ctpatsfan77

More data shows Mayo all over the field - AFC East Blog - ESPN

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"Momentum was quickly snatched away by New England, who once again proved that any Patriot, at any moment, can make a play." —Inside the NFL, Packers v. Patriots

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townes

I'm not a big stat guy but well done, those actually seem like meaningful stats. Unlike baseball I think football is really hard to judge by stats as so much is dependent upon what everyone else around you is doing or not doing right. Baseball is much more of an individual sport and as such easier to evaluate statistically.

RelocatedPatFan

That's some impressive stats. it's be great to see a breadown of where the tackles happen (like they do in basketball where they show shots taken/made).

And with information like that you'd think more offenses will have to "Hold the Mayo"...sorry I couldn't resist

patriot lifer

I agree. It'd be much more useful to see a more sophisticated breakout. Like some of the tackles may have occurred during gang-tackles where the opposing player was sandwiched with Mayo, OOOOHHH!!

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2013 Season:

Nate Solder (6'8" 320 lbs)
Seabass (6'8" 320 lbs)
Rob Gronkowski (6'6" 265 lbs)
Jake Ballard (6'6" 275 lbs)
Logan Mankins (6'4" 320 lbs) (100% recovered)
Dan Connolly (6'4" 320 lbs)
Marcus Cannon (6'5" 340 lbs) (Switch to Guard??)

RB: Ridley, Vereen, Washington, Bolden

RelocatedPatFan

Right. Like who initiated the contact that slowed the player down if it was a gang-tackle. But, that's why you have to love football because the eye-test seems so much more meaningful than stats on a sheet.

And glad to see you taking part of the punnage.

BradyFTW!

No matter what you're looking at, it can be described statistically. The question becomes "how complicated is that statistic?" and, following from that, "do the metrics that we currently use adequately and meaningfully describe the event?"

In baseball, as you said, the answer is usually yes, because, offensively at least, interactions are very simple. Even in baseball, though, you used to hear all of the same things that you're saying about football when it came to measuring defensive performance. The too-simple metrics that were being used actually punished fielders who had lots of of range, and of course that was wrong. That wasn't because statistics can't measure defense, though; it was because they were measuring the wrong things. It was harder to do than a simple OBP calculation, and somehow people made the leap from there to conclude that it was impossible. It wasn't, though, as the last few years of innovation in this area have shown.

The same holds true for football. The issue isn't that stats can't describe it: it's that we've been using overly simplistic, altogether insignificant stats for far, far too long. We chose ease of compilation and use over actual relevant. Football Outsiders is one of a number of sources that are slowly changing that. It will be far harder to do effectively than baseball, and the end result won't be nearly as telling, but there are always extraordinarily insightful statistics out there to be found. In fact, I can all but guarantee that a lot of them have already been developed, but individual teams have them under lock and key. There's a reason why pretty much every pro sports franchise in the country has MIT nerds locked in the basement somewhere.

unoriginal

The data also supports the conjecture that our pass defense is really weak in the middle of the field, particularly in the zones our linebackers cover.

strngplyr

I love what Mayo is doing, but I hope some of that data isn't skewed by our #2 corner situation, getting kicked off receivers backs like they're riding a bull and forcing Mayo to do cleanup.

Can't wait til Bodden is back, I think we can have a pretty damn impressive defense when we have 2 solid corners (not that I wasn't impressed with the 2nd half of last year, lets see a repeat performance for all of this season).

PatsWickedPissah

Sorta the 21st century version of keeping the dwarfs working in the underground mines under BB's Sauron eye

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ctpatsfan77

Actually, I didn't include this part, but the FO article (click through the ESPN article to get there) suggests that Mayo's "success rate"* is on the lower end for LBs, but not unacceptably so; that said, success rate tends to be fairly proportional to how close to the LOS you play (the #s for safeties, for example, are abysmal).

*FO generally defines success on an offensive play as picking up 40% of yards on first down (e.g., 4 on 1-and-10 but 6 on 1-and-15), 60% of yards on second down (e.g., 4 on 2-and-6), and 100% of yards on third or fourth down. So a successful tackle means the receiver doesn't advance the ball that far.

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"Momentum was quickly snatched away by New England, who once again proved that any Patriot, at any moment, can make a play." —Inside the NFL, Packers v. Patriots

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