Cade Massey on Flipping Coins and the NFL Draft

Readers of this site will recall the name Case Massey. Along with fellow noted economist Richard Thaler, he co-authored the Massey-Thaler draft study titled The Loser's Curse. The paper found that, under the previous CBA, "surplus" draft value peaked with picks in the late first round and early second round. Surplus value was defined as the expected performance value above which a team could expect by spending an equivalent amount on a veteran free agent.

Massey has continued research into the draft. His presentation at the 2012 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference outlines his recent findings. (I recommend using IE to view the presentation. Chrome didn't play nice with the video.) The slides from the brief can be viewed here.

If I understand things correctly, Massey has found that:

Attention All Offensive Coordinators

Fourth down and short in the middle of the field does not mean you need to run a goal line play with the jumbo package. The average play in the NFL gets 5 yards. What's the completion percentage for short passes in this league, like 75%?

Line up and just run a standard play. Use play action. Throw an intermediate or deep pattern once or twice a season to keep defenses honest. How about a bubble screen if the corners don't press. And if they do, let them get burned.

Do not telegraph your intent to plunge for the line of gain. That only makes the defense's job easy. Spread out and force the defense to defend the entire field and your success rates will improve. Punish the defense for crowding the line of scrimmage. Think of fourth and short as an opportunity to know exactly what the defense is going to do and take advantage of it.

On the goal line, it's different. There is very little of the field to defend, and yards gained beyond the goal line are irrelevant. Jumbo packages and plunges make a lot more sense.

Analytics and the Ludic Fallacy

Analytics have become a major part of political campaigns. Candidates now employ a large number of analysts who find every point of leverage possible. They target potential voters in ever narrowing slices, matching messages containing certain styles and emphasis with particular demographic audiences.

One of the most visible applications of analytics in this year’s election is the FiveThirtyEight blog, created by Nate Silver. For those who may not be familiar with Nate, he is a noted baseball sabermetrician best known for creating the PECOTA prediction model. His election forecast has favored Obama more heavily than most others throughout the election season, and he has been the target of criticism recently.

In defending his approach, Nate and others have explained his probabilistic reasoning with examples from football. The 90% or so chance Nate gives Obama to win the Electoral College is, for some reason, put in football terms…Romney is down by 3 with 2 minutes to play…or Romney is down 7 with 5 minutes to play…or something along those lines. (I think that's ironic given that even football experts don't seem have a good grasp of situational probabilities.)

I disagree with those analogies, but not because I have any better reason to think that either candidate will win. I think the situation is more like this: Romney is down by a very small number of points with 1 minute to play, and we don’t know who has the ball or where the line of scrimmage is. Or maybe it’s more like this: Romney is down by a point or two and has just snapped a long field goal attempt, and no one has a very good idea which way the wind is blowing. If it was blowing just like it was last game, the kick will almost certainly come up short. But if the wind is blowing more like it did two games ago, he’ll probably make the kick and win.

The Extra Point Must Go

This week's article at the Post asks What's the point of the extra point?

 The extra point is something left over from gridiron football’s evolution from rugby. Originally, the ‘touchdown’ in rugby was less important than the ensuing free kick, and the points given for the touchdown and the ‘point after try’ varied during football’s early history. Today’s extra point is a vestige of football’s rugby roots. It’s football’s appendix–inconsequential, its original purpose uncertain...and safe to remove.

Love?

[Caution: Commentary below. No objective stats to be found in this post.]

It's the Christmas season, so it's a fitting time to ponder the concept of love. I've been taught a lot about love this season, mostly by people such as Chris Berman, Steve Mariucci, and Jon Gruden. According to them, Brett Favre plays football for the love of the sport. He loves the game so much, he's willing to go out there and risk severe injury, just so that we can enjoy watching him perform.

Brett Favre himself tells us how much he loves the game. His official personal website is titled For Love of the Game. And in his press conferences, he routinely and openly ponders how much left he has to give. Vikings fans aren't quite sure what he's been giving them, and I'm sure many of his teammates are now wondering what he has left them with.

We're told Brett Favre loves football, but what does that mean? What kind of love is that exactly? Love as in I love my kids? My dog? Pizza? Guacamole? English is a strange language when it comes to the word love. We use the term for so many things, from our desire for some McDonald's french fries right now to our favorite TV show to our undying selfless sacrifice, joy, and pride in our children.

