Joe Thomas entered the NFL in 2007, and retired this week after 11 years with the Browns.  During his time with Cleveland, the Browns had a 0.273 winning percentage, the worst record in the NFL. I wrote about how Thomas had one of the worst AV-adjusted winning percentages of all time, and that was before Cleveland went winless in 2017.

Thomas is an obvious future Hall of Famer.  He was a 6-time first-team All-Pro choice by the Associated Press, and a 10-time Pro Bowler.  He is one of just five players, along with Merlin Olsen, Mel Renfro, Barry Sanders, and Lawrence Taylor, to make the Pro Bowl in each of his first ten seasons.

But there’s another way that Thomas is a remarkable player.  He might just be more Ogden than Jonathan Ogden, and that’s saying something.  Here is what Doug wrote back when the Approximate Value system was in its infancy:

I’ve instituted a minimum AV for first-team all-pros, second-team all-pros, and pro bowlers. We may as well call this the Jonathan Ogden rule, because he’s the guy who demonstrated the need for it. The AV formula, because it starts with team success, hates Jon Ogden. Ogden is essentially the opposite of Derrick Brooks, who ranks surprisingly high in AV largely on the basis of being the lone constant on one of the best 12-year team defensive runs of all time. According to my metric of choice — points per possession — Ogden has played on a below average offensive team for 11 of his 12 seasons, some of them way below average. As a result, there just haven’t been many points to divvy up among the Raven offensive players. So when I run through the formula, Ogden gets a lot of points relative to other Ravens, but still not as many points as he probably should. The AV methodology essentially implies that a terrible offense can’t have any great players, and that’s not true.

So my inelegant fix is to simply declare that first-team all-pros at tackle and at any defensive position get a minimum of 13 AV no matter what (a typical first-team all-pro gets about 16). Second-team all-pros get a minimum of 11 AV, and pro bowlers get a minimum of 9 AV.

The system has gone through some changes since then, but consider that Thomas had an AV of 9, 10, or 11 in four of his six seasons as a first-team All-Pro. That’s really low. In fact, he is responsible for 4 of the 11 seasons since the merger where an offensive tackle had fewer than 12 points of AV.

By comparison, 87 of the 100 (1970 to 2017 is 48 years of NFL history, and there were four seasons with three All-Pro tackles) had an AV of 12 or higher.  Thomas wasn’t just great, but he was uniquely great, as a dominant tackle despite playing on a team that couldn’t ever take advantage of the value he provided.