Xavier Rhodes: Drunk Giraffe?

There is nothing to say that a player with poor combine results, or mediocre college production, can't succeed.  Still, I do think that when a player player diverges by a large degree from the historic norms for successful players at his position, it is probably not a good indicator that things will turn out well.  With that in mind, I thought I would point to a couple of highly drafted prospects that raise some concerns for me.

I've already kind of touched on Menelik Watson, so my first dubious prospect will be cornerback Xavier Rhodes.  Rhodes was taken with the 25th overall pick by the Vikings.  He does have some very positive traits, but he also has some glaring issues.  In the positive category are his size, speed and explosiveness.  On the flip side, he has terrible measurables in the agility drills (short shuttle and 3-cone).  Here is how he compares to some of the better known NFL cornerbacks.


Player                                                Ht/Spd Score        Agility Score

Xavier Rhodes	1.312	-2.601
Champ Bailey	1.272	2.321
Patrick Peterson	1.322	1.160
Darrelle Revis	0.656	1.176
Carlos Rogers	0.636	2.269
Charles Tillman	0.636	0.599
Nnamdi Asomugha	1.258	N/A
Antoine Winfield	-0.485	0.920
Antonio Cromartie	1.082	0.674
Lardarius Webb	0.261	0.581
Brandon Flowers	-0.870	0.775
Richard Sherman	0.882	-0.333
Asante Samuel	-0.241	-0.007
Joe Haden	-0.319	0.223
Terrence Newman	0.338	1.231
Leon Hall	0.535	1.361
Devin McCourty	0.436	0.859
Johnathan Joseph	0.899	-0.428
Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie	1.818	0.416

The Ht/Spd score is just a measure of a player's speed relative to their height.  Duh.  As always, it is given in the form of how many standard deviations away from the average result for a given position, that this particular player is.  Basically, the smaller you are the faster you better be.  The agility score works the same way.  Ideally, of course, a player would do well at both.

This is just intended to take a very basic look at what I feel are the primary traits for a cornerback.  You can easily incorporate additional factors, to improve the overall picture.  I could incorporate the Kangaroo Score, where Rhodes would undoubtedly do quite well compared to his peers, since he had a 40.5" vertical jump and am 11' broad jump.  Unfortunately, that tends to be a trait that I treat as only the icing on the cake, if everything else checks out the way it should.

While Rhodes' speed, relative to his height, is quite good, his agility score is absolutely wretched.  I really can't find anybody to directly compare him to, let alone someone who became a success.  Joe Haden attended the combine while recovering from a knee injury, and still performed better than Rhodes.  Even compared to safeties, where the standard agility score is lower, he fares poorly.  As it stands, Xavier Rhodes is probably about as nimble as drunken, gut shot, giraffe.  The closest comparisons I can find for him are these two players:

Player                                             Ht/Spd Score      Agility Score
Mike Jenkins                                           0.251            -1.552
Brandon Browner                                     0.657            -0.977

Even here, Rhode's agility score is still a full standard deviation worse than some of the least nimble corners.  Even attempting to compare him to Mike Jenkins is frustrating, since I've never gotten the impression that Jenkins is very good, despite his one Pro Bowl.  His agility score is so bad, that I almost want to dismiss it as a fluke.  It just seems impossible for a cornerback to have produced these sorts of times at the combine.  Perhaps if Rhodes is able to constantly jam the receiver at the line, he might do okay (probably not).  If not, he could be in trouble, despite his excellent speed.  Playing behind pass rushers like Jared Allen and Brian Robison could mask this weakness to some degree, but I would bet that it will become apparent eventually.  One way to see things in a more positive light, is to look at the cornerback that the Vikings took last year, with the 66th pick.

Player                                             Ht/Spd Score     Agility Score
Josh Robinson                                         0.500            1.578

Robinson is almost the perfect model of what teams look for athletically.  His main problem is that he is 5' 9.5".  He's obviously not built to match up against someone like Calvin Johnson, but nobody else really is either.  Despite that, I wouldn't be surprised in the least if he ends up having a better career than Xavier Rhodes.  People with Robinson's rare athleticism almost never fail, though, like all cornerbacks, he will still probably have up and down periods.  We'll see what happens.

The real question for me is not whether Rhodes can succeed.  It is whether you should spend a first round draft pick on a guy who measured so terribly, in an area that probably matters quite a lot for his position.  I would think that being conservative in the first round, just to be as certain as you can be of getting an at least adequate player, would be the way to go.  Taking a corner who possibly had the worst historical short shuttle and 3-cone times (by a wide margin), seems like an unnecessarily risky proposition. 

