Of Course, You Know This Means WAR

Yeah, I’m back. Don’t get all excited or anything.

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.

Consistency Rules, Or No Cialis In The Shotgun

Forget Emerson; this is football.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, as every good 85-year-old grammar-school graduate knows, wrote that a "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of young minds" ... so go forth and be inconsistent, I guess.

Consistency in football is a curious quality, not altogether foolish but in the same area code. Teams strive to be unpredictable from play to play yet consistent in the amount of yards gained by those plays, because they can coach to that. Imagine the plight of a coach whose team rolls up 500 yards in offense and 85 plays in one game, and 200 yards and 55 plays in another. Is he really better off than the coach of a team that's good for 275 every game?

Probably not. The coach of the 275-yards-a-game team takes the hand that's dealt him and maximizes it through ball control, special teams and defense. The coach of the up-and-down team spends more time trying to maximize an offense that can't be maximized, only made less maddening.

Furthermore, the idea that teams are unpredictable from play to play is a conceit, as we’ve established many columns ago. There are only so many plays in a game, and only so many yards that can be gained on those plays. The successful offensive teams do what they do best more often in order to maximize the number of yards gained per play and the number of plays run in a game -- cf., the Indianapolis Colts. If the Colts wanted to be unpredictable they’d run Joseph Addai 40 times a game, and that just plain ain’t happenin’.

The springboard for this discussion is fantasy football. One of the neglected realities of fantasy football is that most of what’s done in real football works against fantasy football. The Eagles are a better team with Ronnie Brown, but his presence makes LeSean McCoy a worse fantasy running back. A healthy Jermichael Finley takes fantasy points away from James Jones, Greg Jennings, Ryan Grant, and James Starks.

However, one thing is true in fantasy football and real football: Production vs. consistency is a conundrum. In fantasy football, do you want a player who's good for 15 points one week and 45 the next, or do you want a player who averages 25 points a game? A combination of the two isn't bad, but given the lady-vs.-tiger conundrum, which do you choose?

There's a definite case to be made for consistency, a predictability that can be managed to, and for that we return to real football. Looking at the standard deviations of NFL teams in all offensive categories over the last five years, the most consistent teams have been three of the league's most successful teams … and two mediocre teams.

As I was putting my research together, I asked many of my football-loving friends to name the successful teams. To a man they guessed the Patriots as one of the most consistent teams. And to a man they were wrong.

While the Pats are the epitome of a successful NFL team, they have not been one of football's most consistent offensive teams over the last five years for some very simple reasons. Reason No. 1: The running game. Reason No. 2: Randy Moss. Randy Moss is a walking inconsistency. Let me rephrase that: Randy Moss is a jogging-at-half-speed inconsistency.

Rather, the successful teams have been the Eagles, the Giants, and the Colts.

The Colts’ offense has been operating at near-peak efficiency for the last five years. Last year was a bit of a down year because of injuries, but basically there is no more up for the Colts’ offense. They run more plays than any other team year after year, they gain more yards than just about anyone, and they are the league’s most consistent team in the number of yards gained per play. Any individual gains are going to be mere internal reallocation. Can Pierre Garcon catch more balls this year? Sure – but so could Austin Collie or even – gasp! – Anthony Gonzalez, and it’s going to come at the expense of the other receivers. There is no more production to be wrung from this offense.

Philadelphia, the league’s most consistent team in terms of yards gained and first downs, also has a system-based story. Ever since Andy Reid has been the coach, the Eagles have built their offense around an athletic quarterback, a versatile running back, and playmaking wide receivers. The differences between the Vick version and the McNabb version are in the details. McNabb favored the tight end. Vick favors the wideouts.

The Eagles' dedication to the system extends to the role players. When Kevin Kolb (who was never a good fit for the system) was traded to Arizona and the Eagles needed a backup quarterback, they looked at their system, looked at the available talent, and signed the second-best QB for their system – Vince Young. Similarly when the Eagles looked for a backup running back they found a fit for their scheme in Ronnie Brown.

The Giants have a system too, albeit one that's less exciting and more dysfunctional than the Eagles' system. It relies on runs and lots of them, coupled with mid-range passes to wide receivers and particularly the tight end.

The biggest loss of the offseason may have been Kevin Boss. The Giants lost a huge component of their offense and came up with nothing to replace it.

