Dick Stanfel

Jack Butler

From Fifth Down friend Andy Barall:

The Hall of Fame seniors committee named Dick Stanfel and Jack Butler on Wednesday as finalists for election in the class of 2012. To be elected, they need the same 80 percent support as the modern era finalists when the full selection committee meets in Indianapolis on Feb. 4, the day before Super Bowl 46. A few thoughts about the nominees:

Although his playing career lasted only seven seasons, Dick Stanfel left his mark as one of the finest and most consistent offensive linemen of his time. In an era that valued technique over brute strength, Stanfel was fundamentally sound enough to be elected first team All-Pro five times and to be named to the N.F.L.’s all-decade team of the 1950s....

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I try to be very careful with how the site's code is structured, so that the pages will load and render as blazingly fast a possible. Users like it and it can have a direct impact on our bottom line.

One item that has been out of my control is the ad code we include on the pages. Some of these ads load 5-15 additional files and quite frankly some of the ad servers don't seem to have a good idea of what speed means, so the pages hang and we get lots of frustrated e-mails. As well as being frustrated ourselves.

In my opinion, Jerry Rice is the greatest football player ever. His records are so incredibly, absurdly, ridiculously unbelievable that you can't throw enough adjectives and adverbs his way. But with Larry Fitzgerald signing his enormous-but-justifiable megadeal with the Arizona Cardinals this past weekend, I wondered if he could one day challenge Rice's records. After all, Fitzgerald entered the league at a very young age and has been almost dominant since then. He turns 28-years-old a week from today.

Rice was the most dominant receiver through age 34 in league history. He ranks 1st in touchdowns, receiving yards and receiving yards per game through that age. Last year, Tony Gonzalez passed him in receptions through age 34, 1069 to 1050, dropping Rice into second place in that category. Of course, that's because Gonzalez entered the league at 21 while Rice didn't start playing until age 23. Rice was in his 12th season at age 34, and he laps the field in even more embarrassing fashion in receptions, receiving yards, touchdowns and yards per game through twelve seasons.

At age 35, Rice tore his ACL in week one, causing him to miss nearly the entire season. In dramatic fashion, Rice came back for MNF in week 16 and scored a touchdown, helping him become the only player to catch a touchdown in 20 seasons.

Elo Rater - Pro-Football-Reference.com.

User ratings for GOAT debates always lead to interesting discussions both here and elsewhere. At PFR, we have just launched our Sports Reference Elo Rater on the football site. The raters have been popular tools on basketball, baseball, hockey, and college football and we have no doubt it will be popular here as well.

The ratings are based on a head-to-head rating system developed by Arpad Elo and played a role in the movie, The Social Network, and Zuckerberg's FaceMash app. You are given two players to rate along with their stats and vote for which one you think it better. That's it. We then change the player's rating based on the margin separating them and whether the win was expected or an upset.

All players are starting today, August 22nd, at 1500, so it will take quite a lot of votes to start separating the wheat from the chaff.

Jason Lisk has started a series titled "A Thought about the ..." for each of the 32 teams in the league, as part of his NFL preview for the Big Lead. Today, he takes his thoughts to St. Louis, and cites my somewhat controversial article on Bradford from earlier this week.

Jason Lisk takes a different look at the Rams' success.

So, what I looked at for this is other teams where the defensive points allowed improved dramatically from one year to the next. The Rams last year went from next to last in 2009, 31st in points allowed, to 12th in the league. I found all teams since 1978 who improved at least 15 spots in their points allowed ranking in the league. I then went deeper into those teams, and isolated two different types. The first, we’ll call the “Bradford effects”, which found all teams that had a different QB (who had never been the main starter for that franchise prior) during the dramatic improvement season, and that same new QB was also the starter a year later. The second, we’ll call the “Manning effects”, since he shows up 3 times on the list, and this is for all teams that had a dramatic improvement from one year to the next, and the same QB was the starter before, during, and after the points allowed improvement.

Obviously, we don’t think Peyton Manning has an impact on his defenses–he’s played with good ones and bad ones and everything in between during his career. Same with Marino and Elway and Brady and Montana and all the other guys that show up on this list. If a team dramatically improves during the middle of a QB’s career, we are less likely to attribute that to the quarterback.

