DGDB&D: a Texans blog.

Morlon Revisited, Some Housekeeping Notes, and a Fantasy Update

Aug 7, 2008 2008 Season, Bad Idea Jeans, Douchebag Tom, Morlon Greenwood, Stats

Back in the comments to this post, I wrote the following in response to socctty’s post:

Thanks. I was actually wondering what the FO numbers were. I want to respond to this in a new post, but that will likely be later today.

Well, replace “today” with “this summer” and here we are.  Rather than just drone by myself, though, I emailed with socctty, posing my own questions regarding the numbers.  Here’s the back and forth.  First, my email.

First off, like I think I mentioned, I admit that the FO numbers do not look good for Morlon.  And I love what the FO project (for lack of a better term) is about; the changes sabermetrics has brought to baseball analysis would be more than welcome in the football world.  That said, and at the risk of sound disingenuous (or, worse, sounding like one of those “VY is better than stats” fans), I do have a couple questions/concerns about FO’s methodology, at least as it pertains to defensive players.

Let me back up, though.  FO is based on “The Hidden Game of Football,” right?  Well, it’s been a while since I read that, but I do recall a large portion of the beginning of that book talking about how football differed from baseball, in that the latter was linear and each action was more or less independent of other actions.  I believe the quote was “baseball is a thread; football is a fabric.”  Now, I do think that FO has done a great job of extrapolating from the lessons of that book and creating ways to better evaluate certain players and teams as a whole, but here’s concern #1:

While people who touch the ball (”skill” positions and returners) have enough measurable attributes to allow for in-depth analysis (yards, TDs, what-have-you), I feel like defensive players, especially in the running game, are hard to measure.  As someone said in the comments to that post, if a run is supposed to go outside, but Morlon seals the edge and then DeMeco blows the guy up as he’s looking for a new hole, does FO account for that?  Can anyone really account for that sort of thing?  Second, if Morlon is responsible for the running back in a passing route (fairly common for his position) and the QB decides to run left, Morlon can’t break coverage until the QB crosses the line of scrimmage, so it is going to be pretty hard for him to stop someone like Vince before the QB gets 4.5 yards (success on first down).  How is that accounted for?

And, since I am asking so many questions of you, I’ll try to answer some of the ones you posted.

“Shouldn’t a weak side backer have more than 1 sack, 1 hit, and 3 hurries on the season?”  In theory, yes, though that as tempered by (a) Richard Smith never, ever blitzing with Morlon (something I screamed about all last season) and (b) in a non-blitz situation, getting to the QB is going to be Greenwood’s third responsibility on every play.  First, read the fullback and pick up the run.  Second, pick up the FB or RB in the flat or in the short zone in the passing game.  Third, if neither the first or second option applies, get after the QB.  Without looking, I can’t know for sure, but I imagine the third scenario doesn’t happen a whole lot.  Also, when the RB flares to the strongside, if Morlon reads the play correctly from the snap, he’s going to cut straight across the field, behind his own D-line, rather than try to get the QB before a dump pass and then have to chase the RB from behind.

“Why was he targeted so many pass plays?” Because the way he’s used in our system, he’s covering as described above as well as filling the middle zone when DeMeco blitzes.  It would be odd if Greenwood didn’t have the most passes thrown at him of the three LB positions.

One final thought:  Including Thompson and Bentley in the SAM statistics for last year doesn’t work because they were both playing for other teams.  If you replace them with Diles and anyone else who got snaps over there, do we know what the numbers were?

Socctty’s reply:

You know what, that’s a good point with the “sealing the edge” scenario. In that sort of instance, I’m not sure how Football Outsiders would score it. Generally speaking though, they consider the strong side of the field the SAM linebacker’s responsibility. So when a running back blows past him and gets tackled by DeMeco 6 yards later, they credit DeMeco with the tackle and “credit” Morlon with allowing 6 yards on the play (unless he was taken out by a pulling guard or something).

