarterback in the foreseeable future that underwhelms, the new theory for optimism is “Well look at how lost Jared Goff was as a rookie!” There is no doubt that Goff was terrible as a rookie and it’s equally true that he was excellent as a sophomore. Goff pulled off a remarkable worst-to-first campaign, ranking last in ANY/A in 2016 and then first in ANY/A in 2017. He increased his ANY/A average by 4.90, the greatest year-over-year increase in NFL history. That is why he is the exception.

I looked at all quarterbacks who (1) were 24 or younger during their rookie season, (2) threw at least 150 passes as a rookie, (3) threw at least 150 passes in their second year, and (4) entered the league in 1969 (when we first have sack data) or later. This naturally biases results in favor of second-year passers who improve, as quarterbacks who struggle as a rookie and then struggle in year two may not hit the 150-pass attempt threshold. Regardless, Goff’s improvement was truly remarkable. He finished 3.39 below league average in ANY/A in 2016 and then 1.82 above ANY/A in 2017. The graph below shows all passers who met the four criteria above. On the X-Axis, their Relative ANY/A as a rookies; on the Y-Axis, their Relative ANY/A as second-year players. A quarterback who is bad as a rookie and good as a sophomore would therefore be on the upper left quadrant of the chart, which is precisely where Goff (shaded in red) sits: [continue reading…]

Nine years ago, at the old PFR Blog, I wrote an article that suggested that Jason Witten would join the Hall of Fame in the Class of 2024. That may be particularly prescient, as Witten just retired, making him eligible to make the Hall of Fame beginning in the Class of ’23.

The main reason I figured Witten would make it to Canton? Through age 26 (the 2008 season), he had more receptions and receiving yards than any other tight end, and he was showing no signs of slowing down.

Well, he didn’t slow down. Two years ago, following the 2015 season, I updated that post.

Today? I wanted to provide another quick update. Jason Witten completed his age 33 season in 2015. And here’s the killer stat: nobody in NFL history has more receptions through their age 33 season than Jason Witten.

Larry Fitzgerald (who, like Witten, entered the NFL at 21, was productive as a rookie and a Pro Bowler at 22) is a year younger than Witten and has passed him on the “receptions through age 33” list. But that’s Larry Fitzgerald, who not only is a future Hall of Famer but also a wide receiver. Witten didn’t slow down much the last two years, either: he ranks 2nd all-time behind Fitzgerald in receptions through age 35. [continue reading…]

In the early game on Thanksgiving back in 2013, the Lions obliterated the Aaron Rodgers-less Green Bay Packers, 40-10. Matthew Stafford threw for over 300 yards, Calvin Johnson gained over 100 receiving yards, and Reggie Bush rushed 20 times for 117 yards. Heck, backup Joique Bell nearly joined him in the century club, with 17 carries for 94 yards.

Since then, the Lions have played in 68 games without having a 100-yard rusher: Detroit is one game away from tying the ’88-’93 Browns for the second longest streak in history without a 100-yard rusher, and five games away from setting a new record. The current mark is held by the 1960s Washington Redskins, who went 72 games without a 100-yard rusher until Bobby Mitchell on October 1, 1967 ended the streak. [continue reading…]

As I noted on Wednesday, the 2018 NFL Draft was a very weak one for wide receivers. The first common NFL Draft between the AFL and NFL was in 1967, which means the 2018 Draft marked the 52nd draft in the common era. In 47 of the first 51 drafts, at least one wide receiver went in the top 23, but it wasn’t until the 24th pick in the ’18 Draft that a wide receiver — Maryland’s D.J. Moore to Carolina — was selected. The graph below shows where the first wide receiver was taken in each draft:

Just because it’s a weak wide receiver class, though, doesn’t mean this will be a bad class. And the fact that Moore lasted so long isn’t a bad sign, either. There have been 7 other times that the first wide receiver went with the 7th pick or later, and those wide receivers were Haywood Jeffires, Lynn Swann, Demaryius Thomas, Stanley Morgan, Santonio Holmes, Alexander Wright, and Donnie Avery.

