Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-2007

[Ron Sellers]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

Actually, quite a few people felt that there was no reason why Welker, with Tom Brady throwing to him, couldn't exceed 1000 yards if he could rack up 687 with the likes of Joey Harrington, Duante Culpepper and Cleo Lemon throwing the ball to him.

As Shockt showed, there was a person in response to Barnwell's article who said as much back then as well.

And yes, I am fairly certain I predicted over 2000 yards for Welker and Moss. I had little faith in Stallworth, to be honest.

I do vaguely recall you being one that did indeed call that; good job. It's one of the reasons that I take your commentary seriously.


The point remains that the vast majority - incredibly vast majority - did not foresee the 2007 season from Welker that we all enjoyed witnessing. Anybody that predicted that he would lead the league in receptions would have been laughed off as a delusional homer by most.

Was it realistic for FO or anyone else to predict that Welker would have more receptions and yards in 2007 than he had had in his entire career up to that point, or that he would lead the league in receptions?

It's easy to say that now, but there wasn't much of any reason to expect such a spectacular year at that point in time.

 

[Joey007]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

That's right up there with the "Clint's Corner" analysis of the 2000 Patriots draft

GoPats.com - Patriots Unofficial - Clint's Corner Archive

Boy that article ended up way wrong, J.R. Redmond wasn't better than Kevin Faulk.

 

[Kasmir]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

...am I experiencing Déjà vu; or did we not just address this?

So, Barnwell was "off" on his analysis? Off? You say it as though there is a rather minor difference between falling short of a 1000 yard season and just 36 receptions at 445 yards. What's worse is that the aforementioned prediction essentially cuts Welker's production from 2006 in half. Forget 1000 yards.

It's like taking a Wonderlick test and trying to argue two different grades are merely "below average." Receiving a "20" is one thing. Receiving a "4." That's just utterly awful.

It's quite ironic that you seem to think that cherry picking a single case can somehow invalidate a statistical system. If there's any statistical falsehood you should avoid, that's it.

Your argument reeks of personal agenda. You've proven nothing other than your antipathy towards Football Outsiders specifically and statistics in general.

 

[Deus Irae]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

...am I experiencing Déjà vu; or did we not just address this?

So, Barnwell was "off" on his analysis? Off? You say it as though there is a rather minor difference between falling short of a 1000 yard season and just 36 receptions at 445 yards. What's worse is that the aforementioned prediction essentially cuts Welker's production from 2006 in half. Forget 1000 yards.

It's like taking a Wonderlick test and trying to argue two different grades are merely "below average." Receiving a "20" is one thing. Receiving a "4." That's just utterly awful.

It seems more like an author making a poor assumption(s), and misreading data than the data being faulty. I see 4 significant errors which are the result of the author's choices rather than errors in the system. One of them is a bit obvious, as he decided to try out-thinking the room and flipping the stats to run against themselves. The others seem more in line with what the article purports to show, even though the author gets it all pretty much completely wrong.

1.) As has been gone over, time and again, Welker was a receiver who was rapidly improving his game, and was doing it with poor quarterback play, to boot. He hadn't even gotten into the league until he was 23 years old, and his first reception didn't come until he was 24 years old. Welker had gone from 0 to 20 to 67 receptions in 3 seasons, and had really gone from 20 to 67 in his first two years as a WR. He was also going from Frerotte/Rosenfels/Harrington/Culpepper/Lemon to Brady, which was a bigger gulf than he accounted for (his note, in passing

a figure which would be scarily low if it were not for Welker himself.

should probably have been more of a clue for him as to just how big a difference there was going to be). In fact, it's probably an area he should have avoided entirely, given his early comment of

Ah, but those receivers weren't going from Joey Harrington to Tom Brady, you say. That's true. Will that actually improve Welker? Hard to say.

2.) As for looking at Brown for his baseline, his mistake was choosing the wrong Brown seasons. Instead of choosing the 2000-2002 era, which would have been a solid comparison (similar style WR getting to the BB system, exploded from 36 to 83 receptions, also after 25 years of age) he picked 2004 and 2006, when Brown was 32 and 34 years of age, respectively.

