I guess it's time to start poking and prodding at this year's crop of defensive tackles, much like we did last year. While we're gradually adjusting our approach to how we pick apart these players, things will largely appear fairly similar to how we have done things in the past.
While examining this year's defensive linemen, we've been forced to ask ourselves some rather difficult questions, that perhaps fall outside the normal realm of draft analysis. While most of these players will carry some amount of hype, and have their fair share of supporters, we're still just looking for a more objective method of weighing how exceptional they might really be. Exactly how fearsome are most of these draft prospects, and how can we really determine whether we are all being duped? As far as we can tell, there was only one way to answer this question.
We needed to figure out how many defensive tackles Reilly could eat over the course of a single year.
Now, this might seem like a slightly unusual question to ask. After all, we don't know if Reilly has a taste for long pig. All we can really say for sure is, he does seem to have a strong desire to eat the mailman. While the ferocity he shows to these civil servants is mainly due to his paranoid belief that the government is watching us through our mail slots, I can't dismiss the possibility that Reilly also might be somewhat feral. Whether he is more intimidating than a defensive tackle, however, is something that we have never actually solved.
Okay, so we still have to tackle the mathematical details of our little mystery, but this should be a fairly simple problem to solve. Because of his sensitive stomach, and his demands to be treated like royalty, Reilly already gets a not insubstantial amount of meat in his diet. On average, he goes through about 3.5 pounds of baked chicken per week (pre-cooked weight). That adds up to 182 pounds of chicken per year. I was rather impressed by this result, but this number still doesn't quite get us to our solution.
Perhaps more interesting, is what happens when we look at Reilly's impact on the world's chicken population. According to the Google-tubes, an average chicken weighs about 5.8 pounds. Of that weight, only about 50-60% is actual meat, with the rest being bones and blood for your Santeria rituals. This means that over the course of a year, Reilly is responsible for the slaughter of somewhere around 52-62 chickens. Entire families are getting wiped out to appease my four-legged fiend, and so far, he has shown no signs of remorse.
We also found that a typical human body is about 40% muscle and 15% fat,
which gives us a combined total of 55% consumable product (we're
surprisingly similar to chicken, it turns out). The extent to which NFL players diverge from these average results is difficult to judge, as the NFL doesn't seem to feel that identifying the nutritional value of draft prospects is worth incorporating into the combine. Regardless, if most of my friends
are around 170 pounds (maybe we are being generous), they would yield about 93.5 pounds of consumable
goods. So, we now know that, if necessary, Reilly could dispose of about 2 of my friend's bodies, over the course of a single year These are probably useful things to know.
But wait, we seem to be forgetting something! By my rough estimate, about 80% of Reilly's diet is still made up of kibble. What if we eliminated that, and put him on an all flesh diet? Suddenly, we would have Reilly consuming 910 pounds of meat in a year. That works out to 261-313 chickens. Additionally, if a 300 pound defensive tackle would yield about about 165 pounds of man-kibble, that means Reilly could eat about 5.5 defensive tackles per year. If we had a large enough freezer, Reilly could devour an entire Aaron Donald every 2.1 months. Or, he could pick DeSean Jackson's bones clean in just about 38.7 days. If Reilly felt jealous of the time I spent socializing with friends, he could quickly dispose of 9.7 of them over the next year (a good thing to remind them of, if they should ever ask me to help them move furniture)..
Suddenly, we seem to find ourselves in a position where the big scary defensive linemen aren't nearly as intimidating as they once seemed. That an arthritic 13 year old dog could wreak this sort of havoc is sort of an eye opener. How many of these prancing fat men, in their brightly colored spandex outfits, could claim that they were capable of something so terrifying? I really don't think a single one of these supposed tough guys could consume nearly half a ton of human flesh, which clearly means that Reilly must be significantly more intimidating than any of them. The logic here is indisputable. The thought that I go to sleep each night with such a potentially deranged predator lurking by my side, suddenly feels a bit unnerving.
We are, however, intimidated by Takeru Kobayashi. That guy could probably pose a legitimate challenge to Reilly.
Okay. Now that we have that settled, let's get back to our examination of this year's crop of future disappointments.
As always, I will include the player's Kangaroo Score (our measure of lower body power), and the Agility Score
(which comes from their short shuttle drill and 3-cone drill). Each
score is given in the form of how many standard deviations that a player
is above, or below, the average result for someone in their position
group. If you want to, you can also read the post on Athleticism and the Defensive Tackle,
to see why we think these traits might have an impact on a player's
likelihood of succeeding. Based on the role we expect a player to play,
and the type of defense we expect them to be in (3-4 vs 4-3), we will
sometimes shift the degree to which we value one attribute over
another. I will also list the average number of tackles for a loss
(TFL)
that a player had in their last two years in college, just to provide
some rough measure of how disruptive they were.
This list will continue to be modified/updated as new data and
prospects come to my attention. I won't list every prospect
here, but will just focus on the ones that I think are interesting for
one reason or another. Last updated: 3/29/2016
Joey Bosa, DE, Ohio State
Kangaroo Score: -0.269 Agility Score: 2.331 TFL: 18.5
We'll end up discussing Joey Bosa a bit more thoroughly when we get to our post on outside pass rushers, but for now we just wanted to consider the possibility of turning him into a 3-4 defensive end. It's just an idea we found a bit entertaining. Because we are comparing him to a much heavier group of athletes, his scores will come out quite a bit differently here. The first problem we run into is that Bosa would probably need to bulk up by about 20 pounds to play the 3-4 defensive end position, which might require going to the all cheeseburger diet that we sometimes recommend. Since we could probably expect him to take about a year to gain this weight, you'd probably end up squandering about 20% of his rookie contract just waiting for him to fatten up, which would obviously be quite a waste. Adding bulk wouldn't have any effect on his Kangaroo Score, which is just mediocre, but it probably would reduce his agility to some degree. Fortunately his agility results suggest he could give up some ground here, and still remain significantly above average. While his lower body power is lower than what we want to see for this position, his explosiveness is about 1.610 standard deviations above average (relative to this group of players), when his vertical and broad jumps aren't adjusted to account for his weight. Unfortunately, that too would probably drop a fair bit, if he bulked up. We still suspect that Bosa could play this position, in theory, but probably only at a rather mediocre level. Without the advantage of a higher degree of power or explosive power, we suspect he would get buried in the running game, while simultaneously having his potential as a pass rusher greatly reduced. I guess this little thought experiment didn't turn out to be as interesting as we originally thought it would. This sort of position switch is increasingly striking us as a rather risky idea.
DeForest Buckner, DE/DT, Oregon
Kangaroo Score: 0.398 Agility Score: 0.661 TFL: 15
Last year, we were a little bit critical of Arik Armstead, Buckner's former teammate at Oregon. The hype for Armstead seemed to revolve around his combine results, and overlook his lack of production, as well as the possibility that he wasn't even the best defensive lineman on his own team. Despite those concerns, Armstead was still selected with the 17th overall pick. Now we get to look at the player that we suspected was the real star of the show at Oregon. While Buckner's Kangaroo Score is a tad lower than Armstead's result of 0.896, both exhibit at least reasonable lower body power. Because of some minor differences in Buckner's broad jump, versus his vertical, this result might be a slight underestimate. If we look at Buckner's non-weight adjusted jumps, he produced a more impressive result of 1.089, suggesting that he might have more of an explosive burst than pure raw power. When it came to agility, Buckner slightly outperformed Armstead, whose result were a still respectable 0.412. In the end, neither of them produced what we consider mind-blowing results at the combine, but they still fell into a fairly acceptable range. The main difference between them is in the way that Buckner dominated his team's statistical production, especially in his final season, while Armstead produced rather pathetic results in his time at Oregon. While we could complain that Buckner's stats might have been padded by a higher percentage of assisted tackles than we would like to see, that is probably nitpicking. When Reilly went to watch the clips of Buckner's games, he came away with the impression that Buckner generally looked quite solid and respectable, even if he wasn't necessarily a consistently overwhelming force. Reilly also suggested that Buckner's effectiveness as a pass rusher seemed to improve significantly when he lined up inside, where he was able to target offensive guards who tend to be less physically gifted, and probably struggled a bit more against more powerful offensive tackles. In the end, it seems obvious that Buckner is destined to become a 3-4 defensive end, where we suspect he will probably turn out to be a good player, even if we aren't confident that he is a lock to become someone who terrifies opponents. His strengths seem to significantly outweigh his weaknesses, and he appears to be one of the safer prospects among this year's defensive linemen, and is most likely worth a 1st round pick.
A'Shawn Robinson, DT, Alabama
Kangaroo Score: -0.682 Agility Score: -0.494 TFL: 7
It almost feels as if Alabama is running the most pointless and uninspired cloning program in the entire world. This year we have A'shawn. Next year it will be B'Shawn, who will quickly be followed by C'Shawn and D'Shawn. Alabama seems to have an endless stream of these sorts of guys. While we're sure that somebody has an explanation for why Robinson is
considered a 1st round prospect, this information currently eludes us. Undoubtedly, all of the clones in this product line will be touted as potential 1st round draft picks, since little seems to stand in the way of the Alabama hype machine. From our perspective, this is a prospect with no discernible athletic
advantages, and statistical production that was at best mediocre. The
only positive spin we can put on this is that Robinson is one of the
younger defensive tackles in this draft, so maybe people feel he hasn't
hit his peak yet. We would avoid him completely.
Andrew Billings, DT/NT, Baylor
Kangaroo Score: 0.358 Agility Score: -1.104 TFL: 13.75
Reilly and I have sort of been rooting for Billings. For a prospect who will only be turning 20 this March, his statistical production was gradually becoming fairly impressive. The problem is, while his numbers in college were good, we wouldn't say that they had quite reached the level that merited a 1st round pick. If he had stayed in school for another year it is quite possible that a more physically matured Billings would have reached our production targets, but who knows? Then you factor in his combine results, which were a bit murky and erratic. The main thing in his favor was the result from his broad jump, which was 1.300 standard deviations above average, and showed the type of lower body power that we hope to find in a nose tackle. Based on what we have seen, he plays quite a bit like his measurables would suggest. He is stout and powerful, but probably not terribly nimble (his pro day would boost his agility score to -0.497). The question we always ask here is, should you really be taking run stuffing nose tackles in the first round? We had similar concerns with Danny Shelton last year, and the results of that pick are still bearing questionable fruit. We think Billings could possibly turn out better than Shelton, but we still tend to lean towards only using mid-round picks on this position.
Robert "The Defenestrator" Nkemdiche, DT, Ole Miss
Kangaroo Score: 0.992 Agility Score: ? TFL: 5.5
For someone who was a very highly touted high school prospect, we think it's kind of funny that his greatest accomplishment so far was falling out of a fourth story hotel window, and surviving. That's actually kind of impressive if you think about it. Maybe he was watching reruns of the Fall Guy, or maybe it was part of some elaborate religious ceremony commemorating the life of Joseph Smith. Who really knows? Oh wait...you say he was probably just stoned? Ah, okay, that probably makes more sense. Really, the thing that surprises us the most is that this would make it two years in a row that we have had idiot draft prospects leaping/falling out of windows, if we counted Josh Shaw. We're kind of hoping this becomes a trend. Regardless, while Nkemdiche has some impressive lower body power, and appears to be the type of athlete we often like, he really didn't accomplish much in college. At some point a player's actual performance has to live up to their hype and potential, and we don't think Nkemdiche ever did. If he was a 4th round pick, we might consider him, but the 1st round would be way too much of a gamble for someone with his history of under-performing and general idiocy.
