Since the dawn of football, the
offensive line has been the most underappreciated unit on a football
field. In very bizarre fashion, the better the O line is, the more ink
is offered to the surrounding “skill” positions that benefit from that
group’s successes. Average football fans probably remember Emmitt
Smith’s touchdowns and his many 100-yard games during his heyday.
But unless you were an avid Cowboy fan or a law enforcement officer
between Dallas and New Orleans in the 90’s, you will likely struggle to
name even two of the men who did such a magnificent job blocking for
Smith.
Once a lineman gets drafted into the
NFL, we usually only hear about him when he: 1) commits an illegal
procedure penalty; 2) commits a holding penalty; or 3) is selected to
the Pro Bowl.
Fantasy football has only worsened
the situation due to the intense focus we put on the skill players
(regardless of how skilled they actually are): linemen may be unknown,
but you know the name of the #3 WR on an NFL team if only because he
keeps vulturing receptions from your #1 WR.
Dearth of Information
While we are afforded all sorts of
statistics for QBs, RBs, WRs and defensive players, valuable statistics
on O linemen are almost non-existent—a fact that doesn’t prevent fantasy
websites and magazines from dressing up this dearth of information into
two or three paragraphs of fluff and editing.
No one in their right mind would
argue that O linemen are unimportant. We just don’t understand them,
and most of us don’t have a clue as to how to scout them—either
individually or as a unit.
In similar fashion, no one could
reasonably argue that the cylinders powering a car’s engine are
unimportant. And while I don’t know much about how cylinders work, I do
have myriad resources at my disposal: magazines, websites and
associations. The auto industry is over 100 years old, and there are
trillions of dollars floating in and out of it. There are millions of
people that dedicate their professional lives to understanding every
aspect of cars—even those hard-to-understand cylinders.
This may come as a shock to many of
you, but the mostly qualitative professional insight you might garner
from fantasy football experts is far, far worse than the mostly
quantitative insight you will gain from auto industry technocrats. The
majority of fantasy writers (take the Davis brothers for example)
pontificating about what happens on Sundays are often intoxicated on
that day of the week and/or have other jobs to focus on during the
week. The resources available to fantasy readers are created as labors
of love—long on the love and short on the labor.
There is nothing wrong with any of
that. We just need to recognize it for what it is.
Compared to the auto industry,
fantasy football is a newborn, with conventions just now taking root.
Hopefully, we here at FFExperts.com
will be able to contribute a convention that is useful and simple.
Creating a Rating System
There have been many hours invested
by this Davis duo trying to figure out a system that we could introduce
to better assess O lines. The challenges are mind-boggling. For an
individual player, you can look at collegiate experience, the round in
which he was drafted, NFL experience, height and weight, sacks allowed,
Pro Bowls, previous and current coaches, seasons played within various
offensive schemes, etc. As units, you can look at sacks allowed,
rushing yards per game, passing yards per game, rushing yards per second
half, games played together as a unit, seasons played together within
various offensive schemes under various offensive coaches, etc.
Forget that, dude. Moving on.
Creating a Simple Rating System
There are certain bits of
information that are easy to obtain and assimilate—and function more
objectively than subjectively:
Individual Linemen
But wait. Isn’t a start a green
light from a coach who makes a subjective decision that player X is
better than player Y? Aren’t Pro Bowl appearances often tied more to
hype than they are to talent? These objections carry some weight, but
let’s think them through.
First, while fans like us may know
very little about scouting O linemen, their coaches certainly know a lot
more. Unlike barely-compensated-and-possibly-intoxicated fantasy
writers on Sunday, offensive line coaches in the NFL are paid very well
to be on top of their games come kickoff. Their opinion on who starts
is similar in many ways to a magazine like Car and Driver giving
a passing grade to a vehicle that successfully completes an important
“handling test.” A start in the NFL means something.
Second, remember how players are
selected to the Pro Bowl: coaches, players and fans all cast their
votes, each group carrying the same weight. While fans can go crazy
voting for the star skill positions on their favorite teams, linemen
historically get the fewest number of fan votes—which makes their
selection much more meaningful because the most qualified professionals
are the ones doing the choosing. Coaches and players are certainly the
most knowledgeable on this subject of the best linemen, and they
are—essentially—the ones making the decisions. Getting selected to the
Pro Bowl as an offensive lineman is like earning the highest crash test
rating on a car from Consumer Reports.
Third—and perhaps most important—is
the very critical continuity aspect of this group of five guys working
together. Unlike many of the very complicated categories we gave up on
above, this information is relatively easy to find. All one has to do
is go to NFL.com and look up the O line players by name to see how many
games they have started at their most recent club.
