Football Frontier

Much has been made of the sudden influx of new starting quarterbacks in the NFL. In week 3, unfamiliar names of Gardner Minshew, Jacoby Brissett, Luke Falk, Kyle Allen, Teddy Bridgewater and Mason Rudoph headlined depth charts rather than the quarterbacks who were expected to start this season.

Andrew Luck’s sudden retirement, injuries to Drew Brees, Ben Roethlisberger and Cam Newton, Sam Darnold’s bout with mononucleosis – is this a sign of crisis?

I came up with a simple metric to take a look at this situation, since detailed injury data is very hard to find going back in time. I took the draft position of a team’s starting quarterback in every game and divided it by the number of games played in a season. For undrafted quarterbacks, I used the number 275 as an estimate. Just to use something – there’s no analysis behind the number.

I started the analysis with 1994, the first year of the salary cap.

What this graph shows, first and foremost, is that drafting a franchise quarterback became a big priority in the first decade of the new century. Going into this season, 13 of the 32 teams planned to start a quarterback who was drafted in the top four of the first round (Darnold is sick now and Eli Manning lost his job to this year’s sixth overall pick). Twenty teams planned to use a first-rounder. Only one team (and this may well change after last night’s performance), planned to start an undrafted quarterback.

This season’s average draft position of 55.0 is representative of the last eight seasons. But the question remains whether jump from 63.4 to 51.5 from 2017 to 2018 was an indication that the trend is continuing? Or did the shift effectively end around 2010 and this is just the new normal?

For now, I don’t think there’s a crisis. NFL coaches have complained about the lack of NFL quality quarterbacks for as long as I’ve been watching the game. Some of the new ones impress, some don’t. There have been highly drafted quarterback busts seemingly since the beginning of time itself.

High-profile injuries always seem to arrive in bunches (again, no analysis behind the comment). With Hall of Fame names like Roethlisberger and Brees going down in a space of hours and a third (I could write volumes on his candidacy, pro or con) losing his starting job a week later, there’s a lot of attention on young quarterbacks right now.

The Miami Dolphins have named their starting quarterback for the 2019 opener – the new face of the franchise – and it’s… Ryan Fitzpatrick.

The 36-year-old, drafted 250th overall in 2005 by St. Louis (in a distant past when St. Louis had an NFL franchise) has started games with seven different teams. He has been on the winning end with six different teams – Cincinnati, Buffalo, Tennessee, Houston, the Jets and Tampa Bay. He was 0-3 with the team that drafted him.

Generally, quarterbacks who lose more than they win aren’t in the league very long. But a few of them bounce around a lot, earning backup role and sometimes capturing a bit of Fitzmagic. Fitzpatrick’s career record as a starter is 50-75-1. He’s also known for having scored 48 on the 50-question Wonderlic test given at the NFL Scouting Combine. The test rewards speed and ability to assess problems and make calculations. That might make him an ideal candidate for gaining competency with a complex game plan on short notice. Once you’re on a roster, you never know.

But his record as a starter is unusual. From 1974-2018, ten different quarterbacks were -25 or worse and 29 were +25 or better.

Another member of that group is Josh McCown, who has also started (and won) with six different teams and is now suiting up with his ninth different franchise. He was coaxed out of retirement at age 40 when the Eagles lost their backups to injury. McCown probably won’t be starting with Carson Wentz still the franchise quarterback and Cody Kessler likely able to play soon. McCown’s career record is 23-53.

As far as I can tell, no quarterback has ever won games with seven different teams. That probably changes soon.

Andrew Luck shocked the NFL world by retiring yesterday. In 15 days, the Indianapolis Colts will begin the 2019 season. In 19 days, Luck will reach the age of 30.

Luck has had more than his share of injuries, most notably missing the entire 2017 season after shoulder surgery. Much has been written about this injury, suffered two years earlier. Was it mismanaged? Luck certainly played through pain, and there are legitimate questions as to whether the Colts handled this responsibly. Faced with another painful injury, this time to his lower leg, and perhaps realizing that surgery and another rehabilitation was likely, Luck chose retirement.

Much has been written about the Indianapolis fans and their reaction to the announcement, made late in yesterday’s exhibition game. In today’s era of interpretive (a.k.a. lazy) journalism, where a journalist reacts and molds rather than reports, Indianapolis fans “savagely” booed Luck off of the field. I wonder if this was the case. Luck is/was a franchise quarterback. Franchise quarterbacks seemingly live forever. They don’t, on the eve of a new season at the age of 29, suddenly walk off into the sunset. If I were in the crowd, I’d probably think it was an elaborate prank, and not a funny one at all. The trajectory of the Colts has changed, and true fans, looking forward to a brand new season, suddenly face the unknown. I’d boo the messenger, assuming, maybe hoping as much as assuming, that this wasn’t happening. Instead, the media, desperate for relevance they’ve long since discarded, chooses to try and make a story out of the reaction itself.

The real story is in what led to Luck’s decision in the first place. It’s not a story that can be told in a sound byte or a hot take. It may never be told properly.

Has this happened before? Surely there’s a similar story from the past. I came up with Jake Plummer immediately. Plummer, a free spirit and a remarkably talented quarterback, made news in 2007 when, at the age of 32, healthy, he chose retirement over playing for Tampa Bay after a trade. But that doesn’t hold up. Plummer said he would retire after losing his starting job in Denver the previous season. The Buccaneers traded for him anyway. He wasn’t in training camp.

Overwhelmingly, quarterbacks play until they’re told they will no longer receive playing time. Some don’t want to retire holding a clipboard, some don’t mind. Searching my spreadsheets of quarterback data, I couldn’t find a situation similar to Luck’s. Bert Jones had a similar career trajectory, but a neck injury forced his retirement, under his doctor’s orders, in the spring following missing most of his tenth season. Neil Lomax? Tried to come back for a year from a severely arthritic hip. The Cardinals had plenty of warning, and brought in a free agent replacement a full year before Lomax finally retired. Maybe I’m missing someone, but I don’t think I am. This is the biggest story in the NFL in a long time.

The best comparison I could find was the mysterious and sudden retirement of Barry Sanders as training camp began in 1999. But Sanders played running back and ten seasons accumulating more than 15,000 rushing yards is not only a full career, but a no-thought-about-it Hall of Fame career. Players at most positions age much faster than quarterbacks. The Sanders story is odd, but only because he chose not to tell his coach or announce his retirement a couple of months earlier.

