miloofcroton
Third String But Playing on Special Teams
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2017
- Messages
- 501
- Reaction score
- 543
As I was recapping some thoughts on the latest NFL draft, I started delving in a bit further into the philosophies of the teams. I've been researching football organizations for the past several hours, which is to say every non-player personnel: coaches, executives, directors, analysts, scouts, and technically even owners. Obviously, the primary measure of success is winning, and at that, sustained winning. However, winning is a very coarse statistic for when analyzing the pros and cons of various strategies and tendencies throughout the league. We're looking for more granular things that can be noticed without necessarily needing every single win to line up.
One measure that stuck out to me was the ability to acquire and develop QB talent. Sure, some teams, even those with primarily defensive minds, can take the A+ QB talents in the first round. Not many can successfully develop QBs from the mid rounds, and far less are able to do it more than once, indicating that the ones who did it once simply drafted an A+ talent in that round. Ultimately, QB is the most important position in football, a position that teams live and die with, and the ability to be utterly dominant in the acquisition and development of this position is enough to put you in the upper tier. I found Belichick to be the best, thanks to both his greatest finds as well as his consistency. I found Sean Payton to be the only other current NFL coach worth mentioning, but his consistently atrocious defense has stained my opinion of him and that Saints organization somewhat. That leaves only one other coach that I would put 'significantly above the mean', and he's the wily coach up in Ann Arbor: Jim Harbaugh. He's also had great defenses everywhere he's gone, and should he enter the NFL again, himself combined with a great front office would be the only competitor in organizational excellence to Bill Belichick and the Patriots.
Now, I wasn't done there. I started following this rabbit hole in Cleveland, on the path of football analytics. On the surface, many baseball fans, economics majors, and other math-inclined people may appreciate this concept. Analytics certainly have a place, but this is a rebuttal for their use as the guiding principle in organizing a team.
For one, sustained success in football requires making the whole more than the sum of the parts. If you are just the sum of the parts, then you end up with parts that are too expensive or out of the lineup due to injuries, and you can't continually replace that talent pool when 31 other teams are looking for the exact same things. This is somewhat in contrast to baseball. There are far fewer synergies between baseball players, and those that do exist can almost perfectly be described by easily quantifiable statistics. Baseball teams do still face the conundrum of having 31 or so other competitors for the same types of people, but large rosters, minor league systems, and massive drafts allowed even extremely minor advantages to eventually bubble to the surface. In football, you're looking at far more discrete results without the ability to blindly choose players because they have one trait that might be undervalued by other teams (assuming your luck averages out on all other traits).
For two, there's also the incredible amount of work done behind the scenes in football, in week to week preparation, off-season activities, and other leadership opportunities. There's the necessary toughness to strive for a few inches at key moments that are nothing more blips on the radar screen in a football analytic's head.
Neither of these really exist in other sports the way that they do in football, nor does the importance of the QB position which I mentioned earlier. However, in searching for Belichick's comments on the subject, I discovered one further reason that perhaps existed somewhere in my psyche due to my previous studies in game theory, but Bill said it more eloquently:
Bill Belichick on analytics: ‘It’s not really my thing’
That's really driving home my point about what I called 'discrete results' (not the best term, but I'm keeping it for continuity in this piece). In baseball, basketball, soccer, and even non-sport things like finance, you take 55% chances all game long because there are a large amount of plays or transactions, and each essentially have equal importance in the success of your venture. Interestingly, baseball plays usually result in failure (to score) and basketball plays usually (relatively) result in success, which are two opposite ends of the spectrum, but the inherent equality of any single play to mean as much as the next is extant in both sports.
In football, you have a very asymmetric game board. If the previous examples were economics, football is war. In football, as in war, you don't need to win every battle, have the advantage in every aspect of a battle to win the battle, or even have the probabilistic likeliness to win the most battles. You need a decisive advantage or several, and then you continue on to decisive victory. Decisiveness essentially means an extremely high probability for excess, which I called discrete because anything other than a 1 (or close to it) is a 0 in your mind. These concepts can boil down to heuristic categories, such as rock beats scissors, paper beats rock, and scissors beats paper, but that is only a specific type of categories that exist in the set of all categorical strategies. You can also have a system where one category always wins. This is almost the case with the NFL passing game, for the half of the game where you're passing and they're defending, because passing is consistently the better way to score points and control a game. Not to get too off topic, but in war, having control of the skies (in terms of aircraft and rockets/missiles/bombs) is an utterly dominant way to control any region of land or water, provided you can maintain supplies to your air attack and are not politically-limited in the force with which you are allowed to apply. (At least, that worked until nuclear threats made even a single mistake in your air defense a discrete/utter loss for essentially all of your defenses, but that's waaay off topic...)
