The hot stat in baseball is replacement value. It’s expressed in different ways, including WAR, or “wins above replacement,” but its basic premise is this: if you replaced player X on your team with a statistically average player, would he perform better or worse than the player he replaced – and by extension, would the team be better or worse?
Of course, this being a baseball statistic it has all kinds
of tendrils – would the team be better offensively? Defensively? Would he hit
in the clutch? Would he get on base? Would he throw out base-stealers? Would he
give up the gopher ball in late-and-close situations? – but the idea of
replacement value really boils down to how close a given player comes to the
norm.
Replacement value is semi-self-fulfilling. Successful teams
have more above-the-norm players, but it’s not clear whether those teams are
successful because they have more above-the-norm players, or more of those
teams’ players are above the norm because they’re on successful teams. Success
begets performance and vice versa, and don’t forget: “Mother and Child Reunion”
was first a chicken-and-egg dish served in a Chinese restaurant.
Football being less stat-driven than baseball (though not
for lack of want-to), replacement value is not the hot topic it is on the
diamond. Replacement value is less valuable in football because three-quarters
of an NFL roster is on the field for one-third of a game or more. Many of those
players are going to be at or below replacement value. It’s unavoidable. It’s
the definition of the mean in a world where
all the children are above average.
(With all the situational offenses and defenses sometimes
you’re better-served looking at the replacement value within a position on a given
team – moving from the designated run-stuffer to the designated pass-rusher on
defense or looking at the first-down back versus the third-down back. One of
the reasons the Giants are so good is that Brandon Jacobs and Ahmad Bradshaw
are both above replacement. Ditto for
Osi Umenyiora and Jason Pierre-Paul.)
In football, replacement value is good for answering tough
questions at the top of the pyramid. Who’s better – Peyton Manning or Tom
Brady? How can you tell?
The baseball answer to that, delivered from the pulpit of
replacement value, is to take Manning and Brady away from their teams, replace
them with a player whose replacement value is at the norm, and see what
happens.
That’s a loaded question. Take Albert Pujols out of the St.
Louis lineup and there’s an Albert Pujols-shaped hole that can't be filled by
Matt Holliday or Lance Berkman. The Cardinals still have to bat nine; they can
slip in a Skip Schumaker and go into run-manufacturing mode, but it’s a partial
transformation at best. They’re not going to go all bunt-y and start running
Berkman like he was Michael Bourn.
Contrast that with football. The most crushing blow to an
offense in 2011 outside of Peyton Manning occurred when the Vikings lost Adrian
Peterson. How did the ‘Queens react? By not running the same offense at all.
Joe Webb got the keys, the passing attack flipped around, the running attack
was stood on its head, and while it wasn’t more successful it wasn’t markedly
less successful. The point is that given resources and resourcefulness it can
be done.
Indianapolis, of course, did none of those things, because
it wasn’t built to do them. Joseph Addai and Donald Brown are running backs
whose chief asset is not running the ball 30 times a game. They’re the Trevor
Hoffman fastball, effective not because it’s used but because it might be used
the next pitch … or maybe the pitch after that. The offense built around Peyton
Manning could not be rebuilt around anyone else, certainly not Curtis Painter,
Dan Orlovsky, or Kerry Collins, and the defense wasn’t good enough to deliver a
win when the offense couldn’t outscore the opposition. So on the surface you’d
guess that Peyton Manning had the greatest replacement value of any player in
recent times.
Not so fast; we still have the Brady-Manning question to
answer. Why did the Patriots not disintegrate when they lost Tom Brady in 2008,
while the Colts went kablooey when they lost Manning in 2011? Defense is a big
part of the answer, and having a defensive coach as head coach. The
Indianapolis defense was shredded by injuries in 2011; New England in 2008 had
a great defense, with Richard Seymour, Vince Wilfork, Mike Vrabel, Tedy
Bruschi, Rodney Harrison, Jerrod Mayo, and Adalius Thomas all playing at a high
level. They weren’t the 16-0 defense of the year before, but they were a top-10
defense, and the best defense the Pats have had since.