We’re in new territory here. On its surface, the unwillingness to go through another cycle of surgery, rehab, missing games, pain… it’s understandable. But successful quarterbacks Luck’s age have always done it anyway. Today’s quarterbacks are more protected by the rules and surgical techniques are more advanced than they were when Jones was young and we have the recent and notable example of 42-year-old Tom Brady, who seemingly wants to play forever. Brady outlasted the other true legend of his generation, and has now outlasted his first-round, first-pick successor as well.

It’s easy to speculate as to why Luck chose to retire rather than go through the injury recovery cycle. Plenty of hot takes to be had here. Too much money in today’s game? Millennials are spoiled? He never had what it takes? The victim of incessant Twitter trolls? These days, we don’t even have to listen to the guy to think we have all the answers.

But I don’t have an answer here. Quarterbacks are obsessive, crazy people with great leadership skills. They say the most difficult skill in sports is learning to hit a curve ball. I doubt it. It’s becoming a franchise NFL quarterback. Making good decisions within two seconds 95% of the time. Having an arm that would make most Major League pitchers jealous. Digesting playbooks more complicated than the entire works of Shakespeare. Tough enough to take hits from 300-pound linemen, over and over, without flinching. An NFL quarterback has proven himself beyond normal human benchmarks. It has to be part of their DNA.

The older I get, the more I understand that not only is there always more to learn but that I’m comfortable not knowing all the answers, reinventing and challenging my beliefs. Luck’s decision requires some adjustment. Maybe he comes back next year, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe the game of football has fundamentally changed in the last few years, and maybe it hasn’t. Listen and learn.

In the interest of providing accurate headlines and in my personal dislike of click-bait, I’m providing an update that tells you perhaps everything you want to hear except what you really want to hear.

A couple of years ago, I joined a partnership with OOTP. This was for the specific purpose of publishing a football game. OOTP is the publisher, and is providing a publishing platform, a GUI platform and GUI programming, custom graphics, marketing and dozens of other valuable insights and functions that are well beyond the scope of a solo developer. On my end, I’m providing the FOF8 base, adapting it to this new GUI, and adding a host of new FOF9 functions.

We’re calling the new project Front Office Football 9. We’re all fairly certain it will have that name upon release. The goal was to have this finished last fall. You might have noticed, however, that there is no new product on the market. That’s why I spent a couple of months last fall adding some features to FOF8 that I was saving for FOF9 – primarily with game planning. I also provided a 2018 player file. All this is work valuable to the FOF9 effort, but our delay meant that it was appropriate to spend extra time putting it into FOF8 as well.

The biggest question you have right now is, I’m sure, whether OOTP still plans to put out FOF9. That answer is a definite yes. We’re still making progress and we’re still expending resources.

The second-biggest question you have right now is, “well, then when the #^$%& are you releasing it?” I just don’t have that answer. None of us do. We would all like to get it out this fall, but we’re not in a position right now to make that determination.

A common theme on the OOTP board these days is discussing and speculating about my own feelings about publicity and marketing. I am the lead developer, after all, and I haven’t said much about the game. Why is that?

Going back to 2001 and the release of The College Years (still, to date, by far my most successful game), I’ve tried very hard to avoid talking a lot about my work. Before 2001, I loved the attention. I knew most of the major reviewers out there and it was fun to talk about my work. I was a reviewer for Computer Gaming World before I started Solecismic Software. That gave me a huge advantage in starting out because I knew who to talk to and we all had a lot in common. That works great when you keep to a specific schedule. I was lucky in that I had a good sense how long everything would take and the market was different back then.

However, soon after I started work on TCY and soon after I hyped it a bit with reviewers, EA Sports wanted more from me with FOF. Wonderful. That was my ticket to “making it big” in this business. I was all-in. And for those of you who know me personally, the most profound disappointment in my career was when a group of lawyers for the NFL and a group of lawyers for AOL could not settle a very simple question for EA that would have allowed us to put FOF3 on the Madden CD, for free, giving people an interface for joining a managed FOF multi-player world. Tiberon (the Madden development group) was terrific. Holding that space for us until they just about had to stamp the gold images. But the lawyers were not making progress and after we missed that window, EA lost interest in FOF. No more “making it big.”

Meanwhile, I was a year behind with TCY and customers were frustrated. The game was a lot bigger than FOF2, and it had a few bugs to work out on release. All was fine within a month, but I was very well aware that the hype had caused significant harm and the initial reviews of TCY suffered from it specifically. For future FOF releases, I adopted a “no-hype” policy. Then, one year, for reasons having nothing to do with the game or the community, I decided to hold back a release announcement until the day before the actual release.

Frankly, I thought I was being quite obnoxious with that. But people seemed to find it refreshing back then, so I decided to let it become part of my community ethos, so to speak. Just shut up and let the work speak for itself. I think that approach works well for solo development. Sure, there’s less excitement during the release, but word of mouth spreads and you end up with more sales in the long run than you would have with the alternate approach.

Am I taking this approach with FOF9, then? No. Not at all. I’m silent about development because I’m part of a bigger whole today. OOTP has professional marketing in place and several teams to help with the release process. It’s not my place to speak for them and set this process in motion. And they will set this process in motion once we have a strong idea about when we will release FOF9.

Naturally, that brings up a lot of questions. Where are we in development? Why are we delayed? Why can’t we at least show screen shots? What new features will be in place when the game is released? I can only answer some of these questions, and the rest, as I am part of a team now, will be handled by OOTP in the proper time frame.

Where are we in development? OOTP has provided a nice new framework for the game. I have learned this framework, and ported the AI and FOF8 engine to a new set of structures that will support it long into the future. In doing so, I focused on elements that will make expansion easier – FOF9 may not support that many different-sized leagues, but it will support a few – and new formats will be easier to add. That was a huge issue for me with my solo framework because of decisions I made maybe ten years ago to save disk space. I took the time to evaluate the new design and remove those limitations when designing the port itself. I’ve also added a few new bells and whistles here and there (providing details about that is part of the pre-release process). We have yet to implement some of the key “show-off” screens, like the in-game module and the piece I’ve designed to replace Solevision. We aren’t showing screen shots because that’s more for the build-up process and because the graphics touches come late in development.