Significance of Continuity
While neither Davis brother has ever
played a single football down outside of high school, we do come from
impressive lineage. Our father was an All America O lineman in college,
and he coached offensive linemen for years at the high school and
collegiate levels. In fact, both Joe Gibbs and Don Shula, in the early
1980’s, sent their respective offensive line coaches to visit with our
father and deliver, essentially, the same message: “You have THE best
coached offensive line in college football.” We realize that with such
an impressive story about our father’s professional skills, you’re
wondering what happened to us to turn us into Sunday drunkards and
fantasy prognosticators. Well, just you wait and see: We’re going to
win the lottery!
We asked Dad about the importance of
continuity, and he had some interesting comments.
“If I were an offensive line coach
in the NFL, and you gave me the option of taking a group of
average-to-above average guys who have played together for the past few
years, or of taking five of the best Pro Bowlers from the previous year
who barely know each other, there is no question what I’d do. I’d
always take the guys who have worked together. There is nothing more
intricate in football than offensive line play. You can put a group of
linemen together, and they can be decent within five or six weeks. But,
generally speaking, to really mature as a group—especially in the
NFL—they need a year or more.”
That is powerful.
With that, we now unveil the
Continuity Quotient for Offensive Lines. Its simplicity may overwhelm
you. We take the last 20 regular season games for a particular NFL
team, and we see how many of those games the five starting O linemen
have actually started.
We picked 20 regular season games
because that time frame represents just over one year, and it will make
the math very easy: Five linemen multiplied by 20 games is 100 possible
starts. A quotient of 100 means that these five guys have started the
past 20 games together. If one of the guys is brand new, then the best
continuity quotient this group could possibly get would be an 80.
The quotient is as simple as that.
Keep Your Expectations Low
If a guy is being set up on a blind
date by some friends, and the matchmakers only tell him the girl’s chest
size, that leaves a lot to be desired. Sure, it can be an interesting
piece of information, but you really want to know a whole lot more about
what you are getting into.
In similar fashion, we do not posit
this quotient as anything more than one of many aspects that will help
determine the relative strength of an offensive line. There are plenty
of other things that need be studied and valued.
This quotient in no way implies that
one can use a factor of it and multiply a RB’s previous season’s
production to arrive at an estimate for this year. Not even close.
What we hope it does is
offer—finally—something new, simple and helpful about assessing
offensive lines.
Continuity Quotient Plus
Still keeping things simple, but
going three small steps forward, we will offer some other helpful
information with this quotient. In its most simple form (as above), we
could simply give a number, such as 78, to express the CQ.
However, it is very easy (and even
more helpful) to express the numbers by position. Here is an example:
78
20 18 20
20 0
The quotient is on top, but below
are the positions showing how the starts were distributed to give us the
CQ (Left Tackle 20+Left Guard 18+Center 20+Right Guard 20+Left Tackle
0=78/100). This format gives you a better visual of how that quotient
was obtained. Quite significantly, if your quarterback plays for this
team and he’s right-handed, great news: his blind side represents a
very high proportion of that quotient.
We’ll even go a couple of steps
further. In our example, the right tackle is the newcomer to this
group. Maybe he’s a stud rookie, or maybe he’s an experienced vet, we
can’t tell from the above. Remember to keep your expectations low:
we’ll never promise a blissful marriage or suggest that you run in fear
based on the CQ+. Also remember that we are shying away from
qualitative analysis. But as noted above, we do view NFL starts and Pro
Bowls played-in as reasonably objective criteria, so we can simply offer
that information below to paint a better picture. And we can easily
supply that information—not just for any one position, but for them
all:
78
20 18 20 20 0
62 49 24
65 30
3 0 1
0 1
This data affords us some very
useful information that is fairly easy to obtain. The top two rows are
the same as above. The third row shows how many NFL starts that player
has logged. The bottom row shows how many trips to the Pro Bowl that
player has made. In this example, we now see the left tackle as a real
stud (almost four seasons of starts and three trips to Hawaii), while
the new guy has almost two full seasons of starts with one Pro Bowl
under his belt.
The Plan
We’d like to make some bold
predictions about how useful the CQ+ will be for years to come.
Unfortunately, we just don’t know what to expect.
Beginning next week, we’ll offer
periodic case studies of teams, with special emphasis on the CQ+.
Next week, we’ll look at the
currently undefeated Dallas Cowboys. The week after that we’ll look at
the currently undefeated New England Patriots.
These two teams fascinate us because
of how similar they are.
