The Proper Way To Analytically View Football

In the modern era, the sport of football has developed beyond just that and is now more of a community that consists of passionate fans, media members, and the many people who either formerly worked in the league or currently do. The masses have embraced the culture of football, and the rise of social media has allowed for an endless variety of interpretations and opinions to be heard from the football community. As most opinions or takes in sports can never be indefinitely true or not true, I believe there is a large degree of axiomatic principles that apply to the general assessment of the game. These principles are mostly overlooked by the media, likely because they aren’t exciting enough. In some ways, football is like politics in that there is a spectrum of perspectives to observe the various topics and debates related to it. On a basic level, the amount of time and energy dedicated is largely what varies the most as average people will typically only view football as a casual source of entertainment, but some will dedicate their entire workload to football, and then there lies all those who fall somewhere in the middle. In addition, others easily influence people, leading to many obtaining inaccurate information or a flawed perspective about a particular subject. Until recently the gap between casual fans and those who work in it has begun to fill due to social media’s valuable properties. Sites like YouTube and Patreon have allowed for a collection of people to share and teach the gained knowledge from various backgrounds regarding football and this couldn’t make it any easier for casual fans to gain new insight into the sport.

The unpopular nature of injuries

Given the physicality of football and the frequency at which it is played, injuries are a big deal, especially in the NFL. Every team’s front office spends countless hours as a group over the offseason planning for the next season, and it’s safe to say some teams have good plans to succeed while others have worse. As the season goes on teams are dealt with unpredictable rates of injuries with different levels of severity which alters the plan initially set forth, sometimes in a dramatic fashion. This is one of the main reasons it’s so difficult to predict a football team’s success before the season. As much as fans and the media don’t want to admit it, an NFL organization is heavily dependent on the health of its players, so much so that it is ultimately near impossible to win a Superbowl without significant luck in this regard. This is hard to accept because we view the NFL as a player-driven league where the cream rises to the top and saying player health is an element of luck is unintuitive to that narrative. As much as that narrative is true, it is only true on a larger scale rather than on a year-to-year basis where this method of predicting based on the overall talent of a team is ineffective as it’s nearly impossible to predict a team’s injuries and the degree they’ll be affected by them. Given this, a more consistent and reliable way of ensuring success on a year-to-year basis is to have an elite coach while putting less emphasis on talent, that way regardless of how many key players get hurt, you have your number one strength being the coach to rely on throughout the season.

Importance of coach and culture

Analysts who make predictions and all those who place bets often base their conclusion of a particle scenario on the simple assessment of how many talented players a team has. In some situations, this might work out, but this way of analyzing is inconsistent and unreliable. Historically in football, the only two aspects of a team that leads to sustainable success are the coach and the QB, even more so in modern football where it is quite obviously a QB-driven league. It is clear and obvious that when there’s exceptional talent filled in both roles, it’s highly likely to succeed regardless of any other deficiencies. What’s important is to examine the specific difference in value between the two comparatively and to understand the risk involved in these two different principles.

The 2019 season was a perfect testimony to the idea that coaches in the NFL matter more than any other sport. The NFL has been attempting to adopt the same sort of principle that has developed over the past decade or so in basketball and baseball that the league is driven through its players, but based on how the recent seasons have shaped out this has been proven untrue in football. The first thing to recognize is how the Browns’ season has played out. Coming into the 2019 season, the browns were heavy favorites to win the division and were even thrown around in talk of the Superbowl. On paper, there was no other reason to doubt these expectations as it was quite obvious they were loaded with talent and came off the previous season hot with a young QB in Baker who had a historic rookie season. But this all turned for the worst when the season started showing the true colors of the first-year head coach Freddie kitchens as he was clearly in over his head and unprepared. This is clear and obvious when you look at their record and who they’ve lost to given the unbelievable talent he had to work with. Then finally after the team gathered momentum and picked up three straight wins, he allowed his best defensive player to commit one of the most horrendous on-field acts in history and gets indefinitely suspended. The same scenario occurred with the Cowboys in 2019 as well, being regarded as a Superbowl contender because of their overwhelming talent spread throughout the team, only to be diminished by the NFL’s most mediocre Head Coach. It turns out the strategy of having elite talent while being content with a low-level coach hasn’t worked out. As Bill Belichick has said, “Talent sets the floor, character sets the ceiling.” This has now been demonstrated in a new fashion as in 2020 Belichick still accomplished seven wins with one of the worst rosters in recent years.