Athleticism and the offensive line

People often say that offensive linemen are the safest picks in the first round.  This may be true.  I was looking at a list of linemen who had been taken in the first two rounds, from 1999 to 2012, and the average player selected in this range ended up starting in about 70% of the games during their career.  Player's taken in just the first round started 75% of their games.  Of course, this doesn't mean that they played well.  I really don't want to attempt to judge that, but they at least managed to get on the field quite a lot.

The thing that strikes me as odd about this, is that offensive linemen should be a somewhat trickier position to evaluate.  Like every player the team's have their combine data to consider.  Unlike other players, offensive linemen don't provide any statistical production.  If teams fail at a rather high rate when drafting quarterbacks and wide receivers with high draft picks, despite having more measurable information on them, how are they apparently doing much better at drafting offensive linemen, with less information?  Maybe they're not.

Isn't it possible that they are screwing up on offensive linemen, just as much as they do at other positions, but it is just harder to notice?  When a receiver repeatedly drops the ball, or a quarterback throws a harebrained interception, even the most casual fan will notice.  With an offensive linemen, however, it will probably take repeated and glorious failures to make the headlines.  Sure, you would think that teams would notice, even if we aren't paying close attention.  Unfortunately, I think we are all familiar with some of the human turnstiles certain teams continue to employ.  Maybe team's just develop blind-spots for certain guys, who they clearly believed in when they got drafted, and for whom they continued to have high hopes for later success.  All I'm suggesting is that maybe some of these "safe" draft picks, are safe because they are so hard to criticize.  After all, how successful is a newspaper article going to be if it spends its time analyzing a lineman's technique?

I'm not claiming to have any answers, but I enjoy examining combine data, and think there might be some trends worth noting.  Initially I would have thought that successful interior linemen would have shown exceptional Kangaroo Scores, as I often envision them as the more brutish and less nimble in-line blockers.  I expected offensive tackles to be heavily reliant on a good agility score (from the 3-cone drill and the short shuttle).  On both counts I appear to have been somewhat wrong, and the complete opposite appears to be the case.

While the Kangaroo Score probably does tell you quite a bit about a player's explosive power, it also seems to relate to their quickness.  Picture an offensive tackle dropping back at the snap of the ball.  Though he is moving backwards, the degree to which he does this explosively is probably going to give him an edge against high quality speed rushers.  Moving forward, this same explosiveness turns them into a run blocking force.  So, the Kangaroo Score comes into play.  Still, with high end left tackles you do see that their agility scores come to matter significantly more than for right tackles.  The average results for a tackle who makes it to a Pro Bowl or All Pro roster are a 0.721 Kangaroo Score, and a 0.233 Agility Score.  For just the left tackles, it was a 0.634 Kangaroo Score, and a 0.476 Agility Score. 

Interior linemen, it seems, probably wind up playing inside due their lack of explosion in comparison to tackles.  Not they can't be good in this department, but it tends to be less common.  The best interior linemen do seem to compensate though, with excellent agility.   Perhaps this agility gives them leverage, and that becomes the source of the power that they might otherwise lack.  I don't know if that is the case.  It's just an idea I am kicking around.  Then we come to the high end centers that tend to have shockingly good short shuttle times, somewhere in the area of one standard deviation above average. The average results for interior linemen that make it to a Pro Bowl or All Pro roster are a 0.075 Kangaroo Score, and a 0.288 Agility Score.  So, yes, the interior guys tend be somewhat less dynamically athletic, but a lot of that is because they are being graded in the same group as the tackles, who just throw off the curve for everyone else.

Since I am proposing that some highly drafted players might be sticking around as starters, when perhaps they shouldn't, let's take a look at some of the generally acknowledged busts from the first two rounds of the draft.

Player                     Position           Pick #             Kangaroo Score      Agility Score
Marcus Johnson       Tackle         49, in 2005            0.208                     0.074
Toniu Fonoti             Guard         39, in 2002            0.863                    -0.762
Adam Terry             Tackle          64, in 2005            0.009                    -0.324
Jason Smith             Tackle          2, in 2009           -1.351                     0.575
Eben Britton            Tackle         39, in 2009           -0.384                    -0.565
Chris Williams         Tackle         14, in 2008           -0.475                    -0.559
Chilo Rachal            Guard         39, in 2008            0.354                    -1.401
Levi Brown              Tackle          5, in 2007            -0.560                    -0.516
Vladimir Ducasse    Tackle         61, in 2010           -0.630                    -1.384 (too soon?)