Jarran Reed, DT, Alabama
Kangaroo Score: 0.029 Agility Score: -0.470 TFL: 5.5
One of our friends frequently likes to say,"You can't polish a turd, but
you can roll it in glitter". As far as we can tell, Alabama must be a
glitter factory. Reed might be moderately more athletic than his teammate A'Shawn Robinson, but we really see almost no meaningful difference between them. We almost have to wonder if Alabama has some sort of requirement that their players depart the school with the athletic ability of a tree stump. A pox upon your house, Nick Saban. Stop sending us these types of bozos.
Sheldon Rankins, NT/DT, Louisville
Kangaroo Score: 1.230 Agility Score: 0.472 TFL: 13.25
We've run across a number of articles that were critical of Rankins' size of 6"1" and 299 pounds. Some people have even tried to compare Rankins to Aaron Donald because of these superficial issues, though we don't think Rankins is nearly quick or agile enough for that to be accurate. We're leaning towards the idea that his smaller size is a bit of an illusion. Based on his Kangaroo Score, Rankins actually has fairly ideal lower body power for a nose tackle, and his 33.5" arms are above average for someone of his height. The really interesting thing is that his Agility Score, while not a stunning result, is significantly better than what we usually find among players who could handle the nose tackle position. So, we think he could be a rather versatile player, who can hold up against the run, while also producing some occasional pressure on the quarterback. As far as the aspects of Rankins' statistical production that interest us, Rankins checks out quite well there too. For the past two seasons his results have generally been significantly above average in almost every category, despite Louisville's questionable decision to frequently line him up as a defensive end. If a team can accept the possibility that he might not be a double digit sack guy, we think Rankins will probably turn out pretty well, and is worth a 1st round pick.
Jonathan Bullard, DE/DT, Florida
Kangaroo Score: 0.122 Agility Score: 0.760 TFL: 13
Bullard is a mildly interesting prospect, though there seems to be some debate as to what position he will play, due to weighing in at 285 pounds. We tried running his numbers through the computer as a 4-3 defensive end (where his results come out very differently), and while there is some possibility that could work, we weren't sure it was an ideal fit. As a defensive tackle, his athletic traits are also a bit peculiar. He doesn't appear to have great lower body power, but if we remove his weight from the calculation, his explosiveness would be about 1.089 standard deviations above average. He actually has some surprising similarities to Aaron Donald, though Bullard is a bit less agile, and probably not quite as quick. The other big difference is that Donald had three seasons of extremely dominant college play, starting at a much younger age, while Bullard was a bit of a late bloomer with limited success prior to this past season. Because of the way he was moved around on the line, it makes it a bit difficult to judge his statistical production, compared to someone with a more fixed position. Still, we would probably say that his results were a fair bit above average in his final college season. If he was paired with a powerful nose tackle, and used as a 3 technique defensive tackle, we suspect he could turn into a useful player. Either way, we think the current suggestions that he should be taken in the late 1st to early 2nd round might set up unfair expectations of him, and could be a tad risky. If he slipped to the 3rd round, allowing a team to hedge its bets, and went to a team with a 4-3 defense that had a quality nose tackle, we think he could be an interesting pick.
Kenny Clark, DT, UCLA
Kangaroo Score: -0.239 Agility Score: -0.076 TFL: 8.25
People claim that Clark is going to be a high draft pick, but Reilly and I have no idea what to make of this. In many ways, Clark reminds us of Leonard Williams, who also confused us a fair bit. They both produced rather respectable stats in college, though Clark only did so for one season, versus Williams who did so for three. With both players, there was no clear sign that they possessed any sort of physical advantages in terms of measurable speed, quickness, power or agility. That raised some concerns as to how they would deal with the more physically gifted players in the NFL. It's not that there was anything wrong with them athletically. They just lacked any evidence of being exceptionally gifted. When we watched them play, both players also struck us as fairly active guys, who kept moving towards the ball, without necessarily being physically dominant. So, much like we said with Leonard Williams last year, we'll abstain from guessing what will happen with Clark. He's not necessarily someone we would want to bet on becoming a success, but he's also not someone we would bet against. All we can say is that a high draft pick might be a bit of a gamble for someone like this.
Vernon Butler, NT, Louisiana Tech
Kangaroo Score: 1.974 Agility Score: -0.557 TFL: 11.75
Based on his pro day results, we've had to radically alter our opinion of Butler. At the combine, Butler produced a Kangaroo Score of just 0.460, which is a bit underwhelming for a nose tackle. At this pro day, he boosted this result to 1.974, which is outstanding. While we tend to be a bit dismissive of the need for high agility with
these sorts of players, we might also argue that Butler's results are a tad better
than you normally find in players his size, which could be interesting. The main problem we have with Butler relates to his statistical production. In general his results weren't bad at all, but relative to his team's defense they were a tad lower than what we would have liked to see. Yes, he arguably made more tackles for a loss than you typically see from a nose tackle, but his other results were a bit weaker. What worries us about this is that we would have expected someone with his exceptional sort of athleticism to overwhelm his opponents a bit more than he seems to have done. This is especially true when you consider the somewhat lower level of competition he faced in college. He seems to have the tools to become a star, but in the little we have seen of him, he didn't always execute quite as well as we might expect. While we are generally wary of taking nose tackles with high draft picks, we still have to admit that we can respect the enormous physical potential that Butler possesses. If he was available in the 2nd or 3rd round, we might give him some consideration, though most people seem to think he will be taken a bit higher than that.
Austin Johnson, DT/NT, Penn State
Kangaroo Score: -0.805 Agility Score: -0.584 TFL: 10.5
When we look at Johnson's statistical production relative to his team, we could argue that his results were fairly impressive, even if they were somewhat isolated to his 2015 season. Unfortunately, we're still not terribly confident about his future, or that of his teammates Carl Nassib and Anthony Zettel. Maybe part of the problem was the Penn State schedule, which was probably a bit mediocre this year. Or, maybe we're worried that Johnson just had a brief statistical surge, brought on by drinking unicorn blood? Who can really say? It looks like Johnson might have padded his stats a bit more than we would like against some of the softer teams, and became noticeably quieter against higher level competition. While he was responsible for a surprisingly high 8.8% of his team's tackles, 61.5% of these tackles were assists, which isn't exactly the sort of result you want to see. Then, you have the not so minor issue that his results prior to 2015 were much more humble, which makes you wonder if his performance last year was an anomaly. Finally, we have his measurable traits from the combine, which are more than just a little bit worrisome. While we could ignore his poor agility results, since we don't expect nose tackles to do well in that area, his lower body power (the dreaded Kangaroo Score), is well below what we would hope to see. We currently seem to see him listed as a potential late 1st to early 2nd round prospect, but that is way too rich for our blood. He might not be as risky a prospect as Terrence Cody was, but that's about as optimistic a statement as we can make about Johnson. We probably wouldn't even select him if he fell to the 7th round.
Adolphus Washington, DT, Ohio State
Kangaroo Score: -1.156 Agility Score: -1.045 TFL: 8.75
We're probably going to spend a fair bit of the off-season criticizing players from Ohio State. Somehow, it seems as if the majority of their team is going to be in this draft, and it is reasonable to suspect that the bulk of them are going to fail to amount to much once they reach the NFL. While Washington's statistical production is borderline respectable, we have to suspect that the leads his team played with created favorable circumstances for him. The talent that surrounded him at Ohio State also probably gave him a helping hand. Of course, "the talent" at Ohio State didn't help Adolphus to avoid getting arrested for solicitation of prostitution from an undercover cop. This raises an important question. Exactly how screwed up do you have to be as a college football player, in order to be unable to take advantage of the plethora of bimbos that are guided towards members of your college's sports teams? Situations like this really make you appreciate the more progressive approach employed at Louisville, which would have helped to avoid all of this embarrassment. Then we come to his rather wretched measurable traits from the combine, which cause huge concerns for us. He's supposedly viewed as a 2nd round prospect, but we'd avoid him altogether.
Chris Jones, DT, Mississippi State
Kangaroo Score: 0.039 Agility Score: 0.396 TFL: 5.5
Based upon his entertaining 40 yard dash, I wouldn't be shocked if female fans felt that Jones deserved to be a 1st round pick. When we consider the rest of his combine results, Jones looks like an exceptionally average athlete. Across the board, his numbers are pointing towards the idea that he has just average speed, power, agility and explosiveness. There's nothing necessarily bad about an average result, it just gives us fewer reasons to get excited. When we looked at his statistical production at Mississippi State, we ran into results that generally fell a bit short of what we would like to see. While we've only gotten to watch a small sample of his games, we really didn't think he looked bad at all, and sometimes wondered if the way that his team moved him around from DE to 3 technique to nose tackle might have hampered his production. In the end though, it doesn't matter too much. We still don't see an undeniable argument to suggest that a high draft pick wouldn't be a bit too risky to use on someone like Jones. If a team selected Jones in the 3rd or 4th round, we wouldn't necessarily mock them for their decision, but even at that point, we'd probably have other prospects that we preferred over Jones..
Bronson Kaufusi, DE/DT, BYU
Kangaroo Score: -0.465 Agility Score: 2.001 TFL: 15
We're just going to toss this idea out there, though we don't have any concrete evidence at this point. We think Kaufusi might be the one who threw Nkemdiche out of the window. Don't hold us to this. It's just a theory. Now, if there if one good thing about drafting a Mormon, it is that you probably don't have to worry about the player getting arrested for beating his wife (wives?) or driving his car into a tree while he is drunk. That just isn't the way they roll. If there is one bad thing about drafting a Mormon, it is trying to dig up their stats on a truly terrible college web site. Oh, and there is also the fact that these guys age like Dominican baseball players. Kaufusi could be 47 years old, as far as I can tell (or, probably somewhere around 23). We're kind of interested in Kaufusi, in the same way that we were curious about turning Joey Bosa into a 3-4 defensive end. Like Bosa, Kaufusi has the frame for that position, but without the need to add much more bulk. Also, similar to Bosa, Kaufusi's measurable traits would suggest that he would be relying on agility, rather than power, if he were to play this position. When we've seen him lined up inside, it did appear that this lack of power was frequently an obstacle for him, as he would sometimes get buried by other teams who were running the ball. Most of his stats against the run were also fairly mediocre. As a pass rusher, however, his numbers were pretty damn good, even if a fair amount of his success came against lower levels of competition. We also tried to put him into the computer as a 4-3 defensive end (which is closer to what he played at BYU), but his most exceptional traits became a bit pedestrian when compared to that group of athletes. We think Kaufusi is a very interesting prospect, but we're just not sure if there is an ideal position for him. In the end, we suspect he will wind up as a 3-4 DE, who could struggle against the run, but prove useful in nickel formations as a pass rusher. Currently, people seem to be projecting that he will be selected somewhere in the 2nd to 3rd round, but we would only consider him on the lower end of that range.