It should also be noted that two other system-heavy teams, the Packers and Steelers, are extremely consistent in certain aspects of the offensive game. Green Bay completes roughly the same number of passes game after game and season after season, while the Steelers are the league’s most consistent team in points scored. You bet the games in Vegas? The Steelers are your team to play.

A lot of this research really points up the value of special teams to bottom-line offensive production. If you average 62 and a half plays a game, which is what the league averages, and you gain slightly more than five yards a play, if you start your drives from your own 40 and have an eight-play drive you’re going to score significantly more points than if you start those drives on your 20. And the Eagles, as long as DeSean Jackson returns kicks, are in a good position to score on more of its drives than other teams.

Why do you think the Packers drafted a return guy in the second round and signed the nation’s leading punt returner as a free agent? Because if your average drive is eight plays and thirty-some yards, you need to be starting more of those drives on your own 40 or better if you want to score points.

Moving on to the consistently mediocre teams, we find Jacksonville and Buffalo. Well, of course we do. Why are Jacksonville and Buffalo two of the league’s most consistent offensive teams over the last five years?

Jacksonville’s case is easy. Jacksonville has been consistent because they’ve had the same mediocre quarterback throwing to a bunch of sub-mediocre wide receivers for the last five years, and they’ve had a great running game to enable that. In the words of that famous fantasy-football guru Ke$ha, they are who they are. And they’re not very good. However, they are very consistent at not being very good. And this year they have what they had last year: David Garrard for three or four games, Blaine Gabbert the rest of the way, Maurice Jones-Drew, Marcedes Lewis, and a mess of terrible wide receivers led – led, mind you – by Mike Thomas. I would rather have Rick Perry DJ my going-away party than be the offensive coordinator in J’ville.

You hear Jack Del Rio whinny a lot about how next season is going to be better, but why would it be? What has really changed? I say move the team to L.A., sign Kobe Bryant, and see what happens.

Buffalo’s story is not quite the same. The Bills throw approximately the same number of interceptions each year and gain the same number of rushing yards. This happens when your quarterback position is a revolving door and Dick Jauron is your head coach. Six starting QBs in five years is a recipe for a baseline passing game, especially when three of the six are Trent Edwards, Brian Brohm, and J.P. Losman.

What would need to happen for the Bills to improve offensively, and break out of their offensive rut? Four things: Stability at quarterback, improved production at running back, more talent at wide receiver, and a significant upgrade in the offensive line. Which do you do first? Actually, Buffalo has decided it would rather work on the defense, and to that end traded lone legitimate deep threat Lee Evans, let Donte Whitner walk, and cut Aaron Maybin. And for this they want Ralph Wilson in the Hall of Fame.

I say move the team to Toronto, sign Andrea Bargnani, and see what happens.

Another fallacy this research points up is the fallacy of taking it to the next level. Over the last five years, only one team has really taken it to the next level: Houston, and that’s because their previous level came up to Michelle Bachmann’s kneecaps. Also, David Carr is in New York. Along the way two teams switched emphasis from rushing to passing, or vice versa – Oakland and the Jets – and Arizona regressed down to Tim Pawlenty’s kneecaps. But that’s it. One team in five years moves to a higher level. Everyone else essentially swaps numbers.

In the greater Green Bay area we hear a lot about how Aaron Rodgers is going to take it to the next level, but I have news for all the dudes in their hand-painted green-and-gold pickup trucks: This is the next level. Over the course of this season the Packers offense, if it is absolutely cooking on all cylinders, will run one two more plays a game than it did last season. That’s roughly 11 more yards a game. If a team is lucky, that will mean one more TD. If a team is really lucky, that means two more TDs. If Aaron Rodgers throws for 50 TDs, he takes those two TDs and six or seven from the running game, and maybe one or two from the defense or the return game. (Oops. This is the Packers. They have no return game.)

But that one or two more plays a game really gets diluted when you try to spread it among Aaron Rodgers’ weapons. Their numbers change fractionally, if at all. Greg Jennings is still going to get his 85, Donald Driver, Jordy Nelson, and James Jones are going to split 175 receptions, the League of Exceptional Tight Ends (Green Bay has six of them that are going to make a roster somewhere south of Saskatchewan) are going to get 60 or 70, and James Starks and Ryan Grant are going to divvy up about 1,400 rushing yards. There are not really a lot more numbers to be had in Green Bay. What you have is what you have.