Why are we delayed? Andreas recently posted on the OOTP forum that OOTP has a lot on its plate right now. Those OOTP improvements took precedence over the FOF development. And I have to shoulder some blame, too. There’s more I could be doing related to the GUI and just getting elements on to pages. But I’ve had some personal issues to take care of recently, and my wife and I are completing a move to Canton, Ohio (of all places – we’re just six minutes from the HOF now). An older home that needs some TLC, and we just moved to Ohio.

The positive side is that the delay means I’ve been able to get more, what should we call it… FOF10 function… into FOF9 than we had originally planned. More league formats, more new ideas on how to implement functions, little AI things. FOF9 was originally going to be FOF8 with a new coat of paint. We’re already beyond that.

For me, and for the good people at OOTP, this is a calling rather than just a job. We’re in it for the right reasons. If anything changes with development or we commit to a release schedule, we’ll tell everyone right away. Until then, it’s probably best to keep relatively quiet. When it’s time to set this in motion, there will be plenty of time for a proper marketing plan and we’ll be available to answer as many questions as we can.

Thanks for your patience.

Ryan Fitzpatrick is a trivia hunter’s dream in many ways, a veritable Walter Mitty in shoulder pads and cleats. A Harvard graduate who seemed unlikely ever to see the field in the NFL, the Rams grabbed him with the 250th pick in the 2005 NFL draft.

For reference, Tom Brady, the poster child for unheralded-to-all-time-great in professional sports, was selected 199th in 2000. An inspiration? Fitzpatrick’s oldest child is named Brady. Their careers, however, have been a bit divergent. Brady took over for injured franchise quarterback Drew Bledsoe in 2001. Since, he has led the Patriots to a 5-3 record in Super Bowls, winning the MVP of the title game a record four times. He has started 298 games for New England, including playoffs.

Fitzgerald did not stick with the Rams. He has been the starting quarterback with seven different teams. I don’t know if that’s a record. A brief search came up with clipboard aficionado J.T. O’Sullivan suiting up for ten different teams, but he only started games with one of them. This year, Fitzpatrick is in his second season as backup in Tampa Bay.

Because starter Jameis Winston was suspended, Fitzpatrick led off the season. He threw for 400 yards in the team’s first three games, which is apparently the first time any NFL quarterback has exceeded 400 in three straight games. In the fourth game, a blowout loss at Chicago, he suffered a quick hook and Winston returned. Only to struggle so much himself that Fitzpatrick relieved him in week 8 and has started the last two games. At 3-6, however, the Buccaneers are not playoff material.

There is apparent magic in the quarterback nicknamed “Fitzmagic.” His career record as a quarterback is 53-72, which is remarkable only that quarterbacks with sub-.500 records almost never reach 50 career starts, let alone 125. He’s in the same company as names synonymous with mediocre, like Steve DeBerg and Jim Everett. His 190/145 career TD/Int ratio is ugly for a 21st Century signal-caller. He has never thrown a pass in a playoff game.

The magic lives on, however. In press conferences these days, he looks like his inspiration is Conor McGregor rather than Brady. He performs a ritual “beard rub” with fellow long-beard and backup offensive lineman Evan Smith before each game. But don’t mistake the shtick for stupid. He apparently scored an all-time league quarterback high of 48-of-50 in the Wonderlic test given annually at the NFL Combine.

Sunday, at home against Washington, Fitzpatrick completed 29-of-41 passes for 406 yards, no touchdowns and two interceptions. The Buccaneers lost, 16-3. This was Fitzpatrick’s fourth 400-yard game this season (and fourth of his career). What’s remarkable about this result isn’t the loss, because
in the 316 instances in which a quarterback has thrown for 400 yards in the modern era (since 1974), they are an even 156-156-4.

It’s Tampa Bay’s grand total of 3 points that had me shaking my head. The average team with a quarterback throwing for 400 yards scores 32 points. But many of those games are shootouts with late comeback attempts, so the passing yards and points accumulate. I struggled to find any instance in the last 45 years where a quarterback threw for 400 and the team failed to reach the end zone.

Only three times in all those years has a team been held to less than 13 points and yet their quarterback threw for 400 yards. In all three of those games, the losing team did not score a touchdown. I’ll include part of the box score for the first instance, because the quarterback who did that in San Francisco’s 14-6 loss to Washington in week 11 of 1986 is fairly famous.

In the divisional playoffs after the 1988 season, Randall Cunningham threw for 407 yards in Philadelphia’s 20-12 loss at Chicago. And, now, in week 10 exactly 30 seasons later, here’s Fitzpatrick throwing for 406 as his team scored only 3.

Sometimes magic amazes for the wrong reason. That doesn’t change the legacy of a fascinating career.

In the second half of this pre-draft analysis, I’ll write about the “Combine Numbers” associated with wide receivers. As I noted yesterday, the bell cow of the Combine, the 40-yard dash, is random noise when it comes to predicting whether a receiver will be a success in the NFL.

Since some NFL athletes can run almost as fast as Olympic track stars, the score that relates most to track – the 40-yard dash – receives significant attention. However, the receiver with the fastest Combine 40 time in the period I studied, Jacoby Ford (4.22 seconds) in 2010, was selected in the fourth round by Oakland and played only four years in the NFL, accumulating 848 receiving yards. He showed some game-breaking return skills, but fumbled the ball too frequently. This is a decent, normal amount of production for a fourth-round wide receiver.

Darrius Heyward-Bey came in second at 4.25 seconds in 2009. He has stuck around for nine seasons. He accumulated 2,071 yards in his first four years, well under what the Raiders (again) would have hoped for from the seventh overall pick, and another 817 yards since. While he’s signed for just above the veteran minimum, I would not be surprised if he retires this off-season.

Up third is Jerome Mathis (4.26), drafted in the fourth round by Houston in 2005. Like Ford, he made an impact as a kick returner as a rookie, but had an issue with fumbling. He had 80 total receiving yards in a three-year career.

You get the picture. Some speedsters, like Mike Wallace, Julio Jones and Brandin Cooks, are very productive in the league. But just being able to run really, really fast is fairly meaningless on its own.