Sheldon Day, DT, Notre Dame
Kangaroo Score: -0.867 Agility Score: 0.700 TFL: 11.5
Day's combine results and statistical production sort of have us envisioning him as a very poor man's Fletcher Cox. Like Cox, Day's combine results seem to point towards the idea that he is rather quick and agile, but probably not terribly powerful. Unfortunately, Cox's result in both areas were still significantly better than what we see with Day. so we wouldn't say that Day's upside was nearly as impressive. While we thought that Day was a sprightly and amusing fat man to watch, he appears to play much like his measurable traits would suggest he would. Also, similar to Cox, Day's statistical production in his final college season significantly dwarfed what he had done in prior years, and their impact on their team's defense was roughly similar. While Day's effectiveness at creating disruptive plays behind the line of scrimmage went up significantly in 2015, Notre Dame also tended to be playing with much more significant leads than they have in recent seasons, which probably created favorable circumstances. We saw a similar statistical surge from his teammate, the physically unimpressive Romeo Okwara, this past year. That really makes us wonder if these guys were suddenly becoming quality players, or if they were both benefiting from some difficult to specify change in their environment that might be making them look better than they really should. Further compounding the problem of Day's surge in 2015, is the question of the opponents he seemed to do the best against. Of his 4 sacks this year, two came against Texas and Boston College, who were both having ridiculous struggles in pass protection all season (with respective sack rates of 11.2% and 10.1%). The other two sacks came against Temple and Massachusetts, whose team sack rates are fairly respectable (3.9% and 5.5% respectively), but are both lower tier teams that generally don't face opponents of Notre Dame's caliber. Against higher quality team's it wasn't uncommon to see Day get buried by his opponents, and for his production to drop significantly. He's probably only suitable for a team with a 4-3 defense, and if he is going to succeed he'll probably need to be surrounded with teammates who can compensate for his lack of power. We have some significant doubts about whether he will be able to succeed against the higher quality athletes in the NFL, so we probably wouldn't be willing to spend the 3rd round pick that many people seem to suggest he will cost.
Javon Hargrave, DT, South Carolina State
Kangaroo Score: 1.149 Agility Score: -0.556 TFL: 23
I guess Hargrave could be one of our oddball Quayshawne Buckley picks for this year. There isn't an abundance of information on him, so we can only speculate based on the little bit of data that is available. His combine numbers point towards him having fairly ideal speed, quickness and power, though he might be a bit less graceful than what we would hope to see. When we look at what he did in college, it is safe to say that he was the dominant force on his teams defense. While you could criticize the level of competition he faced, his numbers would still be impressive even if we cut them in half, and he was rather consistent over the past two seasons. Still, there are a few areas of concern that we have with Hargrave. While he was extremely disruptive behind the line of scrimmage, his numbers when he isn't shooting through the opponent's offensive line are a bit lower than we might expect. He is also 23 years old, which might raise concerns that he was pummeling younger less physically mature players. Finally, because of his somewhat smaller size (6'1" and 309#), and slightly shorter arms (32"), we would tend to suspect he would only be appealing to teams running a 4-3 defense. The upside is that we generally only see him ranked as a 4th or 5th round pick. At that point in the draft, we think taking a shot on a goofy prospect like Hargrave could be a rather appealing option. The risk versus reward ratio looks reasonable. Then again, we still think Quayshawne Buckley was probably a better prospect, and look how that has turned out so far.
Dean Lowry, DE/DT, Northwestern
Kangaroo Score: 0.553 Agility Score: 1.297 TFL: 10.75
When you look at Lowry's measurables, and see that he is a hair under 6'6" and around 296#, it practically screams 3-4 defensive end. His 40 yard dash time of 4.88 seconds, as well as his 10-yard split of 1.70 seconds, were also quite encouraging results for a player of his size. Then you consider his stubby 31" tyrannosaurus arms and you start to worry a bit. We generally don't like to fret about arm length too much, but there does come a point where stumpy arms might be a legitimate problem. We also worry that outside of having a relatively high share of his team's sacks the past few seasons, the rest of his statistical production was a bit weak. Reilly seems to be leaning towards the idea that we should give up on using him as a 3-4 defensive end, and instead view him as a 3 technique defensive tackle. While his arm length issues would be less of a concern at that position, it still strikes me as a bit odd to have someone that tall playing such a position, but it might not be the worst idea. In the end, we both ended up agreeing that Lowry is probably an interesting enough athlete to merit some consideration in the 6th or 7th round.
Connor Wujciak, DT, Boston College
Kangaroo Score: 0.923 Agility Score: 1.477 TFL: 5.25
We were really hoping to find an unpolished gem here, since Wujciak appears to be such an excellent athlete. Sadly, our little investigation didn't turn up very much. While he's a fairly ideal physical specimen, his production in college was extremely lackluster. It was even sadder, when we saw that he was already 23 years old, which should have given him a potential advantage against his younger less physically developed opponents. As an UDFA, he might be worth bringing in, but I wouldn't expect too much from him. He kind of reminds me of the type of player that the Seahawks sometimes try to turn into offensive linemen. Such a switch wouldn't amaze me, since Wujciak does have fairly ideal physical traits for a guard.
Justin Zimmer, DT, Ferris State
Kangaroo Score: 1.061 Agility Score: 1.655 TFL: 19
We're not really sure what goes on at Ferris State University, but we like to think that their focus is on training young people to maintain carnival rides. Or, perhaps, it could be a film school with a very narrow focus on 1980's teen comedies. Either way, when a prospect comes from a school like this it presents some significant problems. First of all, it's hard to get all of the information that we would normally like to have. Secondly, while we don't mind trying to adjust a player's statistical production to compensate for their level of competition, Ferris State probably requires more of an adjustment than we are used to. In the end, though, it is still hard to overlook the fact that Zimmer does appear to be a rather high end athlete. He is explosive, powerful and agile. When it came to his production in college, it initially appears to be quite overwhelming, which is what you would hope to see. A player like this better be dominating his opponents at that level of competition. Unfortunately, there are a number of areas where his statistical production is probably getting inflated by things beyond just playing against bozos. His tackle numbers consistently seemed to be propped up by a much higher percentage of assisted tackles than we would really like to see. His productivity as a pass rusher also might be getting blown out of proportion a bit. Yes, his numbers in his final college season were very impressive, but prior to that we wouldn't say that his ability to disrupt plays behind the line of scrimmage was terribly shocking. We would have expected that someone with his physical gifts would have been more of a dominant force in his earlier seasons. Despite all of that nitpicking, we still think he could be a pretty interesting guy to select in the 7th round.
Vincent Valentine, NT, Nebraska
Kangaroo Score: 1.218 Agility Score: -0.490 TFL: 5.25
As far as I can tell, this guy is actually a video game character, who somehow wound up playing football at Nebraska. I'm not sure how that works, but we don't intend to explore that subject very deeply. The only reason we are including Valentine on this list, is that we are weirdly fascinated by the idea of picking up nose tackles at absolutely zero real cost. Considering that Valentine seems to be viewed as someone who might be an undrafted free agent, he falls right in the desired sweet spot of cheapness relative to physical potential. His statistical production at Nebraska was nothing to get overly excited about, though you have to view his poor results in 2015 with some open-mindedness since he appears to have been injured for much of the year. Still, that doesn't concern us too much. With nose tackles, we just want to find a large immovable blob. While his Kangaroo Score suggests that he has the sort of lower body power to fill this role, it actually might be underestimating him since there were some irregular results when balancing out his vertical jump and his broad jump. If we only focused on his broad jump, he would have a result that is 1.999 standard deviations above average for a defensive tackle, and something we find rather exciting. His agility results, while somewhat mixed, were actually fairly respectable for someone of his size. I wouldn't say that Reilly and I were terribly impressed by him, in the little we have seen, but he does rather closely resemble the athletic profile we look for in these bozos. If he can be acquired as an UDFA, he might be worth taking a look at.
Michael Pierce, NT, Samford
Kangaroo Score: 1.302 Agility Score: ? TFL: 7
This could be a very weird and interesting prospect. We had no idea who Pierce
was, and only stumbled across him while looking for the pro day results
of his teammate, James Bradberry. Yes, his Kangaroo Score
definitely shows the sort of lower body power we like to see in a nose
tackle, but that is still probably selling him short. When you just look at
his broad jump results, his score leaps to 2.846, which is
absolutely insane. Whether those results are accurate, is something we are still trying to figure out. It doesn't appear that he took part in the agility
drills, but as we've said in the past, we don't really care about that
very much when it comes to nose tackles. Still, we did watch a couple
of Pierce's games, and we were kind of stunned by the way he moved.
There didn't appear to be any of the lumbering off-balance awkwardness
that you normally expect to see in a player like this. He actually
looked surprisingly nimble. There were even plays where he (sort of)
dropped into coverage, or chased a player to the sidelines, where his
relative smoothness just looked absurd. We still don't have his 10-yard
split results (which we can now say was an excellent 1.67 seconds), but his 4.98 second 40 time is also a rather excellent result for a man of his size (6'0.3" and 329#).
That might help to explain the surprising range he has on the field.
When it came to his statistical production, we'd say his results were
respectable, but not out of this world. You also have to consider that
Samford plays a lot of games against lower levels of competition, so we
might have wanted his numbers to be a bit more gaudy. If there is an
area of some small concern, it is that he is a bit older than we would
really prefer, as he will be turning 24 this upcoming November.
Regardless, he is generally projected to go undrafted, which strikes us as a
potentially very questionable decision. We'd probably be tempted to
pounce on him in one of the later rounds, though we think even that
still might be getting him at a bargain price. Yup, we're developing a
bit of a man-crush on Pierce, though we have to admit that being able to acquire him cheaply is a big part of the appeal.
Monday, March 7, 2016
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
2016 Free Agent Dumpster Diving
We've been feeling a bit sluggish lately, and were considering the possibility of not doing a post about free agency this year. It's just not a subject that really excites either Reilly or myself. Then, we realized that we could use this as an opportunity to ridicule Stephen Ross, and the Dolphins in general, which picked up our spirits a little bit. After all, we don't really have much else to do until after the NFL Combine.
It really struck us as a mildly interesting coincidence that two of the players who interest us the most, among this year's potential free agents, come from the same poorly run team, the humble Dolphins. The poor sorry bastards we speak of would be running back Lamar Miller, and wide receiver Rishard Matthews. Now, don't get me wrong, we're not going to suggest that vast sums of money should be spent on either of these goofballs, we just think they are oddly interesting individuals, with potentially similar issues. We've liked them both, ever since they were mere draft prospects, and we're just curious as to whether they can escape the black hole that is Miami.
I guess we might as well start off with Lamar Miller, since we've already dropped him into the conversation of misused and under-appreciated players several times in the past. Watching Miller's career over the past four seasons has been more than just a little bit frustrating for us. As far as I can tell, Dolphins fans seem to be a bit divided as to how they feel about Miller, which is fine. Really, it's the attitude of the team's management that confuses us the most.
Over the past few years, there seems to have been a recurring message from the team, that they wished Miller was a more physical runner. I suppose they want a player who they can consistently pound between the tackles, which is fine. Such players do exist, and aren't that difficult to find. The problem is, Miller probably isn't really built for that. Despite weighing a reported 225 pounds, we still feel his measurable traits from the combine point towards him being an outside the tackles runner, which is they area where he seems to have thrived so far in his career. With a 0.071 Kangaroo Score, a 0.857 Agility Score, a 40 time of 4.34 seconds (with a 2nd Gear Score of 0.19), his strengths seems to lean in the direction of speed and elusiveness. You could somewhat fairly say that Miller has more in common with Jamaal Charles than he does with Adrian Peterson, based on these results. Unfortunately, all the Dolphins appear to see is a fairly large bodied running back, and not the skills that Miller actually possesses. So, they keep trying to bang that square peg into a round hole. The Dolphins management are, what we call in this field of study, "idiots".