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Tennessee running back Chris Johnson is currently holding out of training camp because he wants more money. A lot more money. Some think that isn't a prudent decision for the Titans. As a running back, Johnson might wear down in a year or two and will therefore be overpaid over the life of his contract. I'll resist the urge to go on another rant on rookie salaries -- owners and GMs argue that rookies don't deserve big bucks because they're unproven and that veterans don't deserve big bucks because their future potential is limited -- and instead look at a question posed by Ryan Wilson at Cbssports.

Look, there's no disputing that Johnson and Adrian Peterson are the two best running backs in the NFL. But the difference between them and the NFL's 32nd-best back is negligible when compared to the differences between, say, Tom Brady or Peyton Manning and whoever your candidate is for the league's worst starting quarterback. The same holds for wide receivers, left tackles, cornerbacks, safeties -- basically every position but running back.

So why is that?

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Sam Bradford's rookie season has been incredibly overrated by nearly every football writer and talking head. If you wanted the perfect storm of a formula that would spit out an overrated rookie quarterback, you would want to have a quarterback who:

• Finished near the top of the league in attempts, overinflating his yards and touchdown metrics. Yards and touchdowns aren't good ways to grade quarterbacks, but that doesn't stop people from doing just that;

• Played for a team with just a couple of wins in the prior year, so the quarterback would get credit for any regression to the mean in the form of a significant increase in wins;

• Played a really weak schedule that boosted the quarterback's individual stats and team wins; and

• Played for a team whose defense got a lot better without adding any big names, so people can just think "what's the difference between them this year and last year? That rookie QB and not much else."

Some rookie quarterbacks will have some of those factors working in their favor, but Bradford has all four. This isn't a post blasting Bradford as much as it is blasting the Bradford backers. One of those includes the normally outstanding Mike Tanier, who thought Bradford had one of the best rookie seasons of all time. Kurt Warner thinks Bradford is going to be a superstar. Fantasy football fans are drafting him as the 15th quarterback in standard leagues. Article have been written based on the notion that the Rams have already drafted a future Super Bowl winner. Bradford's part-Aikman, part-Montana, part-Manning and part-Matt Ryan, but calling him part-Unitas would be too much.

I'm an unabashed Lee Evans fan. In Febrruary 2009, I ran a series of posts discussing the greatest wide receivers in pro football history. I argued that it was necessary to adjust wide receiver stats based on team attempts, as otherwise wide receivers in pass-happy offenses would hold an unfair advantage over receivers playing in more run-oriented schemes. But I was shocked to find that in 2006, Evans ranked as the number one receiver in football. His numbers were good but not overwhelming -- Evans had 82 catches for 1,292 yards and 8 touchdowns; he ranked 6th in the NFL in receiving yards. To be fair, a lot of receivers had down years in '06, but still, I couldn't figure out why Evans came out on top. The reason, of course, was that Buffalo ranked just 31st in pass attempts that year. As a result, his 6th place ranking ended up being the most impressive season by any receiver that year.

But Evans has put together a string of disappointing seasons since then. The question is, how much of that is Evans' fault and how much blame can go on the collection of talent the Bills have put together? Buffalo has struggled to get even average production out of its offensive lineman and quarterbacks over the past five years. In fact, take a look at the passers for the Bills since Evans entered the league:

As you may have noticed this week, we now have 2011 team pages on the site. Right now these have the team's 2011 schedule & draftees, but they will be populated with 2011 stats when the regular season begins.

Mike also added the 2011 Draft page, and has made it possible to sponsor drafted players right now -- so get your Cam Newton sponsorship while it's hot.

Last but not least, we now have complete team coordinator info going back to the early 1970s. In addition to being awesome in and of itself, this data also allows us to list a coach's "coaching tree" -- coaches that he worked under as an assistant a coordinator or were his subordinates as a head coach.  (Thanks to Scott Kacsmar, who helped us enter this data.)

Vince Lombardi has been a football icon for half a century. Lombardi and W.C. Heinz penned Run to Daylight in 1963, a blueprint for success for football coaches at all levels. Five years later, Jerry Kramer's diary, Instant Replay, offered the first real insight underneath the veneer of the coaching legend. David Maraniss' book, When Pride Still Mattered, first published in 1999, set a new standard for sports biographies.