The other tests include a “bench press,” in which an athlete repeatedly lifts a 225-pound barbell until he feels he must stop. There’s a vertical leap from a standing position, a broad jump from a standing position, a 20-yard “shuttle run,” which measures the ability to accelerate and make turns quickly, a 60-yard version of the shuttle drill and a “three-cone” drill, which measures many of the same agility skills.

Players are also measured, with their height, hand size and arm length recorded within an eighth of an inch. They are also given an intelligence test, subjected to any of a number of medical examinations and (sometimes controversially these days) available for interviews from coaches whose goals are to surprise athletes with unusual questions.

Experts can make a lot of money by taking all this information and coming up with a formula for success. Unfortunately, no one has done that. Since statistical software these days is quite sophisticated, data miners can come up with a formula that fits a large number of past performers. But is that predictive? Even with my sample size of 444 drafted wide receivers, I suspect it’s limited.

A wide receiver needs many skills, and anyone who saw Jerry Rice play could tell you that his speed, while hardly close to the best on the field, was enough to get the job done. Rice reportedly ran a 4.59 in the 40-yard dash. He was drafted 16th overall in 1985. Larry Fitzgerald, a certain Hall-of-Famer, ran a 4.48 – same as A.J. Green, who is headed to Canton himself if he can maintain his production level a few more years.

What do they have in common that other receivers don’t? Fitzgerald was the third overall pick and Green was the fourth in their respective years. Scouts knew about them. Fitzgerald didn’t take part in most of the Combine events, so scouts likely didn’t have that type of comparative information down to the hundredths of seconds. Green did, and while his numbers were good, you can find better. What makes Green one of the best in his generation and Heyward-Bay, who had slightly better, but similar Combine numbers, disappointing?

I gave the 272 drafted players who ran most of the drills in the study a similarity score to Green’s. Strangely enough, one of the lowest scores came from Chad Johnson, who had an excellent career mostly with Cincinnati as well. But I look at his cone-drill time of 7.51 and his reputation as a bit of an eccentric (well, aren’t all good receivers a bit eccentric?) and I wonder if he simply didn’t feel like running the drill. That’s the worst time in that drill among wide receivers, and more indicative of a defensive lineman or tight end.

But some receivers had almost identical scores to Green’s, and some, like Michael Jenkins (2004) and Sammy Watkins (2014) went in the first round. And some, like Robert Herron (2014) and Pierre Garcon (2008) went in the sixth. Herron barely played and Garcon is one of the better 6th-round picks in recent years. Watkins was average for a number-four overall receiver pick and Jenkins was a bit of a disappointment for a late first-round pick.

There’s no magic in Green’s combination of results. In fact, the 100 receivers least similar to Green were a little bit better than the 100 receivers closest to Green. And the slightly smaller group of receivers between those groups averaged a tiny bit better than both groups. As for draft position, the top 100 averaged being picked 128th, the bottom 100 135th and the middle 71 126th.

Am I saying the Combine times don’t matter? Not even enough to be worth tracking? No. There are slight correlations between times and performance. Vertical leap seems to be the most important number, though it only correlates 15% with output. A receiver’s weight actually matters slightly more (18%).

The shuttle drill and 3-cone drill are difficult to use, because the top scouted players are far more likely to skip these drills. Why risk draft position on a poor performance (unless you’re Chad Johnson)?

I suspect that weight matters because it takes a certain amount of strength to deal with good bump-and-run coverage. And some of the low-round or undrafted receivers who have done wonders (going back to Bill Belichick’s penchant for finding Wes Welkers and Danny Amendolas) work out of the slot much of the time. If you want to find an exceptional athlete who was a little smaller but found enormous success out of the slot early in his career, Randall Cobb was picked by Green Bay at the end of the second round in 2011. More recently, the Chiefs have gotten a lot out of tiny Tyreek Hill, a fifth-rounder with elite speed, in many different roles.

That’s a lot to digest. What about a measure of simple competency? Take the 272 receivers with measurements in every category and look at those who scored in the top half in all of them. So that would mean someone who weighed more than 200 pounds, ran a 4.48 or better in the 40, a 4.20 or better in the shuttle, a 6.92 or better in the cone drill, leaped at least 36 inches and had a broad jump of at least 121 inches.

Who are these extraordinary people? The list is just 12 of the 272. Surely these are all players the scouts would agree are superstars in the making. Not so fast. There were two first-rounders (Heyward-Bey and Javon Walker, who ended up being slightly disappointing his first four years), four second-rounders – two who greatly exceeded expectations (Alshon Jeffery and Torrey Smith) and two who busted (Tyrone Calico and Chad Jackson). There was a fourth-round pick, Keenan Burton in 2008, who didn’t fare very well. In the fifth round, Roy Hall in 2007 had nine career receiving yards. The pair of sixth-rounders – Garcon and Jeff Webb (2006) were very solid picks. And the two seventh rounders, Marcus Maxwell in 2005 and Jeff Janis in 2014, were forgettable.

More recently, Kevin White (the seventh overall pick in 2015), fits this category and is looking like one of the bigger busts in recent history. DeVante Parker, also a first-rounder in 2015, has been OK. The only player to fit the bill last year was second-rounder Zay Jones, who hasn’t done much. And, notably, undrafted Tyrell Williams (2015) has been quite a find for the Chargers.

At any rate, the simple every-category competency measure is a poor fit for the data. Probably because smaller players are often more agile. Indeed, weight correlates 18% negatively with the shuttle drill and 23% negatively with the 40-yard dash. The broad jump is the only drill where weight seems to help a little.

So I made one last try – finding players who are in the top third by weight and top third in vertical leap. That’s 209 pounds and 37 inches. That gave me a set of 51 drafted receivers from 2001-14. What was their average performance? As a group, they outperformed their draft position by about 5%. Of the 15 first-rounders, eight significantly exceeded expectations and only three were very disappointing. This group also contains some breakout lower-round performers like Brandon Marshall, Josh Morgan, David Givens and Marques Colston. More recently, it identifies second-rounder Devin Funchess (2015), though there hasn’t been a first-rounder meeting the criteria the last three years.

I’m content to stop there. Being invited to the Combine means scouts think a player has a potential NFL career. That implies a minimum competency. This 209/37 test looks decent for identifying additional potential. And I think data mining the rest is only going to identify stupid coincidences in the remaining data set.