Now, I'm not saying that Miller can't run the ball between the tackles, but with a player that has rather pedestrian lower body power (again, referring to the Kangaroo Score) it probably is more likely that they are going to require a respectable offensive line to consistently execute those sorts of running plays. That's probably not something the Dolphins have really provided.
There are some fine stat geeks out there who have made attempts to judge an offensive line's ability to assist running backs on plays like this, but I still find this subject to be a bit murky and debatable. Instead, I thought we would just show the Dolphins sack rates over the last 5 seasons, which I realize can appear to be an entirely unrelated issue. Just bear with me here.
While the precise extent to which an offensive line is helping or hurting a running back is a bit foggy, I think we can agree that the Dolphins O-Line has been a bit sub-par the past few seasons, when it comes to pass protection. Some might even say that they suck. Is it likely that they are significantly better as run blockers? I kind of doubt it, but the sort of athletic traits we look for in pass blockers, are also things we look at in run blockers, and I can't say that many of the players on their line have ever struck me as very interesting in either area.
Let's think about some of the linemen this team employed in 2015. Even if we can accept that Branden Albert and Mike Pouncey might be above average players (though I have some minor arguments against this), the rest of their line was horribly suspect. Billy Turner? Jason Fox? The laughably horrible Dallas Thomas (who has allowed 16 sacks in his past 25 games)? No, for the most part these guys are bozos. It almost makes you wonder if people were too harsh with poor Richie Incognito, and his questionable motivational techniques. Where is the great Jonathan Martin now, you sensitive hippies? Oh, right, he's out of the league, because he sucked. In retrospect, it makes you wonder if the lunatic was right, even if his tactics seemed a bit absurd.
Let's also consider the extent to which the team has continually tried to ignore what Miller has contributed, despite his circumstances. Miller has maintained a career rushing average of 4.6 yards, while accumulating 2,930 rushing yards, 887 receiving yards, and a combined total of 22 touchdowns. Despite that, the Dolphins have only handed the ball off to him about 12.8 times per game over the last 2 seasons. Yet, people only seem to see the lack of gaudy rushing totals, as if that was entirely his fault, and question the value of resigning him.
What if we looked at the two former 1st round running backs that the Dolphins have brought in from other teams, during the past few seasons, in their attempts to find their savior. Those players would be Knowshon Moreno and Reggie Bush. Both of these players came to the Dolphins in their 6th NFL season, with varying amounts of hype, but how had their statistical performances measured up at that point in their careers, compared to what Lamar Miller has done in his first four seasons?
Outside of the obvious disparity in opportunities, the results of these other players aren't noticeably better than those of Miller. You also have to consider that Moreno and Bush were brought to the Dolphins when they were 26, while Miller is still just 24. We can also point to the fact that Moreno and Bush came to the team having both missed 25% of the their career games due to injury, while Miller has so far only been on the inactive roster for 4.7% of his games. Yet, Moreno and Bush were brought in with some apparent intention of being utilized as starting running backs, while Miller has always been treated as if he were a step away from getting benched. Would Miller be treated differently, if he wasn't a former 4th round pick, but a 1st rounder instead? I suspect so, and that thought irritates me to a surprising degree.
Look, this whole situation is a mystery to me. I just find it interesting to contemplate the lunatic ways in which the minds of NFL GMs appear to operate. Am I endorsing that the Dolphins, or anybody else should spend vast sums to acquire Lamar Miller? No, absolutely not. I just think it would be nice to see him wind up somewhere that he could be appreciated for what he is, rather than treated like a red-headed step-child.
Okay, that's enough ranting on that subject. Let's move on to Rishard Matthews.
I think part of what makes Matthews interesting, probably stems from my deranged fascination with Lamar Miller. There seems to be a similar mount of neglect that has been given to both players. What this potential neglect says about how the Dolphins are run, and their ability to get the best players on the field, I won't say. I just think it is a bit interesting to observe. It's sort of like watching Donald Trump run for president, oddly fascinating and disturbing at the same time.
Now, when Matthews came to the league in the 2012 draft, Reilly and I probably would have ranked him somewhere in the range of our 7th or 8th highest rated receiver prospect for that year. At a whisker over six feet tall, and weighing (at the time) 217 pounds, he had a nice solid frame. In terms of speed, his forty times ranged somewhere between 4.54 seconds, and 4.44 seconds (at his pro day). So that checked out fine as well. With a 0.651 Kangaroo Score, and a 0.187 Agility Score, his other athletic traits ranged from average to slightly above average. When it came to his Stat Score (our lazy measure of college production), he had a result of 0.311. Matthews just kept ticking off the boxes on our checklist of requirements, even if he wasn't necessarily blowing us out of the water.
He struck us as a fairly interesting prospect, that we probably would have projected to go somewhere around the 4th or 5th round. Unfortunately, he wasn't actually selected until the 7th round, which has probably hurt his ability to get playing time.
Now, the interesting thing to us is how he has gradually been showing signs of progress over the last few seasons, despite getting limited playing. Let's look at some of his results.
While Matthews raw statistical production has never been terribly impressive, we still think he's been an interesting guy to keep an eye on. As his Catch % would suggest, he generally seems to have been a fairly reliable target, and perhaps even a bit above average. The main issue has been in getting him targets. While his Yards Per Route Run (YPRR) results in his first 3 seasons have generally only hovered around the area where we expect to find most team's 3rd or 4th receiver, they have gradually been improving.
It's really his results from 2015, that make you wonder if he might be about the step up to another level. With a YPRR of 1.95, along with a catch rate of 72.9%, and a YPC of 15.4, you're seeing results that are really quite impressive. I wouldn't want to get carried away with any of this, but Matthews could be developing into someone who could be a nice secondary receiver for some team. We also can't underestimate some of the things that might have been holding him back in Miami, including his quarterback, and the team's lack of investment in developing a former 7th round pick.
The neat thing about all of this, is that I would tend to doubt that Matthews would cost very much to acquire. Since he hasn't crossed the sort of statistical thresholds that tend to draw the eyes of NFL GMs, and also still carries the burden of being a former low draft pick, I wouldn't expect the bidding to get too high. Maybe a contract that offers around $3 million/year, at most. His price could end up a tad higher or lower, but regardless, it would be a fairly low risk investment. If he performs well, continuing on from where he left off in 2015, your team could get a hell of a deal. If he stumbles and falls, well, the cost of dropping such a contract, and the dead money hits that would go along with it, are really quite minimal. It strikes me as a nice low risk, potentially high reward situation.
I guess I'll toss in a few odds and ends types of players here as well, since I have nothing else to do while waiting for the psilocybin to kick in.
Maybe it is a product of being in Baltimore, and hearing the locals fret about the looming departure of guard Kelechi Osemele, but I've really been curious about the number of sites that list him as a more desirable free agent than Brandon Brooks. Admittedly, Reilly and I have had a bit of a man-crush on Brooks for quite a while, so this might be a product of our own biases. Still, we truly feel that Brooks should be the much more desirable of the two, and someone we could be tempted to spend stupid amounts of money to acquire.
Assessing the performance of offensive linemen generally opens a huge can of worms, so I'll let you judge this on your own, based on whatever sources you trust. All I can say is, as far as we can tell, Brooks has consistently been a vastly superior guard to Osemele when it comes to pass protection. We'd also say that Brooks has been superior in terms of run blocking, though Osemele probably comes closer to narrowing the gap in this area. If you enjoy watching fat men tussle with each other (and who doesn't enjoy that), really look at these two side by side, and tell me that Brooks isn't the better player.
The main thing that seems to be hurting Brooks' stock this year, were the claims that his run blocking started to slip some in the 2015 season. Personally, I have my doubts about these claims. It seems more likely to me that this perception come from the Texans having to replace Arian Foster with more humble talents like Chris Polk and Alfred Blue. People see the running backs getting less yardage, and for some reason they just didn't reach the conclusion that these running backs were as lame as a a three legged mule. Instead they blamed the line. Again, maybe this is all just mindless speculation on my part.
There is also the question of the injury risks that come with Osemele versus Brooks. Over the past 3 seasons Osemele has missed about 27% of his games due to injuries that seem to keep popping up. Brooks on the other hand, has only been out for 8.3% of his team's games.
If I had to throw a number out there, as to how high I would bid on Brooks, how high would I go? That's hard to say. Considering the lack of attention his looming free agent status seems to be garnering in the press, it is hard to say where things will wind up. Honestly, I think if his price remained under $7 million/year, I'd have a hard time not pursuing him. Maybe that sounds a bit high to some people. I really can't say. Personally, I think he could end up being a good deal even at a price higher than that, since I think he could end up being viewed as one of the best guards in the game today, if people were paying closer attention to Brooks.
I suppose the final looming free agent prospects that I am interested in might be among the league's scattered defensive backs. I tend to hate these players, as I think they are overpaid, and inconsistent, but a team still requires that you have a few of them.
I'd probably put cornerback Patrick Robinson at the top of the list. Robinson seems to be mainly treated with apathy, as far as I can tell, and the one year $2 million contract he played for in 2015 doesn't speak too highly of the league's attitude towards him. In my opinion, he is an above average athlete, who was probably drafted a tad higher than he should have been, leading to unfortunately high expectations. As far as I can tell, he has probably performed at a respectable level during his career, on some questionable defenses, and could be a nice bargain. We're looking for a rebound. Something in the $2-4 million/year range seems like a minimal risk to me.
Then we have the somewhat dreaded cornerback Josh Robinson on our shopping list. We've been severely disappointed with his play so far in his career, especially since he is about as perfect an athlete as you could find for that position. Still, we think he was gradually showing signs of improvement in 2015, so a reclamation project might be tempting. I'm guessing he should be insanely cheap, maybe $1.5 million/year, so there is no real risk in seeing if his career can be revived.
Finally, I will admit to a slightly strange interest in Vikings' backup safety Robert Blanton. On paper, he has the sorts of athletic traits we like to see at this position, a 1.177 Agility Score to go along with a 0.947 Kangaroo Score, and he seems to have performed to a respectable level in his appearances in 2014. No, he might not ever become a star, but I suspect he can be quite respectable...and cheap! Compared to someone like George Iloka, who will probably also hit free agency, I think Blanton could be 90% of the player for maybe 20% of the price. I mean, how much can Blanton really cost, maybe $1.5 million/year? I've probably got that under my couch cushions.
I guess there might be a few more players that interest me, at the right price, such as linebacker Vincent Rey, running back Robert Turbin or the perpetually ignored and forgotten defensive tackle Quayshawne Buckley. In the end, though, I've already spent enough time prattling about the unloved and unappreciated, which just reminds me too much of the cold inattention I receive from my ingrate parents. So, I guess I'll just pour a drink and have a good cry, much as I suspect many of these players will be doing on March 9th.