For a lot of the metrics, you’re right that these statistics aren’t always applicable - it would be best to compare Morlon to other SAM backers in 4-3 defenses, and at that point you start limiting the pool of players you can compare him to. It’s probably not fair to compare him to WILL or MIKE backers as a hard and fast rule. Nevertheless, tackling is a basic skill any linebacker should have, and when they rank in the 90s out of 99 total players, it doesn’t reflect well on them.

In virtually every metric FO uses to score linebackers, Morlon scored poorly last year, so it’s hard to believe that there’s some unique skill he has that isn’t being measured in a given statistic. He has a successful play on passes (previously defined) only 38% of the time (average is around 50%; he scored 80th amongst LBs). He was the worst in the league amongst qualifying players on running plays in Run Stop Rate, and 96th in the league on rushing yards allowed per play. So it’s not as if there’s some vague, obscure, fluke category that he’s scoring poorly in. It’s pretty much across the board.

What’s interesting is that the year before last, Morlon did pretty well for himself. (Looking back at Pro Football Prospectus 2007 was interesting; at the end of this I’ll type up some of the things they said) Check out this attached web page for a table I put together. As you’ll see, Morlon regressed across the board in every single statistical category.

As for a “control” player, DeMeco was virtually identical in every single category from 2007 to 2008. This tells us that the statistics are not prone to random variations, and that they reflect players’ performances pretty accurately. Morlon stank it up last year.

Now, we can attribute Morlon’s stats to a lot of things: Smith deciding blitzing was out of fashion; something to do with Travis Johnson getting more reps; Smith switching to more zone coverage after Dunta went down… we could go on. But I think all of that adds up to a lot of apologizing. In the end, I think we have a 30 year old linebacker who was, at his best, average, and now he’s 30. Maybe it was an off-year. I think it’s a sign of things to come.

All that being said, though, there is of course value in what passes the “eye” test. These stats only reflect part of what the game charters’ eyes have seen. We have to assume the linebackers coach and the defensive co-ordinator and the head coach and the general manager see something they like in the guy, so I’m not ready to start lumping him with the Petey Faggins of the world. I won’t start lumping him with the “most underrated players in the league” crowd, either.

PFP2007 notes on the Texans (this was going in to the 2007 year):
- With regards to sacks: “Don’t be discouraged - every other number says (Mario) Williams had an excellent rookie season.” They go on to cite how he was a beast against the run, hiding the horrible performance of the DTs.
- “Williams’s only weakness is that he does not have Julius Peppers-like versatility in pass coverage, something the Texans exacerbated by getting too cute with zone blitzes.”
- On the LB corps: “Ryans was like a piece of filet mignon sandwiched between two slices of moldy pumpernickel.” They said more or less the same thing in PFP2008.
- “The Houston secondary is a festival of replacement-level talent with one bright exception, cornerback Dunta Robinson… as for the rest of these veterans, there’s no reason to waste a paragraph delineating shades of mediocrity.”
- “The Texans drafted cornerback Fred Bennett in the fourth round, and he has extreme strengths and weaknesses. He’s a tall, athletic leaper with great cover skills, but he doesn’t like contact and can’t tackle.”

This year they rave about a possible Okam-Okoye combo.

Me again:

Interesting point regarding Morlon’s slide from 2006 to 2007, if only because he appeared (again, it’s that “eye” test) to play better last year than he had the year before.  I do think you are on to something with the idea that what we got out of him over the past two years is likely the high point, which is why I’ve been fine with the idea of grooming Adibi to take that role.  And, really, if Adibi overtakes him this year based on performance, I’ll be fine with it.

Yeah, I was overreaching by lumping him into the “most underrated in the league” category.  I admit that.  A more accurate assessment would have been “underappreciated by his own fans.”

I guess my biggest problem with relying on the numbers, even the more logical ones created by FO and guys like KC Joyner, goes back to my initial point that it is inherently difficult (at best) to quantify the performance of guys who aren’t carrying the ball.  The ball dictates evaluation of those guys, right (i.e. the running back DVOA is not based so much on how he picks up blocks or carries out a play-fake, but totally in his performance when he has the ball, right?)  Even when you break the defense down and watch each play, without knowing the actual defensive call, it is hard to say whether a guy was successful in what he did.  For all we know, a WLB could be credited with a failure because the ball was rushed to his zone, even in a situation where the WLB’s responsibility on that particular play wasn’t that zone.