Who meets the criteria in the upcoming draft? D.J. Moore, Tre’Quan Smith, Dylan Cantrell, Allen Lazard, Jester Weah, Justin Watson and Reggie Bonnafon, among those with draftable grades. Of those players, Cantrell has unusually good scores in other categories, indicating solid athletic skills. His 4.59 40-yard dash, however, might concern teams and despite high vertical leap and broad jump scores, scouts say he is not an explosive athlete. He has a third-day draft grade. I’d be interested to see if he sneaks into the second round, though.

Just to wrap this up… if you play Front Office Football, you know the Combine plays a much different role in the game. Individual measurable skills correspond to specific potential ratings. This is obviously not realistic. But the alternative is to place more emphasis on the scouting abilities on your staff – with wider variety between teams. This would essentially render the Combine scores within FOF useless.

I think that makes for a less enjoyable game. You’d be drafting purely on scouted ratings and focusing on where your expectations differ from league-wide grades. At that point, it’s just guesswork with no skill at all. Or maybe I’d add something to indicate where your staff member has a particular insight. But if you played a hunch on your own with a Combine number, you’d be making a mistake.

I may change this whole system in the future, but for now, I think it’s a good idea to stick with a simulated Combine that means a lot more than the real-life version. Watching tape and making scouting opinions is full-time work for the few who really do this well. Just as messing with the intricacies of player contracts and agents is full-time work for a GM. That doesn’t make for an enjoyable game. My philosophy is that the game engine itself should be as realistic as I can make it. But the staff experience – your job as the team’s hybrid GM/coach/owner/etc – has to be enjoyable.

The NFL Draft begins Thursday, and I’ve been taking some time the last few days to study how the draft works. In particular, I’m looking at wide receivers and Combine scores.

This first post, however, will focus on performance alone.

The Amateur Draft is an important piece of team building. Perhaps it’s the most important piece, because teams receive on average eight new draft picks every year and only 53 players are on the team during the season. Trades are still very rare in the NFL, especially involving young players.

When you draft a player, he’s yours for four years. After that, he’s more-or-less a free agent and gets paid based on a combination of experience, expertise and the role he’s expected to play. There are very few important bargains in free agency. You fill holes in free agency; you don’t build a team. And when signing contract extensions after that fourth year, you have to pay the market rate.

To analyze the effectiveness of a draft pick under a hard salary cap, therefore, you should limit your analysis to those first four years. In other sports you can factor in the market and the style of a particular owner. Even the NBA has its “Bird exception” and its “Rose rule” and other odds and ends to turn the cap into something a little different. But in the NFL, the draft gives you that young base that shapes your team.

I chose wide receivers to examine because there’s a simple statistic that defines them quite effectively – at least when applied to hundreds of players over a long period… receiving yards. While you can dig deeper with receivers – adding points for first downs earned in passing situations and for touchdowns – simple accumulated receiving yards are quite meaningful.

The scope of this study is 2001-2014. That’s the last 14 years of receivers who have reached four years of experience. 2001 is a good place to begin a study of the most recent passing emphasis within the game. It was the last year before the eight-division, 32-team format. There were 444 wide receivers drafted during that period – more-or-less evenly dispersed in the seven rounds of the draft with a slight increase in the seventh round.

For each player, I tried to find Combine data (and where that wasn’t available, data from the respective Pro Day). I also tracked total receiving yardage through year four. Eighty-five of these players never caught an NFL pass. The highest of these 0-yard picks (and only second-rounder) was Dexter Jackson, 58th overall in 2008, a shorter (5094) small-college star who ran a 4.37 40-yard dash. Tampa Bay tried him in a few games as a return specialist as a rookie, then waived him late in training camp the following year.

Sixteen of the 444 wide receivers exceeded 4,000 receiving yards in their first four years – all the way up to A.J. Green of Cincinnati with 4,874. Eight of those 16 were first-rounders (five in the top eight picks, including Green), four seconds, two thirds, a fourth (Denver’s Brandon Marshall) and a seventh (Marques Colston of New Orleans). Both Marshall and Colston were drafted in 2006.

In fact, 27 of the 43 receivers who have exceeded 3,000 receiving yards were first-round picks. Part of this is self-fulfilling – you draft a wideout in the first round and you had better feature him in the offense right from the start. But scouting receivers isn’t as hard as scouting quarterbacks and the learning curve isn’t quite as steep, so coaches have a decent idea of who will and who won’t thrive in the NFL.

Average receiving yards by round drafted: 1st – 2,708, 2nd – 1,725, 3rd – 1,139, 4th – 813, 5th – 510, 6th – 340, 7th – 293. I broke down the first round, and while the average tails off noticeably in the last few picks of the round, the sample sizes get too small to provide significant delineation.

I also took a look at how individual teams draft. I did this through assigning a score to every pick based on the expected four-year yardage totals for each round. Every team drafted between 8 and 19 wide receivers during the 2001-14 study period (average of about 14).

The “best” team at drafting wide receivers was Indianapolis by a wide margin. Part of that is likely that the Colts could probably get away with lower receiver skill sets because Peyton Manning was so remarkable. Part was having amazing longevity in the form of Marvin Harrison (before the study) and Reggie Wayne. So Indianapolis was also one of two teams with eight receivers drafted (San Diego – average in quality of picks – was also at eight). Philadelphia, Chicago, Arizona, Jacksonville, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Dallas made up the rest of the top quartile. Minnesota, Tennessee, Tampa Bay, Seattle, St. Louis, Baltimore, Kansas City and (dead last) New England made up the bottom quartile.

Why New England? Perhaps Bill Belichick just isn’t great at evaluating college receivers. He’s a master at seeing low-round (or even undrafted) guys on other rosters who can help, but when he reaches for draftees, it’s not pretty. His highest receiver picks at New England were Chad Jackson (36th overall, second round) in 2006 and Bethel Johnson (45th overall, second round) in 2003. Combined, they didn’t reach 1,000 yards in their entire careers. New England is also the only team in the NFL that has not drafted a wide receiver in the first round in this millennium (Minnesota and Detroit are tied for first at four). You’d have to go back to 1994 and Michigan’s Derrick Alexander to find a Belichick-led team and a first-round wide receiver.