It really struck us as a mildly interesting coincidence that two of the players who interest us the most, among this year's potential free agents, come from the same poorly run team, the humble Dolphins. The poor sorry bastards we speak of would be running back Lamar Miller, and wide receiver Rishard Matthews. Now, don't get me wrong, we're not going to suggest that vast sums of money should be spent on either of these goofballs, we just think they are oddly interesting individuals, with potentially similar issues. We've liked them both, ever since they were mere draft prospects, and we're just curious as to whether they can escape the black hole that is Miami.
I guess we might as well start off with Lamar Miller, since we've already dropped him into the conversation of misused and under-appreciated players several times in the past. Watching Miller's career over the past four seasons has been more than just a little bit frustrating for us. As far as I can tell, Dolphins fans seem to be a bit divided as to how they feel about Miller, which is fine. Really, it's the attitude of the team's management that confuses us the most.
Over the past few years, there seems to have been a recurring message from the team, that they wished Miller was a more physical runner. I suppose they want a player who they can consistently pound between the tackles, which is fine. Such players do exist, and aren't that difficult to find. The problem is, Miller probably isn't really built for that. Despite weighing a reported 225 pounds, we still feel his measurable traits from the combine point towards him being an outside the tackles runner, which is they area where he seems to have thrived so far in his career. With a 0.071 Kangaroo Score, a 0.857 Agility Score, a 40 time of 4.34 seconds (with a 2nd Gear Score of 0.19), his strengths seems to lean in the direction of speed and elusiveness. You could somewhat fairly say that Miller has more in common with Jamaal Charles than he does with Adrian Peterson, based on these results. Unfortunately, all the Dolphins appear to see is a fairly large bodied running back, and not the skills that Miller actually possesses. So, they keep trying to bang that square peg into a round hole. The Dolphins management are, what we call in this field of study, "idiots".
Now, I'm not saying that Miller can't run the ball between the tackles, but with a player that has rather pedestrian lower body power (again, referring to the Kangaroo Score) it probably is more likely that they are going to require a respectable offensive line to consistently execute those sorts of running plays. That's probably not something the Dolphins have really provided.
There are some fine stat geeks out there who have made attempts to judge an offensive line's ability to assist running backs on plays like this, but I still find this subject to be a bit murky and debatable. Instead, I thought we would just show the Dolphins sack rates over the last 5 seasons, which I realize can appear to be an entirely unrelated issue. Just bear with me here.
| Year | Sack Rate |
| 2015 | 7.10% |
| 2014 | 7.17% |
| 2013 | 8.89% |
| 2012 | 6.83% |
| 2011 | 9.98% |
While the precise extent to which an offensive line is helping or hurting a running back is a bit foggy, I think we can agree that the Dolphins O-Line has been a bit sub-par the past few seasons, when it comes to pass protection. Some might even say that they suck. Is it likely that they are significantly better as run blockers? I kind of doubt it, but the sort of athletic traits we look for in pass blockers, are also things we look at in run blockers, and I can't say that many of the players on their line have ever struck me as very interesting in either area.
Let's think about some of the linemen this team employed in 2015. Even if we can accept that Branden Albert and Mike Pouncey might be above average players (though I have some minor arguments against this), the rest of their line was horribly suspect. Billy Turner? Jason Fox? The laughably horrible Dallas Thomas (who has allowed 16 sacks in his past 25 games)? No, for the most part these guys are bozos. It almost makes you wonder if people were too harsh with poor Richie Incognito, and his questionable motivational techniques. Where is the great Jonathan Martin now, you sensitive hippies? Oh, right, he's out of the league, because he sucked. In retrospect, it makes you wonder if the lunatic was right, even if his tactics seemed a bit absurd.
Let's also consider the extent to which the team has continually tried to ignore what Miller has contributed, despite his circumstances. Miller has maintained a career rushing average of 4.6 yards, while accumulating 2,930 rushing yards, 887 receiving yards, and a combined total of 22 touchdowns. Despite that, the Dolphins have only handed the ball off to him about 12.8 times per game over the last 2 seasons. Yet, people only seem to see the lack of gaudy rushing totals, as if that was entirely his fault, and question the value of resigning him.
What if we looked at the two former 1st round running backs that the Dolphins have brought in from other teams, during the past few seasons, in their attempts to find their savior. Those players would be Knowshon Moreno and Reggie Bush. Both of these players came to the Dolphins in their 6th NFL season, with varying amounts of hype, but how had their statistical performances measured up at that point in their careers, compared to what Lamar Miller has done in his first four seasons?
| Rushing | ||||
| Player | Att. | Yards | Avg. | TD |
| R. Bush | 524 | 2090 | 3.98 | 17 |
| K. Moreno | 845 | 3468 | 4.10 | 26 |
| L. Miller | 638 | 2930 | 4.59 | 19 |
| Receiving | ||||
| Player | Rec. | Yards | Avg. | TD |
| R. Bush | 294 | 2142 | 7.28 | 12 |
| K. Moreno | 157 | 1401 | 8.92 | 9 |
| L. Miller | 117 | 887 | 7.58 | 3 |
Outside of the obvious disparity in opportunities, the results of these other players aren't noticeably better than those of Miller. You also have to consider that Moreno and Bush were brought to the Dolphins when they were 26, while Miller is still just 24. We can also point to the fact that Moreno and Bush came to the team having both missed 25% of the their career games due to injury, while Miller has so far only been on the inactive roster for 4.7% of his games. Yet, Moreno and Bush were brought in with some apparent intention of being utilized as starting running backs, while Miller has always been treated as if he were a step away from getting benched. Would Miller be treated differently, if he wasn't a former 4th round pick, but a 1st rounder instead? I suspect so, and that thought irritates me to a surprising degree.
Look, this whole situation is a mystery to me. I just find it interesting to contemplate the lunatic ways in which the minds of NFL GMs appear to operate. Am I endorsing that the Dolphins, or anybody else should spend vast sums to acquire Lamar Miller? No, absolutely not. I just think it would be nice to see him wind up somewhere that he could be appreciated for what he is, rather than treated like a red-headed step-child.
Okay, that's enough ranting on that subject. Let's move on to Rishard Matthews.
I think part of what makes Matthews interesting, probably stems from my deranged fascination with Lamar Miller. There seems to be a similar mount of neglect that has been given to both players. What this potential neglect says about how the Dolphins are run, and their ability to get the best players on the field, I won't say. I just think it is a bit interesting to observe. It's sort of like watching Donald Trump run for president, oddly fascinating and disturbing at the same time.
Now, when Matthews came to the league in the 2012 draft, Reilly and I probably would have ranked him somewhere in the range of our 7th or 8th highest rated receiver prospect for that year. At a whisker over six feet tall, and weighing (at the time) 217 pounds, he had a nice solid frame. In terms of speed, his forty times ranged somewhere between 4.54 seconds, and 4.44 seconds (at his pro day). So that checked out fine as well. With a 0.651 Kangaroo Score, and a 0.187 Agility Score, his other athletic traits ranged from average to slightly above average. When it came to his Stat Score (our lazy measure of college production), he had a result of 0.311. Matthews just kept ticking off the boxes on our checklist of requirements, even if he wasn't necessarily blowing us out of the water.
He struck us as a fairly interesting prospect, that we probably would have projected to go somewhere around the 4th or 5th round. Unfortunately, he wasn't actually selected until the 7th round, which has probably hurt his ability to get playing time.
Now, the interesting thing to us is how he has gradually been showing signs of progress over the last few seasons, despite getting limited playing. Let's look at some of his results.
| Year | Pass Routes Run | Rec Yards | YPRR | Target% | Catch % | YPC |
| 2015 | 339 | 662 | 1.95 | 17.4 | 72.9 | 15.4 |
| 2014 | 111 | 135 | 1.21 | 18.9 | 57.1 | 11.3 |
| 2013 | 376 | 448 | 1.19 | 16.4 | 66.1 | 10.9 |
| 2012 | 160 | 151 | 0.94 | 11.2 | 61.1 | 13.7 |
While Matthews raw statistical production has never been terribly impressive, we still think he's been an interesting guy to keep an eye on. As his Catch % would suggest, he generally seems to have been a fairly reliable target, and perhaps even a bit above average. The main issue has been in getting him targets. While his Yards Per Route Run (YPRR) results in his first 3 seasons have generally only hovered around the area where we expect to find most team's 3rd or 4th receiver, they have gradually been improving.
It's really his results from 2015, that make you wonder if he might be about the step up to another level. With a YPRR of 1.95, along with a catch rate of 72.9%, and a YPC of 15.4, you're seeing results that are really quite impressive. I wouldn't want to get carried away with any of this, but Matthews could be developing into someone who could be a nice secondary receiver for some team. We also can't underestimate some of the things that might have been holding him back in Miami, including his quarterback, and the team's lack of investment in developing a former 7th round pick.
The neat thing about all of this, is that I would tend to doubt that Matthews would cost very much to acquire. Since he hasn't crossed the sort of statistical thresholds that tend to draw the eyes of NFL GMs, and also still carries the burden of being a former low draft pick, I wouldn't expect the bidding to get too high. Maybe a contract that offers around $3 million/year, at most. His price could end up a tad higher or lower, but regardless, it would be a fairly low risk investment. If he performs well, continuing on from where he left off in 2015, your team could get a hell of a deal. If he stumbles and falls, well, the cost of dropping such a contract, and the dead money hits that would go along with it, are really quite minimal. It strikes me as a nice low risk, potentially high reward situation.
I guess I'll toss in a few odds and ends types of players here as well, since I have nothing else to do while waiting for the psilocybin to kick in.
Maybe it is a product of being in Baltimore, and hearing the locals fret about the looming departure of guard Kelechi Osemele, but I've really been curious about the number of sites that list him as a more desirable free agent than Brandon Brooks. Admittedly, Reilly and I have had a bit of a man-crush on Brooks for quite a while, so this might be a product of our own biases. Still, we truly feel that Brooks should be the much more desirable of the two, and someone we could be tempted to spend stupid amounts of money to acquire.
Assessing the performance of offensive linemen generally opens a huge can of worms, so I'll let you judge this on your own, based on whatever sources you trust. All I can say is, as far as we can tell, Brooks has consistently been a vastly superior guard to Osemele when it comes to pass protection. We'd also say that Brooks has been superior in terms of run blocking, though Osemele probably comes closer to narrowing the gap in this area. If you enjoy watching fat men tussle with each other (and who doesn't enjoy that), really look at these two side by side, and tell me that Brooks isn't the better player.
The main thing that seems to be hurting Brooks' stock this year, were the claims that his run blocking started to slip some in the 2015 season. Personally, I have my doubts about these claims. It seems more likely to me that this perception come from the Texans having to replace Arian Foster with more humble talents like Chris Polk and Alfred Blue. People see the running backs getting less yardage, and for some reason they just didn't reach the conclusion that these running backs were as lame as a a three legged mule. Instead they blamed the line. Again, maybe this is all just mindless speculation on my part.
There is also the question of the injury risks that come with Osemele versus Brooks. Over the past 3 seasons Osemele has missed about 27% of his games due to injuries that seem to keep popping up. Brooks on the other hand, has only been out for 8.3% of his team's games.
If I had to throw a number out there, as to how high I would bid on Brooks, how high would I go? That's hard to say. Considering the lack of attention his looming free agent status seems to be garnering in the press, it is hard to say where things will wind up. Honestly, I think if his price remained under $7 million/year, I'd have a hard time not pursuing him. Maybe that sounds a bit high to some people. I really can't say. Personally, I think he could end up being a good deal even at a price higher than that, since I think he could end up being viewed as one of the best guards in the game today, if people were paying closer attention to Brooks.