Even so, the offense was the league’s sixth-best unit, with
the same crappy running game that New England has always had. Good receivers to
be sure – Wes Welker and Randy Moss – but not really better than Wayne and
Garcon and Dallas Clark in Indy. So you think maybe Matt Cassel was better than
Curtis Painter?
Maybe a little, but maybe not that much. If Tom Brady’s
replacement value is significantly lower than Peyton Manning’s, replacing Brady
with Cassel doesn’t hurt nearly as much as replacing Manning with
Painter-slash- Collins-slash- Orlovsky. So we come back to the original
conclusion: Manning is better than Brady.Yes, to the extent that his replacement value is higher. You may want Brady over Manning in a big game, and that’s your right. Replacement value doesn’t go there.
All of which is the long way ‘round to the big question: What player is/was the most indispensable to his team?
The simplest way to look at this is to examine the change in record from the year before the player left to the year he left, and then if he went to a new team the difference between the year before the player came and the year he came. A couple of simple change equations, acknowledging that the loss of one player does not define any team’s season.
Let’s work with the top 50 players of all time according to Pro Football Reference, and let’s look at changes that occurred in the meat of that player’s career, if that’s possible.
It gets dicey. Carl Eller and Johnny Unitas changed teams at
the tail-end of their careers, when they were close to being replacement-level
players. That’s not the same as Marshall Faulk changing teams after three years
or T.O. being dealt to the Eagles in the prime of his career.
This little work is split in two, with a list of players who
went from one team to a different team this time, and a list of players who
didn’t go anywhere saved for the next episode, along with a big wrapup.
Now, the list of players who switched teams.
Lest you think the transition from Brett Favre to Aaron
Rodgers was smooth and productive, guess again. The Packers got
more than 50 percent worse; the Jets got 125 percent better. And the
QB aside, the Favre-led team was nearly indistinguishable from the Rodgers-led
team; it wasn’t like the defense collapsed or the offense was gutted by
injuries. Favre at that stage of his career was that much better than Rodgers
at that stage of his career. It was a big difference.
The difference between Warren Moon and Billy Joe Tolliver
was likewise huge. Unlike the calculated move Green Bay made from the old pro
(Favre) to his successor (Rodgers), Houston went from a productive star, to a
28-year-old journeyman who could serve as the poster boy for
sub-replacement-level quarterbacks. If Curtis Painter were older, less
intelligent, and longer off the tee he would be Billy Joe Tolliver. Given that,
a precipitous decline was inevitable.
Interesting stuff abounds in these numbers. Love him or hate
him, T.O. made the Eagles better and the ‘Niners worse – though he had the
opposite effect when he went from Philly to Dallas three years later. Randy
Moss, meanwhile, has had the opposite effect everywhere he's gone. Randy Moss is a player whose teams get worse when he arrives. That
doesn't mean teams aren't good when Moss arrives, or that they don't prosper at
some point during his tenure. They just don't get better when he arrives – and
they get better when he leaves.
You can see how two safeties, Paul Krause and Emlen Tunnell,
stabilized young defenses, and how three great defensive backs – Rod Woodson,
Ronnie Lott, and Herb Adderley – were unable to do much for established
defenses.
You can also see that L.T. is a good player. The Chargers may
have underestimated how good – or perhaps they simply forgot that addition by
subtraction is still subtraction. How could the Chargers without Tomlinson
possibly be a better team than the Chargers with
him?
And then there's Marshall Faulk. When he went from the Colts
to the Rams he pulled off the amazing combination of making his new team nine
games better, while the team he left got 10
games better. There has never been an NFL trade that made each team that much better.
This is good, but there's still the Peyton Manning situation to consider. And we will ... next time.
And I promise there will be a next time.
This is good, but there's still the Peyton Manning situation to consider. And we will ... next time.
And I promise there will be a next time.