People as a rule don’t like to be told about the limits to offensive production because it puts their game in a can, and tells them that if their team suffers from OD (Offensive Dysfunction) there is no Cialis-in-the-shotgun for them. They also are suckers for double-reverses and option passes and anything short of wide receivers tumbling out of clown cars that they classify as unpredictability.

All things considered, I’d rather strive for the brand of predictability found in Indy and Philly: maximizing plays, maximizing yards, hitting the same number of first downs year after year, and keeping the point totals within a narrow range.

Heck, I’d bet even Jack Del Rio could win with that.

Debunk The One You're With

It's with great pleasure that fantasy-football expert Brad Rutta and I announce the birth of our second fantasy-football podcast, available here: http://www.ourmedia.org/ia/details/KitKieferandBradRuttaTheDebunkers_2__DebunkTheOneYou_reWith_/. You want to know what's so bad about good NFL offenses? You'll find out here. Check it out.

Of Duos, Trios, And Would Joe Buck Please Shut Up?

One of the most persistent clichés in sports is the Dynamic Duo -- you know, Tinker to Chance. Nary a broadcast goes by without some ham-voiced slobberamus obsessed with the banishment of silence (nature abhors a vacuum, and so does Joe Buck) using the Double-D term to describe a pitch and a catch, a catch and a throw, a throw and a catch, a pass and a shot, a tackle, a block and a pass, back-to-back base hits, two legs of a relay, or, accompanied by a hearty guffaw, themselves. The term gets thrown around so much you’d swear sports teams are nothing but collections of superheroes and sidekicks, waiting for their chance to drop a smoke bomb on the Penguin’s umbrella.

Sorry to disappoint, but the truly dynamic genuine duo is about as hard to find in sports as a low-key sportscaster. Hockey absolutely lacks duos. They think in lines of three, and if there were two great defensemen teamed up you’d never hear about it, unless they scored like forwards, and then all you’d hear is they never play any defense. Tough life, that.

The sport where duos most often proliferate is, believe it or not, basketball, where two players hogging the action is just the stuff for a dynasty. Jordan and Pippen, Cousy and Russell, Magic and Kareem, Malone and Stockton, Kobe and Shaq – it seems to work in basketball.

It works much less well in baseball, even though pitchers and catchers would seem to be a natural for D-duo status. Alas, it ain’t necessarily so. Johnny Bench caught Tom Seaver when they were off their primes. That goes double for Carlton Fisk and Seaver. Glavine, Smoltz, and Maddux never threw to an HOF catcher. Gary Carter, Gabby Hartnett, Roy Campanella? No pitchers to match. Catfood Hunter, Robin Roberts, Jim Bunning, Randy Johnson, Nolan Ryan? Their catchers never measured up (though time may call Ryan-to-Rodriguez one of the best ever, know now that it wasn’t so back when it was actually happening). It may have been Spahn and Sain and pray for rain, but it mattered little that Walker Cooper was doing the catching.

For true HOF-to-HOF pitching and catching the ranks are slim. Yogi Berra caught Whitey Ford, but their teamup was hardly one for the ages. Same with the Yankee battery of 20 years previous, Lefty Gomez and Bill Dickey, or their contemporary, Ted Lyons and Rick Ferrell. Pettitte to Posada is eventually going to be an HOF battery, truth be damned, but even Tim McCarver at his Yankee-besotted worst could pick out three batteries at any stage of the P-Boys’ career that was better. (Right now: Lincecum to Molina, Beckett or Lester or Dice-K to Martinez, Jimenez to Ianetta. And for the bonus round: Mauer to anyone. And coming soon: Strasburg to Pudge.)

The best battery ever may have been Lefty Grove and Mickey Cochrane. Everyone at the time knew it, and they still know it. Grove won 195 games in nine seasons with Cochrane behind the dish, and that’ll do.