Philosophy of drafting

One major problem a handful of NFL GMs has fallen for in the most recent years of drafting is ignoring positional value and drafting players high regardless of where the player is projected to land. It is important to know that positional value is something that isn’t constant and changes over time. Yet this isn’t very obvious to some front offices as there are still teams taking running backs and nose-tackles with high first-round picks. The best example of this is when Dave Gettleman, New York Giants GM drafted Saquon Barkley at number two overall instead of taking arguably a future franchise QB. Then the following year Gettleman traded Odell Beckham Jr. for a mid-first-rounder which they used to draft Dexter Lawrence, a 340 Lbs nose tackle. The point is not that these players they’ve drafted are not untalented, to say the least, but the fact they could’ve gotten 80% of the production that Barkley and Lawrence bring but in the 3rd and 4th rounds. As most know the NFL has transitioned to a passing league and every bit of analytics shows that; this means positions responsible for defending the run become less valuable. On top of that, running backs and interior linemen are two of the easiest positions to find in either free agency or the draft. Through the 2016 season to the end of the 2018 season, there have been twenty-four different running backs to achieve 1000 rushing yards seasons in at least one of those three years. Of those players, only eight were first-round picks, and 12 were drafted in the third or later (three went undrafted). This truly shows how many new and different half-backs can get high-level production each year similar to interior linemen. There are still GMs who haven’t adjusted to the modern era of football and live by philosophies that died off years ago. 

Why stats should be less relevant

Ever since stats were able to be recorded in the game of football, they’ve been the most used tool by the people watching it to assess the skill of a player while still having a heavy influence on the decisions of front offices. Unlike in the past, more intricate and telling stats have developed with the likes of PFF and plenty of other analytical companies which give great use to teams and fans. Despite the development of all this advanced technology to better generate stats and create new ways to understand players and teams, I still firmly believe the best and most accurate way to truly understand a player or team’s performance is to watch the entire film of a said game simply. Although this method is the most accurate, it isn’t in any way the easiest to do, but I’ll do my best to relay the knowledge of watching ‘film’ through the past few years I’ve been doing so.

The biggest and most important reason to watch ‘film’, while reconciling it with analytics is context. This is an aspect of football analysis that stats/ analytics have yet to be able to capture while it can drastically change the output of any stat you read online. There are numerous times in a game where the effort and skill of a player aren’t shown in any stat due to either a penalty, miscommunication, or a teammate failing to execute his job. Look at Aaron Rodger’s 2019 season for example; If you were not to carefully watch his film and pay attention to his numbers, you wouldn’t be aware of how many opportunities he’s missed due to the following hindrances: receiver’s lack of contested catching, not knowing what to do when the play breaks down, poor situational awareness, etc. For the sake of assessing a specific team, poor special teams, bad penalties/ poor calls will not reflect the skill of the rest of the team. This applies to how players are viewed concerning their wins and overall success too. Using wins and team stats to determine a player’s talent is simply unfair, even at the quarterback position. A perfect example of this is how Matt Ryan’s team success has fluctuated drastically throughout his career while his play has been rather steady. While analytically in 2016, his MVP year was viewed as an anomaly, as a player on film he hasn’t exactly changed before or after, yet his team record has as well as his stats. The talent around Ryan has changed over the years and most importantly the elite playcalling, resulting in differing stats and records. Ryan’s skillset has stayed consistent throughout his career: his good arm, high accuracy on every field level, and his ability to excel at reading defenses. While stats can show the level at which these skills have been utilized and executed the most and least, they can’t define his skill level. The article “Quarterback Positional Analysis: How to Evaluate QB (part one)” has a much more focused take on the nature of the QB position.