Granted, those situations are probably rare, and maybe they are so few as to not impact the overall numbers.  I’m speculating here, mainly just for the sake of playing Devil’s Advocate.

The other question I had was whether the methodology seems to favor or disfavor certain positions?  Like, for example, how are Lance Briggs and Ernie Sims (the two “playmaking” WLBs people mentioned) compared to DeMeco or Patrick Willis?  My guess is that MLBs are always going to rate higher, especially in the run game, because there’s not much room for a running back to get around them when he comes up the middle.  On the other hand, if the O-line seals the end, so that the RB winds up one on one with a WLB, the RB has some room to operate.  Dunno…just more thinking out loud.

And his final reply:

The DVOA numbers only count towards players with the ball or players for whom the ball was intended. And things are taken into consideration, such as receivers who give up on a ball - each throw, for incompletion is marked with a “why” (Hit in Motion, Tipped Ball, Overthrown, etc.)

However, they also score things like blown blocks for running backs in blitz-pickup.

Anyway your point probably does hold some water: there are stats that they keep that are more valid than other stats they keep, and at any rate, they should (like any stat) be viewed in their proper context. One could argue that the FO stats’ main benefits are that they inherently have more context in and of themselves. But yes, there are simply things that they can’t measure.

With regard to the defense’s call, you can actually tell a lot. You can see if they are in cover-1 or cover 2 before the snap; you can of course see if they are in a 3-4 or a 4-3; before the snap you can get a pretty good idea if it’s zone or man, and after the snap there is no doubt (with a hat-tip to TiVo).

Keep in mind that defensive players are never measured in DVOA; only the defense as a whole is.

As far as WLB versus MLB vs LILB-in-a-3-4, etc, as far as pure numbers (counting stats) go, it’s probably best to compare WLB to WLB and LILB in a 3-4 to other LILB in a 3-4. But generally speaking, you can look at rate (or percentage) stats to glean a comparison, provided that the sample size is significant enough. 99th out of 99 isn’t probably very far away from 78th out of 99, but when you show up in the 90s out of 99 in two different statistical categories, and pretty much in the lower third in every other category, it doesn’t look too good for you.

Reading over the 2007 book, I found this nugget also: “Screen passes and dumpoffs are marked as Uncovered unless a defender (normally a linebacker) is obviously shadowing that specific receiver on the other side of the line of scrimmage.”

Soooo…yeah.  I hope that sheds a little light on the sabermetric side of the discussion.  Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts/questions/hate mail in the comments.

**************************************

Now, for the housekeeping:

1. Based on discussions like the above, bfd and I have added socctty to the DGDB&D family.  I have no idea how much he plans to post or what topics he might cover, but I am really excited about the added statistical analysis.  The goal from the start with this blog has been two-fold—entertain and offer some info/analysis that you can’t get elsewhere.  This addition is a huge step in the second direction.

2. In the spirit of the above, I thought I would mention that we are always willing (hoping?) to publish Texans-related stuff written by anyone (other than Douchebag Tom), provided it meets one of the two qualities above (the whole entertain/inform thing).  It’s not an open audition or anything, but if you want to write a guest post, hammer something out and send it to one of us.  We can’t make you famous, we offer no pay, and we can’t promise that people won’t make fun of you in the comments, but…uh…there might be some reason why it still sounds fun.

3. I am leaving tomorrow morning for a weekend get-a-way with the wifey.  So, if you want to read anything new, pester bfd.  I’m assuming he’s not planning on running a liveblog for this game, but I do want to use the CoverItLive software for regular season liveblogs (the same setup we used during the draft).  Two questions: 1. Is there enough interest that it won’t just be me and grungedave making the same jokes every week?  2. Any music requests?

***************************************

DGDB&D Fantasy Football Update.

Currently on board: Me, Lee, grungedave, socctty, DisplaceTexan, Dan B., DeMecoShall…, and abumnamedPaul.  That’s 8.  Am I missing anyone?  What days of the week are best for a live draft?