For the most part, these players do seem to be showing scores that are average at best, and horrific in most cases.  When you compare them to the average results for Pro Bowl players at their listed positions, they all fall rather short of the mark.  There are more guys who I suspect should be considered busts, but teams keep starting them.  I will throw out this idea though.  If you had a quality left tackle, would you ever let him go, or trade him?  Yet two teams in 2013 either did this, or attempted to do this, with these players:

Player                    Position            Pick #              Kangaroo Score        Agility Score
Jake Long               Tackle             1, in 2008           -0.240                       0.636
Branden Albert        Tackle            15, in 2008            0.037                      -0.423

I'm not saying that they are bad, merely that their numbers are somewhat mediocre.  This might have something to do with their up and down careers. The fact that the Dolphins were supposedly in trade talks for Branden Albert, as a replacement for Jake Long, would appear to be a lateral move at best.

Once you get past the players who were taken in the first couple of rounds, where teams are heavily invested in proving they made the right pick, things become a bit more interesting.  If you look at late round or undrafted players, who went on to have success, you see that the majority of them do demonstrate high levels of athletic ability.  When compared to the average Pro Bowl player's results, they do quite well.  This shouldn't be surprising since many of these players are the Pro Bowlers who set the standard in the first place.  So, despite playing for a team that probably had relatively little faith in them, they made themselves impossible to ignore.

Player                    Position             Pick #           Kangaroo Score             Agility Score
Jason Peters            Tackle               Undrafted            2.278                          -0.005
Chris Myers            Guard/Center     200, in 2005        0.213                           1.727
Scott Wells             Guard/Center      251, in 2004       0.278                           1.233  
Chris Kuper            Guard                 161, in 2006       0.172                           0.640
John Sullivan           Center                187, in 2008      -0.251                           0.759
Carl Nicks              Guard                 164, in 2008       1.032                          -0.072
Kyle Kosier            Guard/Tackle      249, in 2002       -0.289                          1.402
Matt Slauson          Guard                 193, in 2009       1.337                          -0.425
Brian Waters          Guard             Undrafted 1999      -0.027                           0.740
Alex Boone            Tackle            Undrafted 2009        0.396                           0.044
Eric Heitmann          Center                239, in 2002      -0.393                           0.743

Yes, there are some highly drafted players with excellent numbers who have failed to live up to their potential.  Alex Barron (2.317 Kangaroo Score and 0.338 Agility Score) and Winston Justice (2.368 Kangaroo Score and 1.584 Agility Score) are perfect examples of this.  I'm not sure what you can do to avoid or explain that sort of situation.  Some guys just don't live up to their potential.  There are also undoubtedly numerous players with poor measurables who have done quite well.  Still, if we take a look at two different ends of the offensive line spectrum (based on 2012 depth charts), this is what we see:

Player                  Position              Pick #           Kangaroo Score            Agility Score
Patriots
Nate Solder          Left Tackle          17, in 2011       1.281                          1.592
Logan Mankins     Left Guard          32, in 2005      -0.370                          1.146
Ryan Wendell        Center                Undrafted            N/A                             N/A
Dan Connolly        Right Guard        Undrafted          0.274                          0.695
Sebastian Vollmer  Right Tackle       58, in 2009       1.748                          1.076


Maybe this has a little something to do with how the Patriots get away with using mediocre receivers and running backs.  That is a shockingly athletic line, even if we don't know what Wendell's scores would be.

Lions
Gosder Cherilus      Left Tackle        17, in 2008      -0.738                          0.133
Stephen Peterman   Left Guard         83, in 2004      -1.245                        -0.079
Dominic Raiola       Center                50, in 2001       0.789                         1.373
Rob Sims                Right Guard     128, in 2006       0.197                         0.383
Jeff Backus             Right Tackle       18, in 2001     -0.646                         -0.914

So, which of these offensive lines would you expect to do better? 

As for the 2013 draft, I will leave the top three tackles alone for now, but I want to point out one player.  People kept claiming this guy was exceptionally athletic, and I just couldn't figure out why.  So it will be interesting to see how it turns out in the long run, since even if he fails it could be years before anyone admits it.