The graph below shows the draft value, The graph shows the amount of draft value spent on wide receivers in each draft from 1967 to 2018.  As you can see, with 2018 excepted, the amount of draft capital being spent on wide receivers is up significantly over the last five decades, in stark contrast to the situation at running back:

In fact, let’s compare running backs (in red) and wide receivers (in blue) in the same graph.  The red line shows the draft capital spent on running backs in each draft from ’67 to ’18, with the dotted red line being the trend line (down).   The blue line shows the same for wide receivers, with the dotted blue line showing the trend line.  Side by side, it’s a pretty interesting graph:

As always, please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Today’s post is a re-post from friend of the program Bryan Frye’s site, which is being republished with his permission and encouragement. As regular readers know, Bryan operates his own fantastic site, http://www.thegridfe.com. You can view all of Bryan’s guest posts here, and follow him on twitter @LaverneusDingle. Enjoy!

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Born March 26, 1960 in San Diego, California, Marcus Allen knew from a young age he was a special talent. During neighborhood football games, he was always several steps ahead of everyone else. He preferred playing defensive back and aspired to be like his hero Lem Barney, but he also spent time in his backyard trying to emulate the running style of Browns legend Leroy Kelly. That time paid dividends when Abraham Lincoln High School coaches Vic Player and Roy Reed decided to make Allen a two-way player, starting him at quarterback. Although Allen was recruited to the University of Southern California to play safety, head coach John Robinson saw enough to Allen’s rushing ability on tape to move him to running back.

He began his college career as a backup for star tailback Charles White. He excelled in limited action, helping the Trojans win a national title as a freshman. The following year, in an effort to maximize the talent on the field, running backs coach John Jackson moved Allen to the fullback position, where he would block for White, as well as have more opportunities to carry the ball. Allen proved to be a proficient and determined blocker, helping pave the way for White to gain 1,803 rushing yards and take home the Heisman Trophy in 1979.

When Allen finally got his chance to carry the load as the team’s primary starter, he proved himself one of the best backs in the nation. He gained 1,794 yards and scored 15 touchdowns as a junior, but that was just a preview of what the talented tailback could do on the field. As a senior, in 1981, Allen put on a masterful all-around performance. He eclipsed 200 rushing yards in eight of eleven games ^[1]Treating post-season/bowls separately, as does the Heisman Trust. on his way to becoming the first player to run for over 2,000 yards in a single season. Combined with his contribution as a receiver, Allen led the nation with 2,559 yards ^[2]He added an additional 124 yards in a Rose Bowl loss to Penn State. and 23 touchdowns, earning the Heisman Trophy in the process. ^[3]He also took home the Maxwell Award and the Walter Camp Award.

Following a decorated career at USC, Allen was drafted tenth overall to the Los Angeles Raiders in the 1982 NFL Draft. Amidst a tumultuous season in which a players strike reduced the schedule to just nine games, the 22 year old rookie thrived. He started strong, picking up 180 yards and a touchdown in his first ever game as a pro. He built on that success and, ultimately, led the league in both yards and scoring while helping the Raiders to an NFL-best 8-1 record. Despite suffering an upset loss to the Jets in the divisional round of the playoffs, Raiders faithful knew they had found a special talent in Allen.

In his second year, he proved to be a dynamic weapon, picking up 1,604 yards on 266 carries and a career-high 68 receptions. He even completed four of seven passes for 111 yards and three scores. Those were solid numbers, but they weren’t enough to garner Allen as much as a Pro Bowl nod. It was the postseason where he built his legacy. En route to trouncing every team on the Raiders’ schedule, Allen gained 584 yards and scored five touchdowns. This included one of the great highlights in Super Bowl history against the favored Washington juggernaut. After his defense stopped John Riggins on a 4th and 1, Allen drove the final nail in the coffin with the signature run of his storied career: a sure stop for a loss that he turned into a 74 yard touchdown jaunt through the heart of the Washington faithful. He earned the Super Bowl MVP award for his efforts.

The following season, he continued to prove his versatility, gaining 758 receiving yards to complement his 1,168 rushing yards. He also led the league with 18 touchdowns. He then outdid himself just a year later. The 1985 season was Allen’s finest as a pro. He rushed for a league-high 1,759 yards and gained a then-record 2,314 yards from scrimmage. ^[4]A record he held until Barry Sanders gained 2,358 in 1997. His prolific production behind an unheralded offensive line earned him the Most Valuable Player award from the Associated Press and the Pro Football Writers Association. In winning MVP honors, Allen became the only player in history to win an NCAA National Championship, a Heisman Trophy, a Super Bowl, and be named Super Bowl MVP and a league MVP.