Since this is a football column, let’s head back to the gridiron. The football equivalent of the pitcher and catcher is, of course, the QB and the wide receiver. And while the odds are definitely in favor of a HOF WR having been thrown to by a HOF QB, it’s by no means universal:

Receiver	Years	QB 1	QB 2	QB 3	QB 4	QB 5
Lance Alworth	1962-1972	Hadl	Staubach*
Fred Biletnikoff	1965-1978	Stabler	Blanda*	Lamonica	Flores
Crazylegs Hirsch	1946-1956	Waterfield*	Van Brocklin*
Steve Largent	1976-1989	Krieg	Zorn
James Lofton	1978-1993	Dickey	Gannon	Kelly*
Don Maynard	1958, 1960-1973	Namath*
Tommy McDonald	1957-1968	Van Brocklin*	Meredith	Gabriel	Berry	Phipps
Paul Warfield	1964-1977	Griese*	Nelsen	Ryan
Charlie Joiner	1969-1986	Fouts*	Pastorini	Dickey	Anderson	Johnson
Art Monk	1980-1995	Rypien	Shuler	Williams
Raymond Berry	1955-1967	Unitas*
Tom Fears	1948-1956	Waterfield*	Van Brocklin*
John Stallworth	1974-1987	Bradshaw*	Gilliam	Tomczak
Lynn Swann	1974-1982	Bradshaw*	Gilliam	Tomczak
Pete Pihos	1947-1955	Thomason	Burk
Charley Taylor	1964-1975, 1977	Jurgensen*	Kilmer
Dante Lavelli	1946-1956	Graham*
Jerry Rice	1985-2000	Young*	Montana*
Michael Irvin	1988-1999	Aikman*
Bob Hayes	1965-1975	Meredith	Staubach*
Don Hutson	1935-1945	Herber*	Isbell
Red Badgro	1927, 1930-1936	Danowski	McBride	Newman
Bill Hewitt	1932-1939, 1943	Brumbaugh	O'Brien
Wayne Millner	1936-1941	Baugh*

Roughly 15 times out of 24, or 62.5 percent of the time, an HOF WR is paired with an HOF QB for the bulk of his career. You can add to that list Torry Holt, Isaac Bruce, Marvin Harrison, and Randy Moss, and depending on Kurt Warner and where you place the breaks in Moss’ career every one of them will have played for an HOF QB. It may be that in the current game only the receivers of great QBs are HOF material – and it certainly works the other way: If you’re an HOF QB wannabe you darn well better have some quality targets. (cf. Kurt Warner. Bad targets = bad years.)

This whole argument takes a sharp right turn when you add in a second receiver, and move the dynamic-duo designation away from the QB and spread it over two WRs. Now you’re talking rare. As the ongoing struggle to pair Terrell Owens with anyone clearly shows, putting two great WRs on the same field is like building a house out of magnets placed north-pole-to-north-pole. Pretty soon the whole thing is going to fly apart, and someone’s gonna put an eye out. No wonder Donovan McNabb cried in the huddle. T.O. does that to people.

The current HOF list shows two WR pairs: Fears and Hirsch, and Swann and Stallworth. The list swells to three with the addition of Bobby Mitchell and Charley Taylor. Fears and Hirsch were worthy, Swann and Stallworth less so, and Fears and Hirsch were thrown to equally by two HOF QBs (which I guarantee will never happen again), but housekeeping issues aside, you can see that two really great WRs on the same team at the same time for a long time is a truly unusual and special thing.

Okay, now add to the list Bruce and Holt, two probable HOFers, and acknowledge that Henry Ellard and Flipper Anderson were a heck of a pair, but not so much Jack Snow and Harold Jackson. (As time goes by you realize there weren’t too many offenses more overrated than the Rams of the ‘60s, and Roman Gabriel and Jack Snow in particular. Photogenic, yes. Productive, no.) Get the impression that the Rams, like few other teams, have been able to manage multiple great WRs on the field?

The only why I can come up with to explain what the Rams did and why it worked is this: The Rams usually had at least one good running back on the field at the same time. They were pass-first teams with dangerous running attacks. And you could say almost the same thing, less the “pass-first” line, about Chuck Noll’s Steelers. (Bill McPeak’s Redskins? No.)

Maybe it’s a reason. Maybe it’s no reason at all. And there’s no real lesson here, since it’s impossible to tell what influences what. Get a great QB and a powerful running attack, and pass the ball a lot, and your WRs will be HOFers? Not necessarily. Get two great WRs and a great QB and you’ll be able to run the ball? Uh, no. Assemble two great WRs and a great RB, and you’re liable to wind up with an HOF QB in the deal? Possibly. It’s just interesting, that’s all, and sometimes interesting is all you get. And if Joe Buck would keep his big yap shut for just a second maybe we could concentrate more on this stuff.