Last December, NFL Films and HBO created a documentary exploring the life and career of the great coach. Two months earlier, the coach came to Broadway in the fantastic play Lombardi -- which I had the pleasure of seeing -- loosely based on Maraniss' work. In February, Al Pacino is going to "Hooah", mail-it-in, and over-act as Lombardi in an ESPN documentary to be aired the week before the Super Bowl.

Perhaps no coach has been as idolized and well-chronicled as the man whose name is on the Super Bowl trophy. ESPN and NFL Network have played certain clips so many times that you can close your eyes and hear sports anchors mimic the phrase ""a seal here...and a seal here." With so much on the great coach, what separates John Eisenberg's That First Season: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory?

I understand why the hyped teams in the NFC are Philadelphia and Green Bay. The Eagles had the most dynamic football player in football last season, a reformed Michael Vick. Prior to 2010, no player had ever averaged 40 rushing yards per game and 240 passing yards per game in the same season; Vick averaged 252 passing yards and 56 rushing yards in a scorched-earth, twelve-game stint in 2010. Since then, the Eagles added arguably the best cornerback in the league, Nnamdi Asomugha, in addition to bringing in DT Cullen Jenkins (from GB), DE Jason Babin (Ten), Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie (Ari), Vince Young (Ten), Ronnie Brown (Mia) and Ryan Harris (Den). Joined by Asante Samuel, the Eagles have an embarrassment of riches at the cornerback spot, key for a team that will have to contend with a dominant passing attack to get to the Super Bowl.

But no one is doubting the defending Super Bowl champion Packers, either. In addition to being a young team, Green Bay lost more key players to more games due to injury than any Super Bowl champion in recent memory. The Packers recaptured the Lombardi despite TE Jermichael Finley, RB Ryan Grant, DE Mike Neal and S Morgan Burnett, among others, all spending most of the year on injured reserve. The Packers led the NFC in SRS by a mile -- don't be fooled by that 6 seed they earned -- and there's reason for optimism for the future. Eight of the top ten players in AV for the Packers were 27 years or younger last season: Clay Matthews, Aaron Rodgers, Nick Collins, Greg Jennings, Tramon Williams, A.J. Hawk, B.J. Raji and Desmond Bishop are entering the primes of their careers. And while Charles Woodson and Chad Clifton will be 35 this season, both played well in 2010.

But I'm in love with what the Saints did this off-season. This team looks to be better than the '09 team that won the Super Bowl, and would be my pre-season favorite to win it all. Here's an extensive look at what the Saints have done over the last 2.5 years. Let's start by taking a look at the key contributors from the championship team:

ESPN came out with a new quarterback rating ("Total QBR") on Friday, and if you haven't read Chase or Jason's takes, do so immediately. The early consensus seems to be this:

Pros:

• It can't help but be better than the NFL's official passer rating
• Based in large part on the strong analytical framework found in The Hidden Game of Football and the work of Aaron Schatz, Brian Burke, etc.
• Takes into account all of a QB's actions (sacks, rushing carries, etc.)
• Doesn't penalize QBs for dropped passes
• Tries to parse credit between QB and receiver by breaking down Air Yards vs. YAC

Cons:

• No adjustment for strength of schedule
• A 'black box' -- we don't know the specifics about how it works
• WPA-style clutch adjustments might be retrodictive, but aren't predictive
• Splitting of credit between teammates appears to rely on subjective assessments

As soon as ESPN released the first batch of ratings from the 2008-10 seasons, I ran some correlations between existing stats and QBR:

                    r         R^2
    voa         0.9295      0.8639
    dvoa        0.9200      0.8464
    anypa_idx   0.8988      0.8079
    anypa       0.8960      0.8029
    rate_idx    0.8766      0.7684
    rate        0.8745      0.7647
    uAYA*       0.8647      0.7478
    aypa_idx    0.8478      0.7188
    nypa_idx    0.8445      0.7132
    aypa        0.8411      0.7075
    cmppct      0.7690      0.5913
    cmp_idx     0.7680      0.5898
    ypa_idx     0.7384      0.5453
    ypa         0.7340      0.5388
    tdpct_idx   0.7173      0.5146
    ypg         0.7146      0.5107
    tdpct       0.7027      0.4937
    intpct_idx  0.6013      0.3616
    intpct     -0.5989      0.3586
    skrate     -0.5546      0.3076
    skrate_idx  0.5516      0.3042
    (* = 2010 data only)

Basically, 86% of the variation in QBR is explained by Football Outsiders' VOA metric, and 81% is explained by our Adjusted Net YPA stat. Oddly enough, even though QBR factors in rushing plays, Ultimate Adjusted YPA correlates worse with QBR than Adjusted Net YPA -- in essence, uAYA tracks more closely with QBR if you remove its rushing components.

