Today I'm beginning a weekly contribution at the Washington Post's Redskins Insider site. Well, it will be weekly as long as the commenters don't have their way. (There's a little "Report Abuse" link next to each comment, and I think I might have to report almost every one. Maybe readers were expecting another riveting Albert-Haynesworth-is-lazy post.) My contributions will be primarily Redskins-specific, but will draw upon the general concepts in the Advanced NFL Stats toolbox.
The inaugural post is a back-of-the-envelope calculation about how many wins McNabb can bring with his expected passing efficiency and turnover rates. Of course, there's more to a passing game than just a QB, but this gives Redskins fans an idea of the range of potential improvement.
My thanks to Lindsay and Mitch at the Post for the opportunity. Looking forward to a fun season.
Washington Post: McNabb's Potential Impact in DC
The Weekly League: Notes and Ideas for Week One
Five notes before we begin:
1. Thank you times a thousand to Brian Burke. His site is crazy good. It's my ambition not to destroy it.
2. Below are previews of two upcoming games: Thursday night's between Minnesota and New Orleans and the Monday game between San Diego and Kansas City. These previews aren't intended to be exhaustive, by any means. (In fact, the attentive reader will notice that there are only, like, 10 words dedicated to the Chiefs.) Rather, the intent is to construct a lens through which to watch these games -- hopefully something that your local paper isn't gonna provide. I discuss this more fully in the introduction thing near the end.
3. Oh yeah, there's an introduction thing ("Introduction-as-Epilogue") near the end of this document. It explores more fully the theoretical underpinnings to this document. If it makes you throw up, I apologize.
Site News: Welcome Carson Cistulli
On other sites and message boards I often see Advanced NFL Stats referred to as “the Fangraphs of football.” That’s a pretty high compliment, and although I wouldn’t go nearly that far, I’ll certainly take it. There are a lot of similarities, and they were mostly accidental, at least at first. Both sites feature sound statistical analysis, and both feature live win probability graphs for their respective sports. After my own WP graph feature gained a following, I looked at Fangraphs for inspiration for how to further build a respectable sports analysis site. Gradually, Advanced NFL Stats became Fangraphs’ creepy stalker Jennifer Jason Leigh character from the movie Single White Female, and now the transformation is complete.
Carson Cistulli, a regular contributor at Fangraphs, has agreed to come on board to provide us with his brand of analysis, a slightly more entertaining look at football stats than what I can normally provide. He’s planning to start off doing some game previews, but may do some other things down the road.
Aside from his regular gig at Fangraphs, Carson is a writing instructor (maybe he can help me), a contributor at RotoWire, and a real-life poet. Yes poet. (Warning. Click at your own risk.)
So please welcome Carson, and you can look forward to his first post shortly.
Risk Taking In The NFL
Judy Battista, the New York Times national NFL correspondent, just did an article titled Coaches Take More Risks, but Perhaps Not Enough. I helped do some of the analysis for the piece. David Romer is also interviewed.
Roundup 9/4/10
In basketball, don't call a timeout at the end of close games. You'll be more likely to draw a foul and win.
A salary cap also needs a salary floor.
The historical distribution of talent in the NFL.
A neuroscientist's struggle to understand regression to the mean.
The Sports Reference sites, including PFR, was named among Time's 50 best websites. Congrats, guys.
Tony Romo is not a mirage.
Advanced Public School Stats. What's next, Fantasy Teachers leagues? ...With his first round pick, Brian Burke selects Jaime Escalante, math teacher, Garfield High School... Stand and Deliver-great flick by the way. Escalante passed away earlier this year.
Navy 4th Down Strategy
Navy plays a triple option offense, a somewhat rare scheme even in college these days. The triple option allows Navy to compete against much bigger and faster opponents using discipline and execution as their weapons. They tend to be at or near the top of all Division I (FBS) schools in running every year, partly because they rarely pass and partly because they run the option so well.
Navy has enjoyed tremendous success in recent years, especially for a school that offers its recruits a rigorous and austere lifestyle, an extremely challenging curriculum, and virtually no chance of an NFL career. Last year they won 10 games, including their second win over Notre Dame in three years and a 35-13 drubbing of Missouri in the Texas Bowl. It was their seventh consecutive winning season and seventh consecutive bowl appearance. QB Ricky Dobbs broke Tim Tebow's record for rushing TDs by a QB last season. As my favorite Navy blog put it, archrival Army looked at their two-touchdown loss to the Midshipmen last year as a cause for optimism.
One thing about option football is that there is always a very good chance of a gain of at least a few yards. There aren't sacks or incomplete pass attempts. Navy always seems to be able to gain at least 2 or 3 yards when they need to, even when the defense knows exactly what is coming.
Passing = Winning
Advanced NFL Stats owes its start to an old water cooler debate: What's more important, offense or defense? Running or passing? A few years ago, I still had some statistical software left over from grad school loaded on my laptop, so I thought, "Hey, maybe these are questions that can be definitively answered." I tried to answer those questions with one of my original posts three years ago, What Makes Teams Win. When I read my older stuff, I sometimes want to cringe, but not with that one. It holds up very well, and it's well worth revisiting for newer readers, this time with more data. In this post, I'll do just that, focusing on the relative importance of running and passing.
When I was little, my dad taught me the inanity of the 'running leads to winning' fallacy. We'd watch a game on Sunday, and invariably we'd hear the announcers talk about how a team always wins when their star RB got at least 25 carries or so. They'd wax poetic about the noble nature of pure, old-fashioned, run-it-up-the-gut football. My dad would say, "Yeah, by that logic, teams should start kneeling in the first quarter. Kneeling leads to winning, right?"
A Fantasy League Minus The Randomness?
Carson Cistulli, contributor-extraordinaire at my favorite baseball site Fangraphs, wrote me to ask an interesting question. He wanted to know how someone would set up a fantasy football league using commonly available scoring options that would remove most of the luck and leave mostly the results of skill. Personally I think the randomness of sports, including fantasy sports, is part of what makes them so compelling. But draining a lot of the randomness from a fantasy league would be an interesting experiment. Here's what I suggested:
"First, turnovers are extremely random. The correlate weakly from week to week and even less from season to season. Especially on the defensive side of the ball. I would exclude turnovers from your scoring (including TDs directly occurring on turnover plays).