Unfortunately, the success of his MVP performance did not carry over into the following season. After topping 100 yards on the ground in the first two games, Allen suffered a nagging ankle injury that diminished his effectiveness for the rest of the year. He would not gain 100 yards on the ground again that season and, in fact, would only top the century mark in six more games in his career. Although he played in 13 games, he lacked the game-changing ability that once defined him. The low point of the season came in week 13 against the Eagles: driving to set up a game-winning field goal in overtime, Allen lost a fumble that was returned 81 yards to set up a Randall Cunningham touchdown run. Some observed this was the turning point in Allen’s career with the Raiders.

In 1987, a players strike saw one game removed from the league schedule and another three played primarily by replacement players. To the displeasure of Raiders owner Al Davis, Allen never crossed the picket line. When it ended, Allen returned from the strike to contend with Davis signing college football legend and professional baseball player Bo Jackson to play running back during the latter part of the season. Although this initially resulted in a timeshare at halfback, Allen ultimately volunteered to play fullback and use his blocking prowess to clear holes for Jackson. This allowed head coach Tom Flores to fully exploit his talented stable of backs, but it also meant significantly fewer carries for Allen. It was a sign of things to come.

Over the next three seasons, Allen would carry the burden of the team’s rushing attack for the first half of the season, knowing he would have to relinquish the role to a part-time football player for the latter part of the year. He threw key blocks for the younger back, threatened opposing defenses as a receiver, often played injured, and led his team by example in the locker room. Even after Jackson suffered a career-ending hip injury, Davis brought in veterans Roger Craig and Eric Dickerson to take the leading role. It wasn’t until 1993, when he was 33 years old, that he was able to get a fresh start and a starting job for a new team.

After being pursued by Chiefs head coach Marty Schottenheimer, Allen joined fellow veteran expat Joe Montana in Kansas City. He repaid his coach’s faith by playing five more years and scoring 47 more touchdowns, including a league-leading 12 rushing scores in his first year with the team. Although age and injury had taken their toll on Allen’s physical abilities, he maintained the mental toughness and innate ability to play football. Schottenheimer would later say: “If God put one person on this earth to be a professional football player it would have been Marcus Allen… He was the most instinctive, natural football player that I have ever been around.” ^[5]From A Football Life: Marcus Allen.

By the time he retired at the age of 38, he had played in more games (220) and scored more touchdowns (145) than any running back to that point in history. Some focus solely on his career arc and write him off as a compiler who only produced big numbers because he played for a long time. That is simply not the case. On account of the strike his rookie year, his first four seasons comprised just 57 regular season games. Compared with every player in history through the same number of games, Allen ranks fifth in yards from scrimmage (6942). ^[6]Behind Eric Dickerson, Edgerrin James, Terrell Davis, and LaDainian Tomlinson. Thanks to injuries, strikes, and Davis’s eccentricity, after those first four years, he never played another full season with a starter’s workload.

His uncanny knack for finding the end zone contributed significantly to his long career. As an elder statesman, he was used as the Chiefs’ primary goal line threat. Even when banished to Davis’s doghouse, Allen still got the nod from coaches in critical situations. Consequently, he was able to pick up 18 of his 123 rushing touchdowns during his last four seasons with the team, despite averaging fewer than eight carries per game over that span. It speaks volumes that coaches were willing to disregard ownership in order to get Allen on the field. But it wasn’t just his coaches who valued him; his teammates thought enough of him to vote him team MVP four times between 1984 and 1988, despite his reduced role as a ball carrier.

Despite missing time and feuding with the owner, Allen remained productive when on the field. He was a talented enough receiver that draft analysts thought he might be switched to wide receiver coming out of college. They were on to something. At the time he retired, Allen ranked 22nd among all players, and first among running backs, with 587 career receptions. He was also the first player ever to rush for over 10,000 yards and gain over 5,000 yards receiving in a career. Twenty years later, only Marshall Faulk and Tiki Barber have joined that club. ^[7]Only Faulk has more of both.

