Rerun: Reputation and information
Posted by Doug on August 2, 2006
I am in the process of moving, which is why I haven't been around much lately. I don't know when I'll be back to the normal schedule, but in the mean time I will be posting some "re-runs." I wrote this in January of 2006 for sabernomics:
Who is a better football player: David Carr or Steve Hutchinson?
David Carr was the first overall pick in 2002, and the jury is still out on him. Some people believe he only needs a decent offensive line, a change of scenery, some better receivers, or some combination thereof; others believe he’s simply a bust. Steve Hutchinson, for you casual football fans who wandered in here not prepared for a quiz, plays guard for the Seahawks, and does so spectacularly. Let’s set aside for the moment the debate about the value of a mediocre quarterback versus a top-notch guard, and focus on who does his job better. You ask 100 knowledgeable football fans, and all 100 will tell you that Hutchinson is a much better guard than Carr is a quarterback.
That’s reputation.
Now let’s think about information. On what information are we intelligent football fans basing that judgement? As usual, this is easy for baseball fans. If we are debating baseball players, we can start by looking at the numbers. We may quibble about which numbers to look at or exactly what kind of adjustments we need to make to those numbers, but ultimately we feel pretty confident that the players’ statistics — if properly interpreted — tell us what we need to know.
It’s not so easy in football. There are, of course, plenty of stats on Carr. But everybody knows that they reflect not only his own performance but also his teammates’ performance, his coach’s offensive philosophy, and so forth. We know his numbers are tainted, but we’re willing to use them anyway, at least as a rough estimate.
For Hutchinson, we don’t even have that much. In fact, we’ve got nothing. Those of you who have broken down enough game film of Hutchinson, and have broken down enough game film on every other guard in the league, and who really know enough about guard play to know what you’re watching for, you can speak with authority. You form a miniscule fraction of the football watching population, though. For the rest of us, the only stat we have on offensive lineman is the number of pro bowls to which they’ve been named. Either directly or indirectly, that’s how most of us form our opinion of the quality of offensive linemen. Hutchinson has been to three straight pro bowls. He’s good. Who are the best offensive lineman in football? Jonathan Ogden? Nine straight pro bowls. Orlando Pace has been to seven straight. Willie Roaf? Eleven pro bowls in the last 12 years. Will Shields? Ten pro bowls in the last 11 years. Larry Allen likewise has gone to 10 in the last 11 years.
Do you know how many non offensive linemen have been to 10 pro bowls in 11 years, as Roaf, Shields, and Allen have? Concentrating for the moment just on the offensive side of the ball, here is the breakdown:
Number of players who have been to 10 pro bowls in an 11-year span
Offensive linemen - 9
Quarterbacks - 1
Running backs - 1
Wide Receivers - 1
Tight Ends - 0In the history of the NFL, Johnny Unitas, Jerry Rice, and Barry Sanders are the only three players on the offensive side of the ball who played their position as consistently well as Will Shields, Willie Roaf, and Larry Allen have played theirs. Now, it is true that offensive linemen generally have longer careers than the so-called skill position players, but here is an equally revealing glimpse into the pro bowl voting:
Pro Bowl “retention rates”
Offensive line - 60%
Tight Ends - 52.6%
Wide Receivers - 45.5%
Running Backs - 43.4%
Quarterbacks - 43.2%In other words, 60% of the offensive lineman who made the pro bowl in year N also made it in year N+1, while only 43% of quarterbacks were able to retain their pro bowl status from one year to the next. The contrast is even sharper when you realize that 19% of the league’s starting quarterbacks make the pro bowl in a given year but only 10% of the league’s starting offensive linemen do (6 of 32 QBs, 16 of 160 lineman), so it should be easier for quarterbacks to repeat. Of course it is possible that there is something inherent about the positions that makes skill position players much more volatile — pitchers are naturally more volatile than hitters, for example — but I’m suspicious.
If you ranked the positions on the offensive side of the ball in terms of how many statistics are available to describe the performance of players at that position, you would get a list that is in the exact opposite order of the above list. Quarterbacks are measured in several passing and rushing categories, including the complex passer rating formula. Running backs have rushing statistics and receiving statistics. Wide receivers have only receiving statistics. Tight ends also have only receiving statistics, but those receiving statistics measure a smaller part of the tight end’s job than of the wide receiver’s job.
Even when you include defensive players, the correspondence remains. Retention rates for linebackers, defensive backs, and defensive linemen — for whom we have a couple of statistics (sacks and interceptions), but not many — all fall between those of the offensive lineman and the wide receivers. Now that tackles are becoming a more standard statistic for defensive players, it will be interesting to see if their pro bowl retention rates fall. I bet they do.
The less information we have, the more we have to rely on reputation. We evaluate skill position players on some combination of information (stats) and reputation. For linemen, the information is the reputation, so we get a self-fulfilling prophecy. Offensive lineman make the pro bowl because they’re good. And we know they’re good because they make the pro bowl.
August 2nd, 2006 at 9:05 am
so i suppose it is extremely difficult for a new lineman to be inserted into the lineup - in addition to the # of starting lineman in league to # or roster spots, you also have the retention factor. I guess if you are a first timer, you basically become "tenured". willie roaf retired, so that creates an opening in the probowl lineman lineup. Will we go by someone else that has performed well, or will we go by recall of a relatively recent NFL draft and pick someone that got a lot of press recently.
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:59 am
Great article. I've always suspected those stats about retention rates and players with 10 Pro Bowls in 11 years.
My holy grail (and other peoples' I'm sure) is some way to rate these non-stat positions. Anytime I hear a fan talking about a lineman or defensive back and how good they are, I usually assume they are full of crap.
Even rating offensive or defensive linemen can be tough because we don't always know what a player was SUPPOSED to do on a given play.
Say we have a system where we watch the right tackle on every play, and judge his ability. How do we rate his blocking ability if the defense doesn't even rush on his side? They rush the left side, and drop back into coverage on the right side, so our focus player on this play is just standing next to air.
Also, some defensive linemen's job is basically just to get in the way and create traffic. If Sam Adams just rushes and takes up two blockers and creates a bottleneck in the middle of the line, it doesn't look very exciting, and he doesn't get a tackle, but really he did his job because he prevented the offense from rushing up the middle.
August 2nd, 2006 at 5:11 pm
For subjective ratings of offensive linemen, we do have penalty data. I don't know why that's not used more often.
Long-term, we have games started and overall offensive production. I think if a tackle plays for ten years and that team is consistently in the top 10 in points scored, it's safe to say he's pretty good. But compiling that kind of data would be a lot of work.
August 5th, 2006 at 6:23 am
While interceptions and knockdowns are the gold standard for cornerbacks, it seems to me that the best cornerbacks usually get less opportunities to make those big plays because the guys they're covering get open a lot less.
For instance: Deion Sanders is widely considered the best corner of all time. However, for three years in the prime of his career, he only averaged 2 interceptions per year. The reason was because his reputation was so great that QBs wanted to avoid throwing anywhere near him.
August 5th, 2006 at 6:26 am
Yep. And on passing plays, defensive linemen don't need to record a sack in order to be considered effective. If they get close enough to the QB where he is forced to make a bad throw, leading to an incomplete or a pick, the lineman has done his job.
August 7th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
The guys at http://www.footballoutsiders.com do make an effort to give stats to the OL and DLs. For example, the Seattle offensive line last year was near the top 5 in average yardage. However, it seems they were hit or miss, with a very high "power" ranking (for low-yardage 3rd down situations) but also a very high "stuffed" rating (27% of the time, the RB got no yards or very few).