Player                  Position              Pick #           Kangaroo Score           Agility Score
Menelik Watson   Tackle              42, in 2013          -0.732                       -1.589

If you're still interested in all of this nonsense, you can jump over to Athleticism and the Offensive Line part 2.   In that post I compare a player's athletic measurements to their success/productivity base on their CarAV score  .

Why people love statistical outliers

Football is a sport.  Sports are played by athletes (unless it is bowling).  The NFL Combine puts people through different tests of athletic ability.  Then at the end of this testing, we gather together and say "Hey, you know that short slow guy?  He's the one I want.  The guy has moxie."   Then a year or two later, when our man of determination and heart has been run off to play in the CFL, we try again.  This time, we'll get it right.  That other guy?  Hell, he didn't have half the heart this new guy has.   This new guy really brings his lunch pail to work (really, why the fuck do we say this?).  Yup, it's going to be different this year.

Sure, being a hard worker or a guy with great character is a good thing.  Do you think you can identify this trait?  Was Randy Moss a hard worker?  Or what about Terrell Owen's character?  "Bah", you say,"They put up great stats, but I wouldn't want those cancerous guys on my team."  Sure, sure.  I get it.  It's a team sport.  It takes all 53 guys to win not just a couple guys who put up pretty stats.  Okay then, so how are we going to identify these guys with character, that everyone seems to like so much?  Do you have a Moxie-Meter hidden in your basement?  A Lunch-Pail-O-Graph device that we can attach to their skull with electrodes, to measure this essential gritty determination?  Even a Balboa-gauge would do in a pinch, if you have one on hand.

I suspect that no matter what team you root for, you have been in this position at least once.  Your team has selected a wide receiver with a fairly high draft pick, only to find out that the guy just really can't catch the ball very well (Troy Williamson, Travis Taylor, etc.).  So, somehow we are supposed to believe that NFL GMs can get an accurate read on a player's psyche, level of motivation, commitment, or whatever, when they can't even tell if a guy can catch. (which would seem like a fairly obvious trait to pay attention to, but perhaps gets overlooked while they are busy reading their DSM to analyze the player's psychological profile).  Sure, I'm certain that most of these team's scouts, who were generally just failed former football players themselves, have keen analytical minds, highly trained and attuned to detect the faintest whiff of moxie in the air.  Hell, that is probably why they stopped playing football in the first place.  You don't want to damage a mind like that, with blows to the head.

Now, lets say we were working at NASA, and were looking to hire a new guy.  We've got applications from all the best and brightest, from the finest universities in the land.  If I turned to you and said, "You know what Bob?  This guy here is the one we want.  Sure, on paper he doesn't look so great.  In fact he appears to be brain damaged.  But you see, Bob, he just doesn't test well.  I've talked to this guy and he's a real crackerjack.  Sharp as a tack, I tell ya'.  He's the guy we want to plan our mission to Mars."  Well, best case scenario you would be laughed at.  Worst case?  Well, I suppose that would involve having the space shuttle go off course, and instead of heading to Mars, crashing into the White House (maybe I can pitch this idea to Michael Bay).  

Yes, test results should matter to you.  I know, we all hate to feel as if we are confined or trapped by some measurement, whether it is I.Q., 40 yard dash time, or whatever.  We like to look in the mirror and see past that receding hairline, growing paunch, and strange rash in our armpit that just won't go away, to see the vigorous and brilliant man we know that we really are.  Women just can't resist us.  Oh, they play coy, but they notice us.  As for other men, they tremble before our intimidating masculinity.  No stupid number is going to tell us what we are, and it shouldn't do that to any man.  This is America for god's sake, and no commie numbers are going to change that.  USA! USA! USA!

So, basically, what I am trying to say is we tend to be morons.  We're not all beautiful little snowflakes.  Potatoes are all unique too, though nobody ever seems to compare themselves to one.  We're not all just a step away from having our greatness discovered.  We're not all going to be that outlier, who is going to defy expectations, but we still root for it to happen to someone.  Somewhere inside us, we know that some guys are just better, more talented, but we don't have to like it.

Then we see a receiver run a 4.7 second forty yard dash.  We pause.  We think about all the great things that his coaches said about him.  How his teammates would follow him through the gates of hell.  He was the star of the Rose Bowl for Christ's sake!  It's those damned commie numbers, coming to get us again!  Anquan, he'll save us!  Anquan Boldin ran a 4.72 forty yard dash, and things turned out great for him.  He was gritty and tough wasn't he?  That's all you need, man.  Just give me some gritty tough guy, and you can keep those commie numbers of yours.  Hell, look at Wes Welker.  That sumbitch was 5'8" and running a 4.65 forty.  Takes a lot of grit to be small and slow, doesn't it?