I'm sure there are many other directions we can take this topic, but the original purpose of my research has been quite resolved in my mind. I feel that the Patriots organization truly stands above the others.
Other things for further discussion(and I'm leaving out the adjective 'relatively' as these are certainly not *perfect* descriptions):
football: asymmetric, non-repeating
baseball/basketball/most other sports: symmetric, repeating
Football is not nearly as much of a repeating game relative to most other sports or finance, but chess lies still on the opposite end of the spectrum of all of them. A single play in a football game has the same type of strategy as an entire game of chess, as you have only one possible conclusion (well, technically two, if you include a draw), although of course football strategy in individual plays don't contain the complexity of chess strategy.
Scarcity - can a particular resource be gained? This is another side to analytics (to contrast with the earlier discussion on valuation) that is more valid in football. Obviously, the Patriots have been thoroughly aware of scarcity with the way they've handled money and draft picks. There is a lot of subtle discussion within this topic, I think.
For broader game theory: If you're interested in things that transcend the sport that brought us onto this forum, there's the interesting question of which variables are more or less important at different levels (levels generally meaning size and/or period of engagement). For instance, maybe teamwork is crucially essential in a 4 man squad or a 5 man offensive line, but how much is teamwork diluted with double the number of players on a kick return? Does the returner's special talent not shine more individually than a running back's would? And the same is true in organizations. You can certainly have more 'waste' in a group of 1000 people than in a group of 10, not to say waste is a good thing, just that priorties change. Certain concepts don't necessarily have parallels at different levels either. In warfare, suppressive fire is extremely effective, but it only really exists in engagements from around ten to one hundred. Beyond that, the game board changes. Something similar may exist, but you'd have to generalize this specific concept we're calling suppressive fire.
One last comment on analytics in football: I qualify my previous rebuttal for their usage in valuation by saying you can't find analogues for baseball statistics that will effectively work in football to build successful franchises. If you could take your traditional methods of scouting players and then work backwards to attempt to create new stats that mirror everything you could possibly see on tape, then you would have a somewhat full picture of what your evaluation looks like. However, that computer still wouldn't know all of the things a person could draw from a person's character, effort, etc that certainly do contribute to making a team more than a sum of its parts, which is to me the essential defining feature of football.
One measure that stuck out to me was the ability to acquire and develop QB talent. Sure, some teams, even those with primarily defensive minds, can take the A+ QB talents in the first round. Not many can successfully develop QBs from the mid rounds, and far less are able to do it more than once, indicating that the ones who did it once simply drafted an A+ talent in that round. Ultimately, QB is the most important position in football, a position that teams live and die with, and the ability to be utterly dominant in the acquisition and development of this position is enough to put you in the upper tier. I found Belichick to be the best, thanks to both his greatest finds as well as his consistency. I found Sean Payton to be the only other current NFL coach worth mentioning, but his consistently atrocious defense has stained my opinion of him and that Saints organization somewhat. That leaves only one other coach that I would put 'significantly above the mean', and he's the wily coach up in Ann Arbor: Jim Harbaugh. He's also had great defenses everywhere he's gone, and should he enter the NFL again, himself combined with a great front office would be the only competitor in organizational excellence to Bill Belichick and the Patriots.
Now, I wasn't done there. I started following this rabbit hole in Cleveland, on the path of football analytics. On the surface, many baseball fans, economics majors, and other math-inclined people may appreciate this concept. Analytics certainly have a place, but this is a rebuttal for their use as the guiding principle in organizing a team.
For one, sustained success in football requires making the whole more than the sum of the parts. If you are just the sum of the parts, then you end up with parts that are too expensive or out of the lineup due to injuries, and you can't continually replace that talent pool when 31 other teams are looking for the exact same things. This is somewhat in contrast to baseball. There are far fewer synergies between baseball players, and those that do exist can almost perfectly be described by easily quantifiable statistics. Baseball teams do still face the conundrum of having 31 or so other competitors for the same types of people, but large rosters, minor league systems, and massive drafts allowed even extremely minor advantages to eventually bubble to the surface. In football, you're looking at far more discrete results without the ability to blindly choose players because they have one trait that might be undervalued by other teams (assuming your luck averages out on all other traits).