You can also explain 85% of the variation in QBR using the following formula composed of nothing but our Advanced Passing Indices:

QBR ~ -60.5 + 1.2 * Cmp%_Idx - 2.1 * YPA_Idx + 0.5 * TD%_Idx - 3.5 * Rate_Idx + 4 * AY/A_Idx + 0.9 * NY/A_Idx

This produces the following list of the best estimated post-merger "QBR" seasons (min 225 att):

Finally, here are the predicted 2010 QBR leaders alongside the actual QBR leaders (min 225 att):

Everyone knows that quarterback rating is flawed. Everyone has known this for a long time. But because of the drawbacks to other statistics -- touchdowns, wins, interceptions, yards -- QB rating has persevered as the most mainstream singular statistic for grading quarterbacks. PFR has used Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt; Advanced NFL Stats using Expected Points Added; Football Outsiders uses DYAR. Now, ESPN takes its turn at measuring quarterback play.

The actual formula behind quarterback rating is complicated, but it can be reduced to a simple formula. That's what Bob Carroll, Pete Palmer and John Thorn discovered in their groundbreaking book, The Hidden Game of Football. Essentially, QB rating is equivalent to yards per attempt, but with a 20-yard-bonus for each completion, an 80-yard-bonus for each touchdown, and a 100-yard-penalty for an interception. Such adjustments should seem ridiculous to every reader, which is why everyone finds quarterback rating ridiculous. By way of comparison, PFR's ANY/A formula -- in addition to including relevant data on sacks -- gives no bonus for completions, a 20-yard bonus for touchdowns and a 45-yard penalty for interceptions.

But on Thursday, ESPN released the methodology behind its new QB Rating. And last night, ESPN aired an hour-long segment at 8 PM to discuss the new formula. So how does ESPN's formula look?

There's some good and some bad, which means it has exceeded my expectation. As Jason Lisk said, ESPN will promote it ad nauseum but it should have value. It's not perfect, but it's almost certainly better than the traditional passer rating and possibly the best single statistic out there. Here's my take.

Over the weekend, the New York Jets signed Plaxico Burress as a cheaper alternative to fill the void left by Braylon Edwards. Buress and Edwards have had very similar career paths: From Michigan to Lake Erie to New York, these tall wide receivers have been in the news and teasing us with their talents for a decade. How do they compare?

Category                   Buress              Edwards              Edge

Ht/Wt                      6'5, 226            6'3, 211             Burress

Michigan School            Michigan State      Michigan             Push (MSU under Nick Saban)

Sophomore year             65--1013--8         67--1035--10         Push

Junior Year                66--1142--12        85--1138--14         Edwards

Senior Year                Entered Draft       97--1330--15         N/A

1st-team All-Conf.         Twice               Twice                Push

Last college game          13--185-3 in 37-34  10--109--3 in 38-37
                           win over Florida    loss to Texas        Burress

College hardware           Two Bowl MVPs       Biletnikoff Award    Edwards

Drafted by Lake Erie       Pittsburgh          Cleveland            Burress
franchise in…   

Third year breakout        78-1325-7           80-1289-16           Edwards

Breakout more impressive   Tommy Maddox        Derek Anderson       Edwards
because he played with   

Found out the hard way:    NFL rules, college  Helmet can't be used 
                           rules, different    as a reception device Burress


Touchdown rate             Every 9.2 catches   Every 8.4 catches    Edwards

Guilty of...               Criminal possession Driving while
                           of a weapon         intoxicated          Edwards

Super Bowls + Pro Bowls    One                 One                  Push

Brush with greatness       Game-winning TD to  Fisticuffs with 
                           defeat Pats in SB   LeBron's entourage   Burress

Edwards just edges out Burress, 6 to 5. But Jets fans -- and fantasy football owners -- are forward thinking. They want to know how Burress will play in 2011. As usual, I don't know, and you don't know. At this point, it's wild speculation. But we can look to the past to get some sense as to what sort of path Burress' career might take.