Sure those guys are great.  They are anomalies.  Outliers.  Basically, they are like a cancerous tumor spreading through an otherwise healthy statistical analysis.  They show up in your spreadsheet.  They scare you a bit.  You can't figure out what to do with them, or how to make them go away.  So you learn to just accept them for what they are, a pain in your statistical ass (yes, statistical ass cancer).  Though it is reasonable to find them oddly fascinating, it doesn't mean you should spend your life searching for them.  That would inevitably prove rather depressing, sort of like a daily colonoscopy.

People might say that Wes Welker was underrated, or that he should have been drafted higher (actually he wasn't drafted at all).  How highly should you draft a small slow wide receiver, with good but not exactly shocking college production (especially when they come from Texas Tech where everybody accumulates decent stats)?  Maybe good old Wes was just hungover at the combine?  Maybe Anquan didn't have his bran muffin that morning, allowing him to drop the ballast needed to increase his vertical jump?  Okay, fine.

If you want to go looking for the next Wes Welker or Anquan Boldin, that's cool.  I admire the quest that you are setting for yourself.  I do think there are probably some guys out there who have a good eye for drafting talent, and maybe they will spot the next big thing.  Still, at least with receivers (though this applies everywhere else too), most teams haven't shown that they are employing these savants in their scouting department.  So, you can try to find the next guy who is going to defy all the odds, and over the next ten years you might find one.  If you do manage to turn one up, I'd be the first to congratulate you.  But can you do it again?  If some scout out there can do that, say 60-70% of the time, then I would be very intrigued.  If a team can't do this, then that underdog draft pick starts to look like a fluke, just blind luck.  Or perhaps, they did have a brief moment of insight, where their internal Moxie-Meter went off, only to have it again go on the fritz for the following decade.  I certainly can't rule that out.

Or, you can embrace what seems to be the most sensible solution, that those other guys, the bigger faster stronger ones who statistically pummeled their opponents all through college, might just be a better bet.  It's just putting the odds in your favor.  Even if they seem like assholes.  Even if they seem unmotivated.  Even if they lack moxie.  Victor Cruz, Miles Austin, Marques Colston, now those are guys who you can rightfully justify searching for.  While people might treat them as if they were the same sort of underdogs as Wes Welker, they really aren't.  The numbers were there.  The measurables and statistics existed.  Teams just chose not to pay attention.  Maybe they lacked grit?

A statistical approach to drafting wide receivers

I thought I would post up a rather simplified example of what would happen if you asked a spreadsheet to analyze wide receiver prospects in the NFL Draft.  This isn't exactly how I go about doing things, but is close enough to give some idea as to how it can improve a team's odds of making a decent pick.  For this brief look, I will show what the computer thought of the draft classes from 2004 to 2012.

Player's will be given a score based in equal parts on their combine data, and their production in college.  Their Stat Score makes a simple adjustment to their raw college stats to normalize things for the purpose of comparing guys who played in different offenses.  The Stat Score is fairly similar to Shawn Siegele's Dominator Rating,  though I use their college team's total offense rather than just their passing offense.  I'm not claiming that this is an improvement over the Dominator Rating, it probably isn't, it is just the way I have historically done things. The other half of their score will be the Athletic Score, which will come from their combine results.

Since there is obviously going to be a difference between how a guy like DeSean Jackson succeeds, compared to a player like Calvin Johnson, players will be divided into two groups.  The "Big" group will consist of player's over 200 pounds, and their Athletic Score will put more of an emphasis on their Kangaroo Score, though the other combine drills will still be a factor.  These player's are expected to succeed by physically overpowering their opponent.  The "Small" group will consist of player's under 210 pounds, and their Athletic Score will put more of an emphasis their agility score (based on the short shuttle and 3-cone drill), as well as raw speed.  Basically, if you can't overpower your opponent, you want to be able to evade them.  Player's who are between 200 and 210 pounds will be graded on both scales to see where they fit best.

One issue that occurs, is you sometimes have a player who so thoroughly dominates either his Athletic Score or his Stat Score, that it can bury a failure somewhere else.  Take Troy Edwards, the 13th pick of the 1999 draft as an example.  His Stat Score was 2.160 standard deviations above average, which is shockingly good.  Unfortunately his Athletic Score was -0.630 standard deviations below average.  Since I am looking for people who have a physical advantage over their opponent, and a history of meeting this potential, the computer will cut any prospect from consideration who wasn't at least average in both areas.