A big flaw currently in the media is how people put together their power rankings. The common theme in this regard is using a team’s wins and losses as the main determining factor for the order of their list; just looking at the team’s played-out schedule and ordering them with the added help of predetermined biases – this is a symptom of laziness in the media. A thorough investigation into each game that a team plays while accounting for numerous amending factors that alter the outcomes of games gives a much more accurate week-to-week ranking. It’s important to realize that power ranking should reflect what we’d expect a given team to play like in the foreseeable future and not just only reflect how a team has previously played. Also saying team ‘A’ is better than team ‘B’ just because team A beat team B is flawed in multiple dimensions. Firstly: If you were to base your rankings on this simple fact, by the end of the season it’d be impossible for that list to have any logical coherence as teams constantly lose to teams that lose to an opponent in which that opponent had lost to a team that the initial losing team ends up beating or vise versa. The fact of the matter is outcomes of games can vary drastically based on specific matchups. You also must account for injuries on given weeks and the fact that not every player plays their best football every week.

Simply looking at a game’s final score and outcome leaves you ignorant of how the game truly played out; it is only fair to use a game’s outcome to assess the value of a team if you watched the game in full. Many casual fans don’t account for garbage time stats, which are perhaps the most misleading and almost no advanced analytics will account for this. Most people will know this but for those who don’t, many times teams will fall behind greatly due to their poor performance resulting in the opposing team letting the foot off the gas pedal while sometimes even substituting in younger players, which in return allows the team playing poorly to run up the stat sheet and make the game look closer than it was. If you were to watch the game in full, you’d have a much clearer picture of how that given game played out. For those who want to minimize the time spent watching ‘film’, I’d suggest stopping watching when the game gets out of hand. The NFL is a league of parity, and it’s often the small or flukey plays that determine the outcomes of games rather than a team’s overall talent and integrity. Because of this, we should control our urges to overreact to the various surprises that inevitably come each week.

Not even PFF will account for the skill of the opposing team/ player or the level of responsibility of a player. This is where using advanced analytics paired with watching the game gives you the best analysis of a team or player. When viewing a player’s grade, it does not reflect if a DB is being asked to shadow an elite receiver with no help for an entire game or if a pass rusher is constantly drawing double teams. Something that is very overlooked when viewing grades and stats is a specific matchup for a player. Here is a good example of this: A player like Trent Brown, a massive tackle that relies on size and strength will line up against a quick and twitchy finesse pass rusher in Brian Burns. Assuming Brown would be tasked to block him without help in pass-pro, Given Burns’s explosiveness off the edge and Brown’s lack of quickness, his power would not be able to be utilized which would allow Burns to get constant pressure on the QB, racking up stats and positive grades. That is an example of line play as this same principle exists at every position.

Regarding scouting, both the talent of NFL prospects and current players, what you see on film will reveal skills and aspects of football that stats/ analytics couldn’t account for. In addition to knowing how a player produces, it is important to understand individual skill sets and the caliber of each trait. Understanding each trait of a given player and the level at which it can be performed gives the most accurate representation of that player. Understanding the value of each given trait is equally as important. This is more or less relevant depending on the position being evaluated; positions like DB for example will reveal the skill of traits such as pressing ability or play instincts which are not accounted for in stats. The stat ‘average yardage of separation’ for receivers can only reveal so much about a receiver’s route-running ability or release off the line of scrimmage. Another is yards after contact or ‘YAC’ for ball carriers as they don’t reveal the deficiency of the tackler or say if the carrier alluded a defender without getting their hands on them. These are the sorts of things that can only be accounted for by actually watching the play happen.

Like everyone in the football community, we all have our subjective image of the league and value other players more than others and will often compare players based on our assessed opinion of them. What many casual fans are guilty of is how they assess these opinions, being lazy and forming their opinion on shallow information and meaningless stats. What is easy for the casual fan is to look at the most headlined stat leaders (pass yards, rushing yards, TDs, INTs, sacks, etc.) as well as only watching highlights and only seeing the good plays and not the bad ones. The media generally will not cover important details and unpopular truths but rather cover what is more appealing and convenient. This leads many casual fans who don’t pay close attention to have inaccurate views of the league’s goings. In the case you want to form your own educated opinion, it is best to pay closer attention to individual games and have more due diligence in the process of evaluating statistics and analytics. All of which I’ve discussed can be branched off into other discussions that can be debated, but this serves as a conception for the various nuances evident in the sport.