Is The NFL Better Off Without A Team In LA?

Los Angeles has been without a football team since 1995 when the Rams moved to St. Louis and the Raiders returned to Oakland. As the nation’s second largest metropolitan area, it seems odd that the NFL wouldn’t have a single team call LA its home. Talk of finding a team for LA, either by expansion or by relocation, has been growing while the civic leaders clear the path for a possible new stadium.

It may be that the NFL would be foolish not to take advantage of such a large market, but perhaps the current 32 teams are better off leaving LA wanting for a team.

Player Salaries and Economic Rent

A couple months ago, I wrote about rookie salaries--whether or not they're "too high," and how the NFL's next labor agreement is certain to reduce them. With all the recent attention on NBA free agents, some are wondering why a backup point guard on the Orlando Magic is paid more money than NFL superstar Tom Brady. The issue of player salaries is an emotional one because it touches on our human instincts for fairness.

First, let's look at some facts. From USAToday's salary databases, here are the 2009 salaries for the three major professional sports leagues, plus something I'm told is called "hockey."

Steven Pinker vs. Malcolm Gladwell and Drafting QBs

Last season you might recall a dust-up between Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker and popular science author Malcolm Gladwell over whether teams really have any ability to predict which college QBs will pan out into good pros. You might be wondering what the heck a psychologist and a pop-science author have to do with NFL football.

In his book What the Dog Saw, Gladwell wrote about how hard it is for school administrators to discriminate the better teacher candidates from the lesser candidates. Gladwell used the NFL draft to illustrate how difficult it is for anyone to predict human performance, even in a sport where there is ample performance metrics and every step, throw, and catch is videotaped from 12 different angles. Gladwell was referring to what was reported by economists Dave Berri and Rob Simmons as a "very weak" correlation between draft order and per-play performance by QBs.

In an exchange of letters following Pinker's critical review of What the Dog Saw, Pinker took issue with Gladwell's claim that there was "no connection" between when a QB is taken in the draft and his per-play performance. Pinker wrote that this is "simply not the case."

As has been pointed previously, the problem with the weak correlation cited by Gladwell is that it excludes players who are not judged good enough by coaches during their development to warrant much if any playing time. At its core, the NFL draft is a process of selection, and we should expect  selection bias will taint most attempts at analysis. Gladwell looked at the draft process and (correctly) said:

"Coaches and GMs turn out to be good decision-makers when it comes to drafting quarterbacks when you consider the fact that the quarterbacks who never played aren’t any good. And how do we know that the quarterbacks who never play aren’t any good? Because coaches and GMs are good decision-makers!”

But Gladwell's argument cuts both ways. The only way to see that coaches and GMs aren't any good at drafting QBs is to assume they're no good at choosing which QB on their roster to play in games!

In this post I'll attempt to settle the question of whether NFL scouts really have any ability to identify the better QBs. Do the QBs picked higher in the draft turn out to be better performers on a per-play basis? Is Pinker correct that they do, or is Gladwell correct that they do not?

JaMarcus Russell: Concorde of the NFL

With Jamarcus Russel’s recent benching, there’s been a lot of talk about when it’s time for a team to cut its losses on a failed quarterback. I don’t have hard numbers at my fingertips, but I’d be fairly certain that if a QB isn’t playing above average football or there hasn’t been steady improvement, by the end of his second year, it’s time to move on. [Edit: Here's a good look at that very question at PFR.] There’s no question teams tend to stick with struggling QBs well beyond their expiration date, even when better alternatives exist. The real question is, why?

Let’s say you’re an out-of-town Bills fan, and before the season began you were understandably optimistic about the team’s prospects. You bought prime tickets to the January 3rd game hosting the Colts, including parking and a hotel room. Altogether the bill comes to $400. In August, this feels like a great deal.

As the season wears on, it becomes clear the Bills aren’t contenders. The coach is fired, and the upcoming Colts game is not looking promising, as the Colts appear likely be playing for home field advantage in the playoffs. Everything points toward a humiliating blowout. What’s worse, as the game approaches the weather isn’t looking good. Bills fans are always the hardy type, but the foercast is beyond bad—snow, wind, freezing rain, and bitter cold. You’re not exactly excited about the prospect of going to the game.