Allen played a full season’s worth of playoff games. In those 16 games, he had 267 carries for 1,347 yards (5.0 YPC) and 11 touchdowns. He added 53 receptions for 530 yards and two touchdowns. A season of 1,877 yards and 13 touchdowns is even more impressive when you consider that nine of those games came after Allen turned 30.

He also used his quarterback pedigree to benefit his teams in the NFL. Over the course of his career, he completed 12 of 27 passes for 282 yards and six touchdowns. These weren’t typical goal line gadget plays you’d expect to see from a running back; they were largely plays with the same degree of difficulty you’d assign to a quarterback.

That kind of versatility earned him admiration from coaches across the league. In a 1985 article, the Los Angeles Times asked several NFL coaches to rate contemporary running backs. Despite a presumed lack of speed leaving him ranked as the ninth-best pure runner, the panel thought enough of the rest of his game to rank him (tied with Walter Payton) as the best all-around running back.

We’ve established that Allen was a natural runner, punishing blocker, talented receiver, and, when called upon, a decent passer. As important to his legacy as his prodigious on-field accomplishments, however, may be his strength of character.

Davis valued loyalty and reportedly considered Allen’s refusal to cross sides during the strike, as well as his frequent holdouts, as personal betrayals. As an act of retribution, Allen believed, Davis refused to release or trade him, instead preferring to let him sacrifice his body as a 205 pound blocking back. It was rumored that Davis instructed the coaching staff not to play him and even went as far as warning quarterback Jay Schroeder not to look to him on pass plays. Despite knowingly fighting an uphill battle, the star running back didn’t create tension in the locker room and, in fact, was universally respected by his peers.

Even after filing an antitrust suit against the NFL (helping pave the way for unrestricted free agency) and publicly lamenting that Davis robbed him of his prime, his teammates honored him with his fifth Commitment to Excellence Award. He was a steadfastly unselfish teammate, even at the expense of his own legacy, and the guys in the locker room recognized both his resilience and his leadership. To paraphrase Allen: You can’t pretend to be tough; either you are or you aren’t. Both mentally and physically, Marcus Allen was tough. He is also one of the all-time greats.

You will not be surprised to learn that Alabama, Ohio State, and Georgia were the three schools that dominated the 2018 NFL Draft. Players from the Crimson Tide were taken using draft slots worth 83.9 points of value, the most of any school; second was Ohio State with 70.4 points of value, followed by Georgia (68.7), USC (55.7), and Penn State (54.5).

On the other hand, with the exception of the number one overall pick, the Big 12 has a pretty shaky draft. In fact, after Baker Mayfield, the next player selected from the Big 12 was Texas guard Connor Williams.  The graph below shows the AV used to select players from each conference in the 2018 Draft:

You probably aren’t surprised to see the SEC finished first among all conferences in draft value spent on its players. The ACC was second, thanks not to the current conference overlord in Clemson, but to…. North Carolina State, Louisville, and Virginia Tech!

As always, please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Which positions did NFL teams focus on in the 2018 NFL Draft? We can use the Football Perspective Draft Value Chart to answer that question pretty easily for the first 224 picks (all picks after that have been excluded, since they have a draft value of zero). For example, here is how much Draft Value was spent on each quarterback taken:

Now, in the abstract that may not mean much: is 132.8 points a lot or a little? So we need to compare quarterbacks to all other positions. Longtime readers may recall that I crunched these numbers in 2016 and last year, but decided to switch the position designations this time around. For defense, I am combining 4-3 defensive ends and 3-4 outside linebackers — basically anyone whose primary job is to be a pass rusher — into “Edge” players. I am also then combining DTs, NTs, and 3-4 DEs — i.e., all interior defenders — into the label “DT/DE” which excludes 4-3 defensive ends. For linebackers, I decided to just group all linebackers together, since 3-4 OLBs are already labeled as “Edge” players, and the differences between 3-4 ILBs, 4-3 OLBs, and MLBs is not worth separating. The graph below shows the amount of draft capital spent on all positions in the 2018 Draft: [continue reading…]