I suppose the final looming free agent prospects that I am interested in might be among the league's scattered defensive backs. I tend to hate these players, as I think they are overpaid, and inconsistent, but a team still requires that you have a few of them.
I'd probably put cornerback Patrick Robinson at the top of the list. Robinson seems to be mainly treated with apathy, as far as I can tell, and the one year $2 million contract he played for in 2015 doesn't speak too highly of the league's attitude towards him. In my opinion, he is an above average athlete, who was probably drafted a tad higher than he should have been, leading to unfortunately high expectations. As far as I can tell, he has probably performed at a respectable level during his career, on some questionable defenses, and could be a nice bargain. We're looking for a rebound. Something in the $2-4 million/year range seems like a minimal risk to me.
Then we have the somewhat dreaded cornerback Josh Robinson on our shopping list. We've been severely disappointed with his play so far in his career, especially since he is about as perfect an athlete as you could find for that position. Still, we think he was gradually showing signs of improvement in 2015, so a reclamation project might be tempting. I'm guessing he should be insanely cheap, maybe $1.5 million/year, so there is no real risk in seeing if his career can be revived.
Finally, I will admit to a slightly strange interest in Vikings' backup safety Robert Blanton. On paper, he has the sorts of athletic traits we like to see at this position, a 1.177 Agility Score to go along with a 0.947 Kangaroo Score, and he seems to have performed to a respectable level in his appearances in 2014. No, he might not ever become a star, but I suspect he can be quite respectable...and cheap! Compared to someone like George Iloka, who will probably also hit free agency, I think Blanton could be 90% of the player for maybe 20% of the price. I mean, how much can Blanton really cost, maybe $1.5 million/year? I've probably got that under my couch cushions.
I guess there might be a few more players that interest me, at the right price, such as linebacker Vincent Rey, running back Robert Turbin or the perpetually ignored and forgotten defensive tackle Quayshawne Buckley. In the end, though, I've already spent enough time prattling about the unloved and unappreciated, which just reminds me too much of the cold inattention I receive from my ingrate parents. So, I guess I'll just pour a drink and have a good cry, much as I suspect many of these players will be doing on March 9th.
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Charles Johnson Vs. The World
In 1996, Chris Ofili used elephant dung in the making of his painting The Holy Virgin Mary (which recently sold for $4.6 million). In 1985, Dr. Emmett Brown made a time machine out of a DeLorean (Did you know that Back To The Future is banned in China for depicting time travel?). Recently, an Australian teenager plotted to set loose a kangaroo strapped with plastic explosives, as part of ISIS plot to cause mayhem (Awesome? Well, we have mixed feelings). Finally, at some point in the late 1990s (For some reason I can't recall the exact date), I made a bong out of Legos.
I guess what I am trying to suggest here is that people sometimes find peculiar ways to utilize the resources they have at their disposal.
In a similar manner, we often have to wonder about the way that NFL teams choose to make use of the talent on their rosters. While I could rant for days about offensive linemen, and my continued faith in the neglected and potentially misunderstood Eric Kush, that probably isn't a subject that interests many people. Instead, we will focus today on the wide receiver position, which has a bit more flash to it.
Despite our attempts to try to quantify a player's abilities, and predict NFL success, we always struggle with the fact that we can't guarantee that someone will get an opportunity. We still believe that Da'Rick Rogers was a legitimate NFL talent. The statistics that are available from his brief appearances encourage us to believe that he was a superior player to his former Tennessee teammates Cordarelle Patterson and Justin Hunter, whom we had very little faith in. Unfortunately, NFL coaches seemed to feel that Da'Rick was a bit of an asshole, a consideration our calculations don't really account for. Skill doesn't trump a winning personality, evidently.
We also still believe that the Jets should have taken Ryan Spadola (who?) a bit more seriously, rather than continuing to give opportunities to Stephen Hill, whom we felt was probably doomed to fail. While betting on an undrafted white wide receiver from Lehigh might seem a bit foolish, Spadola's pre-season statistics in 2013 were quite encouraging. At this point, however, he may never escape the depths of a practice squad. C'est la vie.
These are things that will always be beyond our control. Still, we wanted to take another look at one of our other long-shot receivers, who is still dancing on the edge of semi-relevance. So, we thought we would turn our gaze back to the frustrating subject of Vikings' wide receiver Charles Johnson.
Charles Johnson Vs. Mike Wallace
There are limits to how much we want to criticize Vikings' wide receiver Mike Wallace. After all, he was one our preferred wide receiver prospects in the 2009 NFL Draft. While he has his strengths and weaknesses, we thought at the time that his chances of success were reasonably good. It's true, his salary may have eventually ballooned beyond what we feel is reasonable, but that isn't really what we are here to discuss.
Instead, we are mainly interested in the complicated situation that arose when the Vikings traded for him, prior to the 2015 season. This worried us because of the way in which his arrival seemed poised to interfere with the possible continuing emergence of our other weird prospect Charles Johnson, who was starting to show some signs of life in 2014.
The reason for this concern, was that both players have mostly appeared to thrive in the role of an intermediate-to-deep range receiver. Wallace wasn't likely to interfere with the short range role of someone like Jarius Wright. That's simply not a role where Wallace's strengths appear to lie. Instead, he was most likely to cut into the playing time for Johnson, which would sort of put a crimp in our deranged plans.
What's frustrating about this, is the question of whether Wallace was really a desirable enough acquisition, at this point in his career, to deserve bumping Johnson out of the way. How much of Wallace's desirability hinged on his past successes, and reputation for being a deep threat? How much of this reputation was still justifiable?
While judging a receiver based on his average yards per catch (YPC) is a fairly stupid thing to do, it does appear a bit odd how his numbers have steadily declined in this area, especially after the 2011 season. From 2012 onward, his numbers have been, at best, rather pedestrian.
We can possibly lay some of the blame for this at the feet of quarterbacks like Teddy Bridgewater and Ryan Tannehill, whom he played with from 2013-2015, but that may not explain the entire situation. Even in 2012, with Roethlisberger throwing the ball, Wallace's numbers already appeared to be slipping. His usefulness as a deep threat may have already been eroding.
Like I said, judging a receiver based on YPC probably isn't a great idea. So, let's instead look at the above chart to see his annual Yards Per Pass Route Run (YPRR). Despite my occasional criticisms of PFF, I think YPRR might be a reasonably useful statistic. It has its flaws, but is better than some of the alternatives. It's basically a very simple sort of measure of a receiver's efficiency on a per play basis. A YPRR over 2, generally suggests that a player was having a rather rare and exceptional year. A YPRR under 1, might mean that a player is really just on the fringe of being useful.
We should probably mention that we calculate YPRR slightly differently from the folks at PFF, as they throw out certain plays for mysterious unknown reasons, while we don't. Despite that, the differences in our results are very minor. I have some nagging issues with YPRR, but that's a subject for another day.
Nonetheless, Wallace's numbers here would suggest that his only really exceptional years might have come in 2010 and 2011. Beyond that, he was probably playing at a level that we might associate with a team's 2nd or 3rd receiver, which still isn't a bad thing at all, as long as he is being paid in a manner that fits those expectations. Then we come to his 2015 season with the Vikings, where his numbers really went into the toilet.
The question is, could we have predicted this outcome in 2015? I can't really say that this is the case. While there are issues related to the Vikings' offensive system, and the effectiveness of Teddy Bridgewater, I probably wouldn't have expected Wallace's effectiveness to plummet to this degree. Another year or two of solid but unspectacular production from Wallace probably wasn't an unrealistic thing to bet on. This sort of rapid decline was probably unforeseeable.
Of course, there is the other question of whether maintaining his plateau of "good, but not great" performances, was something that the Vikings should have been investing in. By trading with the Dolphins, to acquire Wallace's services, they also had to take on his salary of $9.9 million for 2015 (which goes up to $11.5 million for 2016 and 2017). It's been quite a while since a salary of that sort was even halfway reasonable for what Wallace delivered on the field, which brings us to the real issue that interests us. Would the team have been better off continuing to give playing time to Charles Johnson (who had a $510 thousand salary) instead?
I think comparing the statistics for these two players, prior to the 2015 season, is kind of interesting. While no individual stat can undeniably answer the question of "Who is the better player?", it may at least spark some debate over what factors the team was considering (or not considering), when they made their decision to trade for Wallace.
Let's start by just examining some of their results from the 2014 season, side by side. We will include their Catch % (the percentage of plays in which they caught the pass, when targeted), Drop % (percentage of passes dropped), YPC (Yards Per Catch), YPT (Yards Per Target), YPRR (Yards Per Route Run) and Target % (percentage of passing plays they were on the field for, where they were targeted by their quarterback).
While there are some differences between these two players, I feel they are at best relatively minor. When it came to Drop %, YPC, YPT and YPRR, Charles Johnson had the advantage. For Wallace, he seemed to take the lead when it came to catch rate and percentage of plays where he was targeted. Personally, we think that the difference in individual catch rate can partially be explained by the depth at which the players caught their passes, since deeper passes tend to be lower probability plays. That would perhaps work in Johnson's favor to some degree. We also have to remember that 2014 was effectively Johnson's rookie season, for whatever that is worth. Regardless, we could spin these numbers quite a bit further, but in the end, the question is fairly simple. Do you believe there was a significant amount of evidence to separate these two players?
So, as we feared, Mike Wallace's 2015 arrival in Minnesota did appear to have a rather dramatic impact on Charles Johnson's playing time (just 94 passing snaps for Johnson, versus Wallace's 517). Instead of potentially becoming the team's primary receiver, Johnson turned into a ghost, only being targeted by his team's quarterback in 6 games, and spending most of his time on the bench. This extremely limited playing time makes a direct comparison of their individual numbers in 2015 a bit more unreliable. Still, we think the statistics are worth looking at.
While we can only speculate on how more playing time would have affected Johnson's numbers, for better or for worse, these results paint a peculiar picture. In every single category, Johnson appears to have been outperforming Wallace. Despite that, the team rarely felt it was worth putting Johnson on the field.
None of this is meant to suggest that Johnson would have had a monstrous season if he had played more, because I don't think that is likely. Still, considering the near parity of their individual Target % results, we could somewhat reasonably propose that Johnson quite likely would have out-produced Wallace in 2015 if given an equal opportunity. In the end, Wallace finished the season with 40 receptions for 483 yards (when we include the post-season). If we extrapolate from Johnson's limited 2015 data, this might have worked out to something like 49.5 receptions for 698 yards if Johnson had been given a similar opportunity, and his other numbers had remained steady. Of course, this is all a bit speculative.
That would work out to a possible 23.7% improvement in receptions, and a 44.5% improvement in receiving yards, over Wallace's 2015 results. It would have also put Johnson's productivity into a range that we consider to be slightly above average, relative to most NFL wide receivers, which is all that we are really hoping to find.