There is an additional issue.  I'm still not sure whether to adjust the Stat Score for players who competed at the Division II or III level.  Making such an adjustment would be easy, but I just haven't decided yet how much of a deduction to make.

So, here are the top 5 results from each year, including their final score, where they were selected, and whether they were graded as a Big or Small receiver:

2012
Derek Carrier Undrafted 1.606 Big
Michael Floyd  pick #13   0.717 Big
Marvin McNutt pick #194 0.660 Big
Justin Blackmon  pick #5    0.557  Big

Alshon Jeffrey pick #45   0.483 Big                              

Derek Carrier is a bit of an oddball, coming from tiny Beloit College.  It will be interesting to see if he becomes anything , or if I will have to start creating a penalty for players from such low levels of competition.

2011

Jonathan Baldwin  pick #26   1.098 Big   Next stop, Bustville!  

Julio Jones pick #6   0.814  Big

Torrey Smith pick #58   0.643  Small           

Stephen Burton  pick #236   0.513 Big 

Cecil Shorts pick #114   0.484 Small

2010

Dez Bryant pick #24   0.998 Big

Mike Williams pick #101   0.690  Big

Victor Cruz  Undrafted    0.685  Big or 0.590 Small(listing both because it’s interesting to me)

Andre Roberts pick #88    0.640 Small

Emmanuel Sanders pick #82   0.588 Small           

There was no combine data for Eric Decker, Demaryius Thomas, or Danario Alexander.  If there had been I suspect they would have made the list.

2009

Kenny Britt pick #30  0.807 Big

Hakeem Nicks pick #29   0.720  Big

Ramses Barden  pick #85   0.705  Big

Mike Thomas pick #107    0.503 Small

Mike Wallace  pick #84    0.315  Small

No combine for Michael Crabtree

2008

James Hardy pick #41   0.413  Big  Ooops! That didn't turn out well. 

Jordy Nelson  pick #36   0.411  Big

Pierre Garcon  pick #205   0.388  Big

Donnie Avery pick #33   0.363  Small

Earl Bennett pick #70   0.169   Small             

This was just a terrible year for receivers.

2007

Calvin Johnson  pick #2   1.881   Big

Robert Meachem  pick #27   0.661   Big  One of the more disappointing players.  

Mike Sims-Walker  pick #79   0.490  Big
Dwayne Bowe  pick #23   0.435   Big

Laurent Robinson   pick #75   0.381   Big

2006

Miles Austin Undrafted   0.851  Big

Greg Jennings pick #52   0.750  Small

Brandon Marshall  pick #119   0.640  Big

Marques Colston  pick #252    0.608  Big

Derek Hagan  pick #82   0.599  Big                           

A banner year for the computer.  Fortunately the computer is a humble guy, and doesn’t  make much fuss about it.

2005

Vincent Jackson  pick #61    2.019  Big

Dante Ridgeway pick #192   0.990  Big  Not one of the computer’s finer moments

Mike Williams pick #10   0.988 (now known as “the fat Mike Williams”) Big

Roddy White pick #27   0.815  Small

Braylon Edwards pick #3   0.658  Big

That’s not a typo.  Vincent Jackson is indeed 2 standard deviations above average. 

2004

Larry Fitzgerald pick #3   1.014  Big

Lee Evans pick #13  0.855  Small

Reggie Williams pick #9   0.797  Big

Rashaun Woods pick #30  0.605  Big  Honestly, I'm not sure what happened with this guy.

Jerricho Cotchery pick #108   0.588  Big 

As I said before, this is just a very basic way of doing things, and not what I would really recommend.  Trying to boil things down to one overall score just doesn't work as well as looking over a broader set of smaller scores.  Using a broader set of data lets you get more of a sense as to how balanced a player is in a wide range of areas.  

Still, while the computer does make some mistakes here (Jon Baldwin, Mike "The fat one" Williams, James Hardy, etc.) many of these mistakes are no worse than what actual NFL teams did.  The spreadsheet also scored major coups in selecting players like Victor Cruz, Marques Colston, Brandon Marshall, Miles Austin, and Mike "Not the fat one" Williams, as well as others, all in the later rounds or undrafted.  Overall, out of the 40 listed prospects (not counting the 2012 draft class, since it is too early for that), 67.5% arguably became successes according to my odd definition of the term.  That is in comparison to a overall average success rate of 24.39% for all drafted receivers, or a 22.5% median league-wide success rate for individual NFL teams.  Some players like Emmanuel Sanders also appear poised to enter the "success" list as their playing time increases, but I'll leave that alone for now.