It’s not easy finding effective wide receivers, though. There is an element of lottery to it. Just look at 2008. In addition to Dexter Jackson, nine other wideouts were chosen in the second round. Four others were below 500 yards in their first four years. Four were above average for the round, including Donnie Avery, Eddie Royal, Jordy Nelson and DeSean Jackson. Of the group, only DeSean Jackson (4,085) was above 2,600 yards in four years. No receivers were taken in the first round. But second to Jackson in four-year yardage from that entire 2008 class was Davone Bess, who came out of Hawaii, ran a 4.60 40-yard dash, stood 5097 in height and went undrafted. Scouts seemed uncertain whether Hawaii’s incredible passing game in those days worked because of quarterback Colt Brennan (a sixth-round pick in 2008 who never played an NFL game) or Bess.

To wrap up this first post, I’ll talk about Combine numbers. I’ve tried to accumulate as much information as possible about the Combine tests for wide receivers. However, not all prospects run all of the drills and some information comes from Pro Days and some from the NFL Combine itself. I don’t want to throw out information, but a Pro Day might have more favorable (or less favorable) conditions. In addition, not running a test is hardly evenly distributed. Expected top picks are more likely to skip the tests, not wanting to jeopardize their standing with a poor result. And there’s less information about players unlikely to be drafted.

I have a 40-yard time on 441 of the 444 drafted players, ranging from 4.22 (Jacoby Ford, 2010, a fourth-rounder with average fourth-round production through four years) to 4.78 (Jonathan Smith, a seventh-rounder who accumulated 77 career receiving yards). There’s vertical leap data for 372 players, broad jump for 334, a shuttle drill for 297 and a three-cone drill for 288. In addition, I have height for every player and hand size and arm length for most.

I will start out by saying that 40-yard dash time hardly correlates at all with four-year receiving yard totals, despite a positive 16% correlation with draft position. That’s what we’re up against with any study of Combine numbers. More soon.

Jimmy Garoppolo, heading into unrestricted free agency after a half-season rental in San Francisco, just signed a $137.5 million deal over five years with the 49ers.

Think about that. A quarterback with seven games’ worth of experience – 183 career completions – is being rewarded at the astonishing rate of three quarters of a million dollars for every past successful throw.

Now it’s not that simple. Even at fair market rate, the Patriots wouldn’t reward Tom Brady with $5 billion for his 6500-plus completions. It’s about future expectations, and Garoppolo is expected to be a franchise quarterback. So $27.5 million per year is the new normal. Which means the next time someone like Russell Wilson or Aaron Rodgers hits a contract year, agents will be talking about $35 million, hoping to settle above $30 million. And they will, soon enough.

The 2018 NFL salary cap will be about $178 million. Let’s take a look at some ratios.

The NFL rookie minimum salary will be $480,000, which is 0.27% of the salary cap. Garoppolo’s average salary is 15.45% of the salary cap. The ratio between those numbers is 57.3.

Now, let’s go back ten years. I’ll use approximations, but the idea is the same.

In 2008, the rookie minimum salary was $295,000 and the salary cap was $116 million. The crazy-high quarterback contract belonged to Carson Palmer, who was expected to make $67 million over the next five years – or $13.4 million per year.

In 2008 the rookie minimum was 0.25% of the salary cap – that’s consistent. But Palmer’s contract was 11.55% of the salary cap and you could obtain 45.4 undrafted rookies for Palmer’s cap compensation.

What’s going on here? This is an increasing effect of the 2011 renegotiated CBA between the NFL and the NFLPA. It addressed a serious problem – that contracts for first-round picks were getting out of hand and causing the value of top picks to decline. But it created a new problem – that contracts for first-round picks who end up being terrific players eat up far less cap room.

This affected the delicate balance between being able to put together a reasonable roster under the cap without discouraging teams from wanting higher picks. It’s this balance that leads to competitive balance in the NFL. Well run teams are rewarded. Owners willing to push the limits of the cap are rewarded. But no one gains from tanking and bad teams get value from picking high in round one.

I’m not claiming the NFL was broken or is broken. It obviously isn’t. But because of savings from the rookie cap, a quarterback with seven games of experience is getting a contract that would have been impossible for any player ten years ago. And we’re seeing a race developing for franchise quarterback salaries. Garoppolo’s 15.45% means someone will get 18% in the next big renegotiation.

Will that cause harm? Probably not. What will happen is that when the CBA is next renegotiated, there will be pressure to increase the cap as there’s always more attention on the highest contracts and bringing more players up to that standard is impossible without increasing the cap. Most people just see the $27.5 million average, not what that means for cap management itself.

And in this case, San Francisco is willing to channel its savings from the rookie cap adjustment into Garoppolo. Since franchise quarterbacks are hard to find these days, it may end up being a good decision. But there will be more holdouts in the near future as agents want their premier players getting a bigger share of those rookie cap savings.

The balance is changing right now, and things will get a little uncomfortable for the next year or so as teams adjust. But for the last three years – after the crazy-high pre-2011 first-round bonuses completely left the league – there’s been a period of time when it hasn’t hurt to stay under the cap. So ultimately, the Garoppolo deal and the current quarterback race is probably a good thing for the NFL.

And in San Francisco, as long as Garoppolo is as good as he’s looked in his first seven games…

From time to time, sports fans discuss overtime.

In baseball, extra innings are easily understood and implemented. In a sport filled with tradition (except for the one bizarre exception that MLB’s two conferences play with entirely different lineup structures and rules), wrinkles like starting the 12th inning with a runner on second base don’t get a lot of support.

Basketball has so much scoring that continually adding five-minute tie-breaking overtime periods has never been controversial. Double overtime is rare enough that alterations don’t generate much support.

Hockey has tweaked its rules the most. It’s hard to remember how many players play for how many minutes and how a shootout works from season to season in the NHL. There are even alterations in the overtime rules that make calculating the standings less than intuitive. Thankfully, so many teams reach the playoffs after a marathon 82-game season that casual fans are content to trust the system and wait until playoff hockey in April when everything is sudden death and six-a-side and shootouts are relegated to a distant and vaguely unpleasant memory.