Or, perhaps you think Johnson's results from his limited 2015 snaps wouldn't have remained fixed at their current position. I would actually agree with you on this. Because of the limited sample size of Johnson's snaps this year (again, just 94 passing snaps for Johnson, versus Wallace's 517), it's very hard to say how steady his results would have remained in a larger role. Personally, I suspect Johnson's 2015 catch rate would have dropped a bit, if he had been a bigger focus of his team's offense. On the other hand, I think the rate at which Johnson was targeted probably would have risen slightly, if he was serving as his team's primary or secondary receiver, rather than their fourth or fifth option. If we just averaged out Johnson's 2014 and 2015 results, we might see him with a catch rate of 62.79%, a target percentage of 16.46%, and a YPC of 14.73 yards. By receiving Wallace's 517 snaps on passing plays (including the post-season), this would result in Johnson possibly generating 53.4 receptions (a 33.4% improvement over Wallace's results) for a total of 787 yards (a 62.9% improvement over Wallace). Again, this is just speculation, but I don't think these projections are terribly unreasonable.
Or, maybe we are completely nuts. Perhaps Charles Johnson would have performed as poorly as Mike Wallace. I certainly can't see any reason to suspect that Johnson would have done any worse than Wallace, but we're open to this possibility. Johnson still would have had the advantage of costing about 1/19th of Wallace's 2015 salary, as well as retaining the 5th round draft pick that was traded to the Dolphins to acquire Wallace.
I guess what I'm wondering here is, why wasn't Johnson at least worked into the rotation a bit more, considering how poorly Wallace was performing? It's seems doubtful that he could have done any worse, and most of the numbers would suggest that he might have performed better than Wallace, and at a much lower price.
Charles Johnson Vs. Stefon Diggs
We have no ax to grind when it comes to Stefon Diggs, but we probably have to throw him into this discussion as well. While Diggs didn't make the cut, when we were putting together our list of 2015 Draft prospects whom we felt had a good chance of becoming successes in the NFL, we're always open to the possibility of someone slipping through the cracks and exceeding our expectations. These things happen, from time to time.
While we felt that Diggs had too many risks associated with him to merit a draft pick, we can't deny that he did appear to become a productive player. He also managed to generate a fair bit of hype. So, we thought we should take a closer look at his 2015 results, in the same categories we just examined for Mike Wallace and Charles Johnson.
Now, just for the sake of argument, go back and compare Diggs' 2015 results to Charles Johnson's 2014 results. That way we are looking at two players, both of whom are effectively playing as rookies, and who both received a respectable amount of playing time. In the end, I think it is kind of funny how eerily similar their results actually are, with the only notable difference being their catch rate. Despite that, there seems to be a different set of expectations that some people hold about their individual futures.
Let's take things a bit further though. While people seem rather optimistic about Stefon Diggs' future, there are some weird issues with his 2015 results which I think are worth commenting on. In Diggs' first four NFL games, he had 25 receptions for 419 yards, which averages out to a ridiculous 104.75 yards per game. In his next 10 games, he produced 31 receptions for 327 yards, or 32.7 yards per game. There is obviously a rather huge difference in these results, so let's look at his results from these two periods of the 2015 season.
While some might argue that Diggs' numbers dropped simply because he was being targeted less frequently in those final 10 games, which is true, I don't think that necessarily explains what is happening here. After all, it is hard to explain this drop in the rate at which he was targeted, unless some other Vikings' receiver was suddenly becoming a more appealing option, or if opponents started to account for Diggs and shut him down. The other concern for me is the question of why his YPC (a 37.2% drop) and YPT (a 40.3% drop) have plummeted to such a ridiculous degree.
So, what are we supposed to believe that the future holds for Stefon Diggs? Do we bet on him returning to the shockingly good 3.05 YPRR we saw in his first four games? Or, do we bet on the larger sample size of his final ten games, and the rather disappointing 1.04 YPRR he displayed there? The funny thing about this is that many people seem willing to criticize Mike Wallace (deservedly so) for having a disappointing season, while ignoring the fact that for over 70% of the season Diggs' results really weren't significantly better. Despite these concerns, we wouldn't argue with the Vikings using Diggs as a starting wide receiver. After all, it's entirely possible that he was one of the team's better options.
While I have no real stake in how any of this plays out, I'd have to stick to our initial hunch regarding Diggs. His numbers in college made us quite wary of him, and so far the bulk of his playing time hasn't persuaded us to change our mind about how things will turn out in the long run. Those results from his final 10 games are probably closer to what we would have expected of him. We'll have to wait and see what happens next year.
I guess I've been rambling a bit...
Maybe this all seems a bit pointless.
Perhaps it is a bit odd that we would be focused on such a player, whom we admittedly don't feel was likely to enter into the discussion of the league's most productive receivers. Then again, we have some doubts that anybody was likely to do so, playing in the Vikings offense. The team's stubborn focus on giving Adrian Peterson the ball, as well as some possible issues with Bridgewater's development, probably aren't ideal factors for a record setting season by a receiver.
While we have admittedly had some hopes in the past that Charles Johnson could emerge as the next late-round or undrafted receiver to earn comparisons to Victor Cruz, Marques Colston, Wes Welker or Rod Smith, it's entirely possible that this will never happen. Maybe Johnson will just become a good, somewhat above average receiver, which would still be an excellent outcome for a former 7th round draft pick. Maybe he won't. Who really knows?
All we can really say is that whatever potential he might possess won't be discovered by having him sit on the bench, while the players ahead of him continue to under-perform. The possibility that prime years in a potentially talented player's career might be getting squandered somewhat irritates us. There's really only a small window where these players are likely to shine, after all.
It would be nice to think that all the talented players eventually rise up to gain the attention of their coaches, but we have our doubts about this. For every Cameron Wake, who goes undrafted and gets bounced to the CFL, only to return to terrorize the NFL, there are probably numerous other players who never get their shot. The mistakes made in the NFL Draft have far reaching consequences, and those initial impressions that teams form about a player seem difficult to shake.
Think about this for a second. Wouldn't we all agree that former top 10 draft selection, Matt Leinart, was a rather significant failure? Yet, we often seem to forget that Leinart still spent 7 seasons in the NFL. That means that for seven years, somebody was getting bumped off of a team's roster to make room for Leinart. While the player's getting cut to make room for Leinart likely wouldn't have gone on to stardom, it was still a potential missed opportunity to explore other options. It was one less chance, or 7, to look under some rock looking for talent. The only explanation for these decisions seems to have been "Well, Leinart was a former 1st round pick". He certainly didn't seem to possess any other real qualifications. This is why I sometimes hate the NFL Draft, even while I still obsess over it each year. Draft status simply matters more than it should.
At this point though, my hopes are rapidly diminishing as to whether we'll ever discover the truth about Charles Johnson. For now, I'll probably just go back to playing with my Legos, or working on my plans for militarized kangaroos. It might be a more productive use of my time.
I guess what I am trying to suggest here is that people sometimes find peculiar ways to utilize the resources they have at their disposal.
In a similar manner, we often have to wonder about the way that NFL teams choose to make use of the talent on their rosters. While I could rant for days about offensive linemen, and my continued faith in the neglected and potentially misunderstood Eric Kush, that probably isn't a subject that interests many people. Instead, we will focus today on the wide receiver position, which has a bit more flash to it.
Despite our attempts to try to quantify a player's abilities, and predict NFL success, we always struggle with the fact that we can't guarantee that someone will get an opportunity. We still believe that Da'Rick Rogers was a legitimate NFL talent. The statistics that are available from his brief appearances encourage us to believe that he was a superior player to his former Tennessee teammates Cordarelle Patterson and Justin Hunter, whom we had very little faith in. Unfortunately, NFL coaches seemed to feel that Da'Rick was a bit of an asshole, a consideration our calculations don't really account for. Skill doesn't trump a winning personality, evidently.
We also still believe that the Jets should have taken Ryan Spadola (who?) a bit more seriously, rather than continuing to give opportunities to Stephen Hill, whom we felt was probably doomed to fail. While betting on an undrafted white wide receiver from Lehigh might seem a bit foolish, Spadola's pre-season statistics in 2013 were quite encouraging. At this point, however, he may never escape the depths of a practice squad. C'est la vie.
These are things that will always be beyond our control. Still, we wanted to take another look at one of our other long-shot receivers, who is still dancing on the edge of semi-relevance. So, we thought we would turn our gaze back to the frustrating subject of Vikings' wide receiver Charles Johnson.
Charles Johnson Vs. Mike Wallace
There are limits to how much we want to criticize Vikings' wide receiver Mike Wallace. After all, he was one our preferred wide receiver prospects in the 2009 NFL Draft. While he has his strengths and weaknesses, we thought at the time that his chances of success were reasonably good. It's true, his salary may have eventually ballooned beyond what we feel is reasonable, but that isn't really what we are here to discuss.
Instead, we are mainly interested in the complicated situation that arose when the Vikings traded for him, prior to the 2015 season. This worried us because of the way in which his arrival seemed poised to interfere with the possible continuing emergence of our other weird prospect Charles Johnson, who was starting to show some signs of life in 2014.
The reason for this concern, was that both players have mostly appeared to thrive in the role of an intermediate-to-deep range receiver. Wallace wasn't likely to interfere with the short range role of someone like Jarius Wright. That's simply not a role where Wallace's strengths appear to lie. Instead, he was most likely to cut into the playing time for Johnson, which would sort of put a crimp in our deranged plans.
What's frustrating about this, is the question of whether Wallace was really a desirable enough acquisition, at this point in his career, to deserve bumping Johnson out of the way. How much of Wallace's desirability hinged on his past successes, and reputation for being a deep threat? How much of this reputation was still justifiable?
While judging a receiver based on his average yards per catch (YPC) is a fairly stupid thing to do, it does appear a bit odd how his numbers have steadily declined in this area, especially after the 2011 season. From 2012 onward, his numbers have been, at best, rather pedestrian.
We can possibly lay some of the blame for this at the feet of quarterbacks like Teddy Bridgewater and Ryan Tannehill, whom he played with from 2013-2015, but that may not explain the entire situation. Even in 2012, with Roethlisberger throwing the ball, Wallace's numbers already appeared to be slipping. His usefulness as a deep threat may have already been eroding.
Like I said, judging a receiver based on YPC probably isn't a great idea. So, let's instead look at the above chart to see his annual Yards Per Pass Route Run (YPRR). Despite my occasional criticisms of PFF, I think YPRR might be a reasonably useful statistic. It has its flaws, but is better than some of the alternatives. It's basically a very simple sort of measure of a receiver's efficiency on a per play basis. A YPRR over 2, generally suggests that a player was having a rather rare and exceptional year. A YPRR under 1, might mean that a player is really just on the fringe of being useful.
We should probably mention that we calculate YPRR slightly differently from the folks at PFF, as they throw out certain plays for mysterious unknown reasons, while we don't. Despite that, the differences in our results are very minor. I have some nagging issues with YPRR, but that's a subject for another day.
Nonetheless, Wallace's numbers here would suggest that his only really exceptional years might have come in 2010 and 2011. Beyond that, he was probably playing at a level that we might associate with a team's 2nd or 3rd receiver, which still isn't a bad thing at all, as long as he is being paid in a manner that fits those expectations. Then we come to his 2015 season with the Vikings, where his numbers really went into the toilet.
The question is, could we have predicted this outcome in 2015? I can't really say that this is the case. While there are issues related to the Vikings' offensive system, and the effectiveness of Teddy Bridgewater, I probably wouldn't have expected Wallace's effectiveness to plummet to this degree. Another year or two of solid but unspectacular production from Wallace probably wasn't an unrealistic thing to bet on. This sort of rapid decline was probably unforeseeable.