I'm not saying that players should be graded in such a simple manner.  I'm just saying that even a method this ridiculously simple should outperform most NFL GMs, and that a more sophisticated version, along with some limited film study, should produce excellent results.  I'll get into exploring some of the ways to refine things even further here.

The Kangaroo Score

The Kangaroo Score was something I came up with while trying to identify NFL Draft prospects that could become successful pass rushers.  I have seen other people who have used a similar method, but mine still has the honor of having the goofiest name.  So, I win on that point.

The score largely comes from a prospect's vertical jump and their broad jump.  Of course, not all jumps are equal.  A player weighing 200 pounds with a 36 inch vertical jump, simply isn't showing the same power or explosiveness as a 250 pound guy with the same jump. My solution was to multiply a players weight by their jump,  find what the average result was, and the see how many standard deviations a player's score was from that average.  It's just a simple way of gauging a player's lower body power.  We can extrapolate from this a simple mass times velocity equals force view of things, with the jump being used as the measure of velocity, to estimate the amount of force a player could generate against his opponent.  So, basically, I look at players as human projectiles.

For some positions, like defensive tackle, this could be seen as a measure of the power that they are generating when the ball is snapped..  It's sort a general test of an athlete's quick twitch muscles, and their overall explosiveness.  For defensive tackles this measurement alone is more than adequate to identify prospects, but I'll generally refine things a bit further.  As you move outwards from the defensive tackle, and a player's mass decreases from defensive ends to linebackers, to safeties, and finally to cornerbacks, you start to see agility become more of a factor.  The way I see it, a player (at any position, but in this case a pass rusher), could either explode through or past his opponent, or try to evade/work around them.  So, as their mass decreases it becomes more important that the player's score in the agility drills (short shuttle and 3-cone)go up.  Ideally a player would do well in all these categories, but that is somewhat unusual.  Continuing with the human projectile idea, you could compare a guy with a high Kangaroo score to a depleted uranium round fired from a tank, while a guy who also has a good agility score is more like a heat seeking missile.  Hmm, this human projectile idea is sounding more and more idiotic with every word I type.

Sticking with defensive tackles for a minute, let me add this.  While this explosiveness might be all that you need for a nose tackle, who can satisfy a team's expectations by simply being fat and immovable, the more their agility score goes up the more likely they are to create at least some pressure on the quarterback.

Here are some noteworthy defensive tackles and what their scores look like:

Player              Kangaroo Score            Agility Score
Haloti Ngata         2.043                            -0.645
B.J. Raji               1.478                            -0.531
Jay Ratliff              0.821                            1.530
Ndamukong Suh   0.900                            1.227
Geno Atkins          0.793                            1.056

On the other hand we have these guys, most of whom were highly drafted, that are entering bozo/failure territory (at least for their draft position):

Player              Kangaroo Score              Agility Score
Terrence Cody      -1.242                            -1.864
Torell Troup          -0.481                            -0.158
Glenn Dorsey        -1.466                            -0.188
Kentwan Balmer   -0.245                            -0.451
Justin Harrell          0.041                             -0.343

In Justin Harrell's case people might argue that he failed because of constant injuries, but I suspect there was little upside there to begin with.

The bulk of the players fall somewhere between these two groups, so evaluating them becomes a bit trickier.  My point is simply to suggest that such risky and subjective speculation should probably be reserved for the later rounds of the draft, and that high draft picks should generally conform more towards players who actually proved to be worth a damn.

Just for shits and giggles, I thought I would also throw out this score, though technically he is a 3-4 defensive end:
Player             Kangaroo Score                 Agility Score
J.J.Watt                 1.473                               2.347

Hmm, J.J. Watt, how can you not love those numbers?

Since I will probably refer to the Kangaroo Score somewhat frequently, I should probably mention something for the sake of clarity.  The Kangaroo Score for a player at one position generally shouldn't be compared directly to a player at another position.  This is because the score is a measure of how much they deviate from their peers at a particular position.  So, a linebacker with a 1.250 score may look good, but if he was dropped into the defensive tackle pool, he would get crushed, and his score would be much lower.