Soccer embraces the playoff shootout concept because games can remain 0-0 seemingly longer than a cricket test match and overtime is largely absent from the regular season. While periodically (every four years, with the World Cup), interest spikes in the US, this might be part of the reason MLS is a distant fifth in the US. While the “Big Four” North American sports leagues are 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 5th in the world in annual revenue, the MLS is 14th – seventh among world soccer leagues. Whatever the reason, we view sports very differently from the rest of the world.

And football is our sport. The NFL is the world’s largest league in terms of revenue – about $13 billion per year. It also supports more franchises – 32 – than any major league in the world. The Super Bowl is the world’s largest single-day sporting event.

But how does football handle overtime? That’s a tough one. College football has an alternating possession rule which somewhat resembles a shootout. The NFL allowed ties in the regular season for a long time, then implemented a single overtime period, then has tweaked that rule a couple of times in the last decade. Playoff games are not limited by time, though there’s so much scoring in the game that this has never been a problem.

Recapping the rules: in 1974, the NFL added a 15-minute sudden death overtime period for regular-season games. Overtime starts with a coin toss and a kickoff. If the game is still tied after 15 minutes, that’s the final result.

People complained the coin toss was too arbitrary and the risk of scoring quickly too great, so in 2010 for playoff games, NFL teams were guaranteed a possession in overtime unless the team receiving the initial kickoff scored a touchdown. In 2012, that exception was extended to the regular season. This year, the overtime period was shortened to 10 minutes for regular-season games.

To make matters even more complicated, in 2011 the NFL moved the kickoff from the 30-yard-line to the 35 and in 2016 touchbacks after kickoffs were moved from the 20-yard-line to the 25. These are both changes that affect overtime.

That’s an awful lot of rule churn for a league that’s number one in the world by a large margin.

Does it matter? I looked in depth at the 324 overtime games in the NFL regular season and playoffs over the last 20 seasons. In terms of studying the game, I like to consider 1978 and the modifications to passing rules the birth of the modern game and 1998, when I started work on Front Office Football and Peyton Manning entered the league, as the beginning of the time period when studying play-by-play can generate results relevant to today’s game (though it’s always best, in my opinion, to focus on the most recent five years of results).

Here are some of my findings:

Since 1998, 6.0% of regular-season games have gone to overtime and 9.1% of playoff games have gone to overtime. The difference doesn’t surprise me since playoff games are limited to the top twelve teams. The average difference in skill level between teams should be lower in the playoffs.

One factor I considered is momentum in games. Announcers and fans like to talk about momentum being significant. Some of that might be more effective strategy changes during the course of games and some of it might be the mental attitude of players or maybe even the results of injuries.

I’ve often wondered if I should add a momentum factor to Front Office Football. In the original design for the college game, I drew an elephant named Mo who was going to appear on the scoreboard to indicate a team had momentum. But ultimately, I felt it was something that would annoy people more than make them feel more invested in the game. To date, I’ve never added a momentum factor or catch-up factor to either game and it’s unlikely I ever will. My design theory is that results should always be ratings driven and there should only be tangible adjustments to ratings. Most importantly, no ratings adjustment aside from injury should ever be, on its own, more than a small percentage. That keeps the game “honest” and understandable, though the “die rolls” associated with any kind of simulation mean individual play results can vary considerably and sometimes give people the impression that something else could be going on. I can only assure you that I test this kind of thing extensively and that everyone has runs of bad luck from time to time. Anyway…

I counted teams that scored last in regulation as having momentum. These teams won 54.8% of overtime games from 1998 until the two-possession rule took effect (essentially with the 2011 playoffs, as no 2010 playoff game went into overtime). With the new rule, 63.3% of the teams with momentum have won.

Out of everything I looked at with this study, this was the most surprising. It suggests that not only is momentum real, but that the rule change – guaranteeing that the team with momentum gets the ball in overtime – has made it more significant. Maybe even made it more fair if fair is defined as treating overtime as an opportunity to extend a game. Is the difference worth noting? I think so. That’s an 8.5% difference with 98 results since the change. Running a test assuming a normal distribution of results, I get a p-value of 0.079 on the comparison. This means I can’t reject the assumption that nothing has changed with a confidence level of 95%, but it’s awfully close. Another two years’ worth of data will help.

What about the role of the first possession? Before the change, the team with the ball first won 58.5% of overtime games. Since the change, that number has dropped to 53.1%. If the goal was reduce the impact of the coin toss, it looks like that has happened, too.

Before the rule change, teams won on that first possession 33.9% of the time. The goal was simply to score points. Nothing wrong with that strategy, but it heightens the impact of the coin toss. Of the 75 first-possession wins, 61 came from field goals and 14 came from touchdowns. The TD percentage was 18.7%. In 2017, for example, that TD percentage (TDs divided by TDs + FGs) was 58.0%.

Since the change, teams win on that first possession 19.4% of the time. They’ve scored 20 touchdowns and 18 field goals (the field goals allow the other team a possession). That percentage is 52.6%. So what we’re getting is a first possession in overtime that feels a lot like a normal in-game possession. Good or bad? I don’t know.

Before the change, a team’s odds of winning if it failed to score on the first possession was 38.1%. That has decreased to 34.4%. If a team scores a field goal on its first possession, it wins 73.3% of the decisions (61.1% if you factor in ties – three of the five ties in the NFL since the change are among the 18 games where both teams started overtime with field goals). Overall, the winning percentage once a team has failed to win (or lose) on its first possession is 42.6%.

Before and after the change, teams had about a 2% chance of losing the game on the first possession due to a fumble or interception return.

Another factor to examine is home-field advantage. Since 1998, the home team wins 57.9% of the time. Before the change, the home team won 52.5% of overtime games. Since the change, the home team has won 59.4% of overtime games. Because that’s a bit closer to the overall mean, it also suggests the new overtime rules are helping with the problems that motivated the changes.

What is the tradeoff? More ties in the regular season, undoubtedly. We’ve seen ties in 5.2% of regular-season overtimes since the change. That’s compared to 1.0% of overtimes before the rule change. Now that overtimes are reduced to 10 minutes, I expect even more ties. That didn’t happen in 2017. But since 11.7% of overtimes since the rule change last four possessions and 12.6% last five or more possessions, I wouldn’t be surprised if a high percentage of those games end in a tie. My guess is the tie percentage will go to about 10% of overtimes in the long term. It’s hard to figure in strategy changes, but that seems like a reasonable estimate. The net result will be an average of about 1.4 ties per season. That’s not going to break the NFL.