Of course, there is the other question of whether maintaining his plateau of "good, but not great" performances, was something that the Vikings should have been investing in. By trading with the Dolphins, to acquire Wallace's services, they also had to take on his salary of $9.9 million for 2015 (which goes up to $11.5 million for 2016 and 2017). It's been quite a while since a salary of that sort was even halfway reasonable for what Wallace delivered on the field, which brings us to the real issue that interests us. Would the team have been better off continuing to give playing time to Charles Johnson (who had a $510 thousand salary) instead?
I think comparing the statistics for these two players, prior to the 2015 season, is kind of interesting. While no individual stat can undeniably answer the question of "Who is the better player?", it may at least spark some debate over what factors the team was considering (or not considering), when they made their decision to trade for Wallace.
Let's start by just examining some of their results from the 2014 season, side by side. We will include their Catch % (the percentage of plays in which they caught the pass, when targeted), Drop % (percentage of passes dropped), YPC (Yards Per Catch), YPT (Yards Per Target), YPRR (Yards Per Route Run) and Target % (percentage of passing plays they were on the field for, where they were targeted by their quarterback).
| 2014 | ||||||
| Player | Catch% | Drop % | YPC | YPT | YPRR | Target% |
| M. Wallace | 62.03 | 3.70 | 12.86 | 7.98 | 1.60 | 21.14 |
| C. Johnson | 56.36 | 1.81 | 15.35 | 8.65 | 1.65 | 19.09 |
While there are some differences between these two players, I feel they are at best relatively minor. When it came to Drop %, YPC, YPT and YPRR, Charles Johnson had the advantage. For Wallace, he seemed to take the lead when it came to catch rate and percentage of plays where he was targeted. Personally, we think that the difference in individual catch rate can partially be explained by the depth at which the players caught their passes, since deeper passes tend to be lower probability plays. That would perhaps work in Johnson's favor to some degree. We also have to remember that 2014 was effectively Johnson's rookie season, for whatever that is worth. Regardless, we could spin these numbers quite a bit further, but in the end, the question is fairly simple. Do you believe there was a significant amount of evidence to separate these two players?
So, as we feared, Mike Wallace's 2015 arrival in Minnesota did appear to have a rather dramatic impact on Charles Johnson's playing time (just 94 passing snaps for Johnson, versus Wallace's 517). Instead of potentially becoming the team's primary receiver, Johnson turned into a ghost, only being targeted by his team's quarterback in 6 games, and spending most of his time on the bench. This extremely limited playing time makes a direct comparison of their individual numbers in 2015 a bit more unreliable. Still, we think the statistics are worth looking at.
| 2015 | ||||||
| Player | Catch% | Drop % | YPC | YPT | YPRR | Target% |
| M. Wallace | 57.97 | 5.79 | 12.07 | 7.00 | 0.93 | 13.34 |
| C. Johnson | 69.23 | 0.00 | 14.11 | 9.76 | 1.35 | 13.82 |
While we can only speculate on how more playing time would have affected Johnson's numbers, for better or for worse, these results paint a peculiar picture. In every single category, Johnson appears to have been outperforming Wallace. Despite that, the team rarely felt it was worth putting Johnson on the field.
None of this is meant to suggest that Johnson would have had a monstrous season if he had played more, because I don't think that is likely. Still, considering the near parity of their individual Target % results, we could somewhat reasonably propose that Johnson quite likely would have out-produced Wallace in 2015 if given an equal opportunity. In the end, Wallace finished the season with 40 receptions for 483 yards (when we include the post-season). If we extrapolate from Johnson's limited 2015 data, this might have worked out to something like 49.5 receptions for 698 yards if Johnson had been given a similar opportunity, and his other numbers had remained steady. Of course, this is all a bit speculative.
That would work out to a possible 23.7% improvement in receptions, and a 44.5% improvement in receiving yards, over Wallace's 2015 results. It would have also put Johnson's productivity into a range that we consider to be slightly above average, relative to most NFL wide receivers, which is all that we are really hoping to find.
Or, perhaps you think Johnson's results from his limited 2015 snaps wouldn't have remained fixed at their current position. I would actually agree with you on this. Because of the limited sample size of Johnson's snaps this year (again, just 94 passing snaps for Johnson, versus Wallace's 517), it's very hard to say how steady his results would have remained in a larger role. Personally, I suspect Johnson's 2015 catch rate would have dropped a bit, if he had been a bigger focus of his team's offense. On the other hand, I think the rate at which Johnson was targeted probably would have risen slightly, if he was serving as his team's primary or secondary receiver, rather than their fourth or fifth option. If we just averaged out Johnson's 2014 and 2015 results, we might see him with a catch rate of 62.79%, a target percentage of 16.46%, and a YPC of 14.73 yards. By receiving Wallace's 517 snaps on passing plays (including the post-season), this would result in Johnson possibly generating 53.4 receptions (a 33.4% improvement over Wallace's results) for a total of 787 yards (a 62.9% improvement over Wallace). Again, this is just speculation, but I don't think these projections are terribly unreasonable.
Or, maybe we are completely nuts. Perhaps Charles Johnson would have performed as poorly as Mike Wallace. I certainly can't see any reason to suspect that Johnson would have done any worse than Wallace, but we're open to this possibility. Johnson still would have had the advantage of costing about 1/19th of Wallace's 2015 salary, as well as retaining the 5th round draft pick that was traded to the Dolphins to acquire Wallace.
I guess what I'm wondering here is, why wasn't Johnson at least worked into the rotation a bit more, considering how poorly Wallace was performing? It's seems doubtful that he could have done any worse, and most of the numbers would suggest that he might have performed better than Wallace, and at a much lower price.
Charles Johnson Vs. Stefon Diggs
We have no ax to grind when it comes to Stefon Diggs, but we probably have to throw him into this discussion as well. While Diggs didn't make the cut, when we were putting together our list of 2015 Draft prospects whom we felt had a good chance of becoming successes in the NFL, we're always open to the possibility of someone slipping through the cracks and exceeding our expectations. These things happen, from time to time.
While we felt that Diggs had too many risks associated with him to merit a draft pick, we can't deny that he did appear to become a productive player. He also managed to generate a fair bit of hype. So, we thought we should take a closer look at his 2015 results, in the same categories we just examined for Mike Wallace and Charles Johnson.
| 2015 | ||||||
| Player | Catch% | Drop % | YPC | YPT | YPRR | Target% |
| S. Diggs. | 67.46 | 2.4 | 13.32 | 8.98 | 1.65 | 18.44 |
Now, just for the sake of argument, go back and compare Diggs' 2015 results to Charles Johnson's 2014 results. That way we are looking at two players, both of whom are effectively playing as rookies, and who both received a respectable amount of playing time. In the end, I think it is kind of funny how eerily similar their results actually are, with the only notable difference being their catch rate. Despite that, there seems to be a different set of expectations that some people hold about their individual futures.
Let's take things a bit further though. While people seem rather optimistic about Stefon Diggs' future, there are some weird issues with his 2015 results which I think are worth commenting on. In Diggs' first four NFL games, he had 25 receptions for 419 yards, which averages out to a ridiculous 104.75 yards per game. In his next 10 games, he produced 31 receptions for 327 yards, or 32.7 yards per game. There is obviously a rather huge difference in these results, so let's look at his results from these two periods of the 2015 season.
| Catch% | Drop % | YPC | YPT | YPRR | Target% | |
| 1st 4 games | 69.44 | 2.77 | 16.76 | 11.63 | 3.05 | 26.27 |
| last 10 games | 65.95 | 2.12 | 10.54 | 6.95 | 1.04 | 15.01 |
While some might argue that Diggs' numbers dropped simply because he was being targeted less frequently in those final 10 games, which is true, I don't think that necessarily explains what is happening here. After all, it is hard to explain this drop in the rate at which he was targeted, unless some other Vikings' receiver was suddenly becoming a more appealing option, or if opponents started to account for Diggs and shut him down. The other concern for me is the question of why his YPC (a 37.2% drop) and YPT (a 40.3% drop) have plummeted to such a ridiculous degree.
So, what are we supposed to believe that the future holds for Stefon Diggs? Do we bet on him returning to the shockingly good 3.05 YPRR we saw in his first four games? Or, do we bet on the larger sample size of his final ten games, and the rather disappointing 1.04 YPRR he displayed there? The funny thing about this is that many people seem willing to criticize Mike Wallace (deservedly so) for having a disappointing season, while ignoring the fact that for over 70% of the season Diggs' results really weren't significantly better. Despite these concerns, we wouldn't argue with the Vikings using Diggs as a starting wide receiver. After all, it's entirely possible that he was one of the team's better options.
While I have no real stake in how any of this plays out, I'd have to stick to our initial hunch regarding Diggs. His numbers in college made us quite wary of him, and so far the bulk of his playing time hasn't persuaded us to change our mind about how things will turn out in the long run. Those results from his final 10 games are probably closer to what we would have expected of him. We'll have to wait and see what happens next year.
I guess I've been rambling a bit...
Maybe this all seems a bit pointless.
Perhaps it is a bit odd that we would be focused on such a player, whom we admittedly don't feel was likely to enter into the discussion of the league's most productive receivers. Then again, we have some doubts that anybody was likely to do so, playing in the Vikings offense. The team's stubborn focus on giving Adrian Peterson the ball, as well as some possible issues with Bridgewater's development, probably aren't ideal factors for a record setting season by a receiver.
While we have admittedly had some hopes in the past that Charles Johnson could emerge as the next late-round or undrafted receiver to earn comparisons to Victor Cruz, Marques Colston, Wes Welker or Rod Smith, it's entirely possible that this will never happen. Maybe Johnson will just become a good, somewhat above average receiver, which would still be an excellent outcome for a former 7th round draft pick. Maybe he won't. Who really knows?
All we can really say is that whatever potential he might possess won't be discovered by having him sit on the bench, while the players ahead of him continue to under-perform. The possibility that prime years in a potentially talented player's career might be getting squandered somewhat irritates us. There's really only a small window where these players are likely to shine, after all.
It would be nice to think that all the talented players eventually rise up to gain the attention of their coaches, but we have our doubts about this. For every Cameron Wake, who goes undrafted and gets bounced to the CFL, only to return to terrorize the NFL, there are probably numerous other players who never get their shot. The mistakes made in the NFL Draft have far reaching consequences, and those initial impressions that teams form about a player seem difficult to shake.
Think about this for a second. Wouldn't we all agree that former top 10 draft selection, Matt Leinart, was a rather significant failure? Yet, we often seem to forget that Leinart still spent 7 seasons in the NFL. That means that for seven years, somebody was getting bumped off of a team's roster to make room for Leinart. While the player's getting cut to make room for Leinart likely wouldn't have gone on to stardom, it was still a potential missed opportunity to explore other options. It was one less chance, or 7, to look under some rock looking for talent. The only explanation for these decisions seems to have been "Well, Leinart was a former 1st round pick". He certainly didn't seem to possess any other real qualifications. This is why I sometimes hate the NFL Draft, even while I still obsess over it each year. Draft status simply matters more than it should.
At this point though, my hopes are rapidly diminishing as to whether we'll ever discover the truth about Charles Johnson. For now, I'll probably just go back to playing with my Legos, or working on my plans for militarized kangaroos. It might be a more productive use of my time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)