There are some other factors, such as college production, that I think are good to toss into the mix, but for now I just wanted to present a little bit related to the actual value of the NFL Combine.  People often want to dismiss its usefulness, but there is some important information that comes from it.  Later on I will try to show how some of these things relate to other positions (hmm, this was initially supposed to be about pass rushing 3-4 outside linebackers, but I got sidetracked).

Here are some links to different player positions, that illustrate the effects of the Kangaroo Score:
3-4 Outside Linebackers and 4-3 Defensive Ends
Athleticism and the Offensive Line
Athleticism and the Offensive Line pt. 2  Compares traits of  late round successes to highly drafted busts
'Big' Wide Receivers - focuses on Aaron Mellette, but illustrates the point.
Running Backs - talks about how the Kangaroo Score relates to being a 'power' running back
Athleticism and the Defensive Tackle -Compares the athleticism of successful DTs to busts.

An introduction to my lunacy

For a number of years I have been part of a loathsome subculture known as "draft geeks", "draft-niks", or simply guys "with no life".  This circle of bottom dwelling football fans takes a peculiar interest in the annual NFL Draft, trying to prognosticate the future success or failure of athletes who are making the leap from the college level to the NFL.  More often than not, our hunches prove to be wrong, but when we are right we become insufferable boors to all of our friends, happily ruining their Sunday diversions with spreadsheets and analysis that nobody asked for. 

 At some point, I suspect, the game itself became less interesting to us than the machinations that go into constructing the team.  While more stout and virile men take pleasure in watching a middle linebacker decapitate a running back, we obsess over the meaning of a player's time in the 3-cone drill.  Some little boys dream of being quarterbacks, some dream of improving on the Lewin Career Forecast. If given the opportunity to choose between hanging out with the cheerleaders, or getting to run our fingers through Mel Kiper's shellacked locks of hair, our decision would be embarrassingly simple and foolish.   

Do we care if the home teams wins on Sunday?  Or are we more interested in seeing that sixth round pick wide receiver, from North by Northeast South Dakota State, exceed all expectations and become a mediocrity rather than an outright failure, thus proving our wisdom to our uninterested friends and family?  Well, I guess we can agree to disagree on what matters more.

This sort of devoted lunacy ends up crossing over at some point to join the analytics crowd.  Frankly, I still believe the word "analytics" is made up, but I'll try to ignore this for the moment.  I suppose "soulless bastards" just doesn't have the same ring to it (and wouldn't look as nice on a business card).  This circle of sad individuals goes beyond the simple talent evaluation game that is the draft, and focuses more on predicting outcomes for games and individuals, based on the questionable belief that numbers are good for something more than counting the number of illegitimate children Antonio Cromartie has spawned.

The "analytics" crowd, an appropriately anal group, is on a quest to destroy any magic or pleasure that exists in the world.  They don't want to hear any discussion of a player's heart, determination or moxie.  Those are merely the traits you ascribe to the slow and unathletic.  That player you love, the one with the slow time in the forty yard dash, and the weak vertical jump, he's what they would call an "outlier".  Outlier is the sophisticated way of saying "improbable success", and that is only if that player becomes a success.  Until that moment of unforeseen success, outliers are treated with contempt.  Wes Welker and Anquan Boldin are the anti-Christ in the eyes of the analytics crowd, and exist only to make otherwise smart people look stupid.  This may not seem like a terribly kind attitude to take towards two of the games more productive wide receivers, but how can we be expected to be fans of guys who throw such curve balls to all of our delicately crafted projections?  Don't they understand how long it takes to put together these spreadsheets and formulas that predicted their failure? 

Still, while these two related groups, the draft geeks and the analytics guys, can somewhat suck the life out of the room, the is a reason why their numbers and influence might be growing.  The sophistication and accuracy of their projections do seem to be improving to the point where I think they could probably better the efforts of most NFL general managers.  Some of these geeks are better than others.  Some of them still deserve a wedgie.  Almost all of them should be avoided on Sunday afternoon, when you just want to enjoy the game.  But their day is coming, much like it did in the world of baseball.  Hopefully it will all take place behind the scenes, so as not to annoy the mainstream audience who would rather not have their game ruined with scatter plots and regression analysis.  If nothing else, you can take comfort in the probability that these wise but annoying individuals still probably won't be able to get a date on Saturday night (though they would be too busy with their spreadsheets then anyway), and so they will probably be bred out of our society in the long run.  Until then, I'll be posting some thoughts related to these topics and awaiting my own wedgie.