Another topic I examined was weather. Is it ever to a team’s advantage to kick off to begin overtime? Between 1998 and the rule change, teams chose to kick off twice after winning the overtime coin toss. In 2000, in a snowstorm with winds gusting to more than 40 mph in Buffalo, the Bills kicked off to New England. The strategy should have worked as the Patriots failed to score and Buffalo drove to the 12 on its first possession. But a 30-yard kick was blocked, then New England drove down the field and kicked the winning 24-yard field goal with just a few seconds left on the clock. Then in 2002, Marty Mornhinweg pretty much sacrificed his job as Detroit’s head coach by choosing to kick off to Chicago in overtime, only to see the Bears kick a field goal on their first possession.

One problem with using weather is that the NFL doesn’t consistently report data for each game. For instance, the stories I’ve read about the Mornhinweg game indicate winds were at 17 mph when he made that fateful decision. My research suggests that wind significantly reduces offense, making it particularly hard to pass. But the NFL reported a wind speed of 4 mph for that game, which shouldn’t trouble anyone. Using the reported wind speeds for games is obviously tricky. How do you determine what it must have been like on the field? Unfortunately temperature, where we have more accurate data, doesn’t have much effect on NFL games. Mostly it’s heavy snow and wind that makes life difficult on the offense.

Since the rule change, four teams have chosen to kick off to start overtime – all in games with high winds reported. The receiving team scored on the first possession in one of those games, and won two of the four. That’s far too low a sample size to make any conclusions, but since Bill Belichick has been the coach to make that choice in two of those four games (winning once), the reaction to this decision in the future will not be anywhere near as strong as it was when Mornhinweg tried it (and the rules made it much more of a losing proposition).

I scored games with a wind speed of 11 or more mph and a couple of other games with heavy snow as having difficult weather. That was 25.1% of all overtime games. About 4% of overtime games were marked as having extreme weather. What I found was that with no weather issues, teams scored on their first possession 36.4% of the time. With difficult weather, that dropped to 29.6% and with extreme weather, 15.4%. However, I found no significant weather difference in the percentage of times teams scored on the ensuing possession.

Overall, since the rules change, teams are 40-32-5 with the first possession in games with no weather marked and 12-14 in games with difficult weather. Of the nine overtime games with extreme weather since the rules change, the team with the ball first is 4-5.

I think in extreme cases, the decision to kick off in bad weather might help, but not much. And in difficult weather, at best the coin-toss advantage is removed. So my advice to coaches is that move should only be considered if you’re Belichick and you’re so far ahead of any living being in terms of understanding the game that this trivial analysis couldn’t possibly help or if conditions are absolutely brutal – which is something you probably have to determine from being out there on the field during that game.

This brings me to my last set of observations. Since I suggest that weather shouldn’t alter this decision unless your smaller players are having trouble remaining upright in the wind, is there any condition to examine? I didn’t want to data-mine the spreadsheet, because the results resemble astrology if you go in that direction. Obviously, if you look at enough samples, you’ll find something that passes a high significance test simply because of the nature of confidence intervals. Perhaps you should always kick off in Sunday night games in the NFC in odd-numbered years. Or always bet on horses with 12-letter names that start in position five. Data mining can bring endless entertainment in any sport.

I looked at one factor that might be a result of bad weather or, more importantly, why it might be worth kicking off in bad weather games. What is the score going into overtime?

Obviously tied. But if it’s 3-3, maybe the field position you potentially gain with a three-and-out on defense is more important than the advantage of going first. The average score going into overtime is 21.8 points per team. Are the odds of scoring on that first possession significantly worse in low-scoring games?

Unfortunately, scores are so tightly clustered at 17-all, 20-all, 23-all and 24-all (combined 55 out of the 103 overtime games since the rules change) that sample sizes are very tiny. All I’ve noted is that teams have scored on their first possession in only three of the 12 games that were tied at 13-all or lower headed into overtime. However, that low ratio didn’t carry over to the 1998-2011 period for low-scoring games. I can’t conclude anything based on the score itself. I’ve also noted that in games that are 30-all or higher since the rules change, teams have scored on their first possession in five of 18 games. Both high-scoring and low-scoring games aren’t favoring the first possession. In between, teams have scored on that first possession in 30 of 73 games.

And while the winning percentage of teams possessing the ball first (3-8-1) in games at 13-all or lower is unusually low since the rules change, that also doesn’t hold true for the 1998-2011 period (24-18-1).

All of this seems like low-sample-size gibberish to me, and perhaps looking at the weather is gibberish as well and you should simply take the ball first no matter what. Hard to say.

Whenever the situation arises in the NFL, the media likes to repeat the cliche that it’s unusually tough to beat one opponent three times in one season. We hear the usual pseudo-analysis – that if a teams beats an opponent, it will likely stick to that game plan because it was successful while the opponent gets to try new things. And that effect would be magnified in a third contest.

But why would a coach give away a game plan? Why wouldn’t multiple results against the same team have more to do with match-ups than anything else? Is there some rule that a team that wins a game has to stick with the same planning concepts?

It’s relatively rare to see teams play three times in one year. On an average of once or a little more per year, there’s an intra-divisional playoff game. Top teams often split home-and-home games during the regular season. So it turns out that only 19 teams have ever had the opportunity to take that third victory over one opponent.

It looks somewhat likely a 20th team will get that opportunity this year, since New Orleans has beaten Carolina twice and the schedule seems to favor a third game as the NFC 4/5 wild card match-up this season. Since the three-win opportunity hasn’t occurred since 2009, it will get more attention than usual.

Naturally, pundits will spend the week explaining that Sean Payton can’t possibly come up with a third way to beat the Panthers.

So, what’s the reality of the situation? Well, the home team has won 12 of those 19 games, and the team with the two prior victories has won 13 times. Myth busted.

I’ll also take the opportunity to point out that the last team to win that third game after losing the two regular season games was the New York Giants going out on the road as the fourth seed at 13-3 Dallas in the 2007 playoffs. Those Giants ending up beating the only 16-0 regular-season team in NFL history in the Super Bowl.