For two, there's also the incredible amount of work done behind the scenes in football, in week to week preparation, off-season activities, and other leadership opportunities. There's the necessary toughness to strive for a few inches at key moments that are nothing more blips on the radar screen in a football analytic's head.
Neither of these really exist in other sports the way that they do in football, nor does the importance of the QB position which I mentioned earlier. However, in searching for Belichick's comments on the subject, I discovered one further reason that perhaps existed somewhere in my psyche due to my previous studies in game theory, but Bill said it more eloquently:
Bill Belichick on analytics: ‘It’s not really my thing’
That's really driving home my point about what I called 'discrete results' (not the best term, but I'm keeping it for continuity in this piece). In baseball, basketball, soccer, and even non-sport things like finance, you take 55% chances all game long because there are a large amount of plays or transactions, and each essentially have equal importance in the success of your venture. Interestingly, baseball plays usually result in failure (to score) and basketball plays usually (relatively) result in success, which are two opposite ends of the spectrum, but the inherent equality of any single play to mean as much as the next is extant in both sports.
In football, you have a very asymmetric game board. If the previous examples were economics, football is war. In football, as in war, you don't need to win every battle, have the advantage in every aspect of a battle to win the battle, or even have the probabilistic likeliness to win the most battles. You need a decisive advantage or several, and then you continue on to decisive victory. Decisiveness essentially means an extremely high probability for excess, which I called discrete because anything other than a 1 (or close to it) is a 0 in your mind. These concepts can boil down to heuristic categories, such as rock beats scissors, paper beats rock, and scissors beats paper, but that is only a specific type of categories that exist in the set of all categorical strategies. You can also have a system where one category always wins. This is almost the case with the NFL passing game, for the half of the game where you're passing and they're defending, because passing is consistently the better way to score points and control a game. Not to get too off topic, but in war, having control of the skies (in terms of aircraft and rockets/missiles/bombs) is an utterly dominant way to control any region of land or water, provided you can maintain supplies to your air attack and are not politically-limited in the force with which you are allowed to apply. (At least, that worked until nuclear threats made even a single mistake in your air defense a discrete/utter loss for essentially all of your defenses, but that's waaay off topic...)
I'm sure there are many other directions we can take this topic, but the original purpose of my research has been quite resolved in my mind. I feel that the Patriots organization truly stands above the others.
Other things for further discussion(and I'm leaving out the adjective 'relatively' as these are certainly not *perfect* descriptions):
football: asymmetric, non-repeating
baseball/basketball/most other sports: symmetric, repeating
Football is not nearly as much of a repeating game relative to most other sports or finance, but chess lies still on the opposite end of the spectrum of all of them. A single play in a football game has the same type of strategy as an entire game of chess, as you have only one possible conclusion (well, technically two, if you include a draw), although of course football strategy in individual plays don't contain the complexity of chess strategy.
Scarcity - can a particular resource be gained? This is another side to analytics (to contrast with the earlier discussion on valuation) that is more valid in football. Obviously, the Patriots have been thoroughly aware of scarcity with the way they've handled money and draft picks. There is a lot of subtle discussion within this topic, I think.
For broader game theory: If you're interested in things that transcend the sport that brought us onto this forum, there's the interesting question of which variables are more or less important at different levels (levels generally meaning size and/or period of engagement). For instance, maybe teamwork is crucially essential in a 4 man squad or a 5 man offensive line, but how much is teamwork diluted with double the number of players on a kick return? Does the returner's special talent not shine more individually than a running back's would? And the same is true in organizations. You can certainly have more 'waste' in a group of 1000 people than in a group of 10, not to say waste is a good thing, just that priorties change. Certain concepts don't necessarily have parallels at different levels either. In warfare, suppressive fire is extremely effective, but it only really exists in engagements from around ten to one hundred. Beyond that, the game board changes. Something similar may exist, but you'd have to generalize this specific concept we're calling suppressive fire.
One last comment on analytics in football: I qualify my previous rebuttal for their usage in valuation by saying you can't find analogues for baseball statistics that will effectively work in football to build successful franchises. If you could take your traditional methods of scouting players and then work backwards to attempt to create new stats that mirror everything you could possibly see on tape, then you would have a somewhat full picture of what your evaluation looks like. However, that computer still wouldn't know all of the things a person could draw from a person's character, effort, etc that certainly do contribute to making a team more than a sum of its parts, which is to me the essential defining feature of football.