3.) Lastly, the Patriots overhauled the offense a bit. That resulted in an extra 59 pass attempts, thus increasing the overall 'targets' pot by more than 10%.

Obviously, Welker's career has defied the statistics and the numbers geeks. That's going to happen when you put together the most productive 5 years in NFL history while playing mostly at a spot which hasn't historically allowed for that sort of thing to happen. I wouldn't classify it as a system error, however, but would choose to just note that exceptions prove rules and individuals break stereotypes, and that erroneous baseline assumptions tend to lead to erroneous conclusions. The author pretty clearly was just stabbing at ghosts here, imo.

 

[BSR]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

Guys. You are creating a false dichotomy. There is a huge difference between a 1000 yard season and just 36 receptions at 445 yards. That's what they predicted for Welker in 2007. That's severely low-balling it. Low balling even by the standards of Welker's 2006 season in Miami; at 67 rec 687 yrds. So, Football Outsiders? They thought Welker couldn't even live up to that. Again, they predicted just 35 catches, 445 yards. Essentially surmising that Welker was little more than a special teams maven who would be a rather limited slot WR in NE. A reach of a trade.

So again, I'm not bashing them for not foreseeing a statistical giant of a season. Rather I'm bashing them for thinking that Welker couldn't even live up to his stats from Miami. Huge difference. Huge failure for FO.

You are bashing a statistical prediction for results that couldn't possibly predicted by statistics. Its nonsense and as one other person put it, reeks of agenda. Statistical predictions by their very nature try to predict future performance based on past results. Statistical predictions of the Pats 2007 offensive productions are of course going to be broken since the offensive scheme, players and production changed so dramatically from previous seasons. It doesn't matter if FO was off by 2% or 2000%, the parameters changed so dramatically that all statistical prediction became meaningless. That doesn't mean that all statistical analysis by FO or in general is worthless. It just puts into perspective that statistical prediction and analysis is just another data point and hardly the only measurement.

 

[PlainOldEd]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

I love this line.....

"Randy Moss and Ben Watson are probably upgrades on Marty Booker and Randy McMichael, respectively, even if Moss is not the superstar of 1998 that some Patriots fans think they are getting."

I mean, really there is no way anyone could have known. But it's still funny.

 

[patchick]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

For a deep-offseason game, maybe each of us long-time PatsFans posters should sift through our OWN past posts for our most wildly off-target predictions?

 

[Palm Beach Pats Fan]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

You are bashing a statistical prediction for results that couldn't possibly predicted by statistics. Its nonsense and as one other person put it, reeks of agenda. Statistical predictions by their very nature try to predict future performance based on past results.

The issue is not that the statistical prediction was wrong. It was that the data used to generate the prediction was so subjectively selected. Troy Brown's performance at ages 32-34 was taken to be representative of Wes Welker. Maybe a bigger factor: Welker's limited number of snaps in Miami wasn't even taken into account. Look at yards per snap-- he was VERY efficient and would have done more, even with those awful QBs, if he had been used better, but certain Miami coaches viewed him as a "special teams guy".

Nobody could have predicted how amazingly well he would do in NE. It certainly didn't take a genius to think his production would rise a least a little in NE though, and not go the other way.

I live in south Florida. Dolphins fans had mixed feelings about the trade- getting a 2nd round pick and a 7th round pick seemed like good value (he had been a waiver pick-up), but it was also obvious that Welker was going to fit in perfectly in NE because he would be going to a coaching staff that would figure out how to use him.

 

[Huckleberry1]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

How many times can people be wrong about the same thing. People here have been predicting Welker's downfall for years and making the same claims about how his production will drop off, and it just keeps going up. I'm sure however that when he does drop to 999 yards and 99 receptions they will be in here shrieking "I told you so,,,,,"

 

[PATRIOTSFANINPA]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

For a deep-offseason game, maybe each of us long-time PatsFans posters should sift through our OWN past posts for our most wildly off-target predictions?

I remember posting the 2007 season with the Pats regular season record prediction of 10-6 :bricks:

 

[everlong]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

A certain former three letter poster on this board thought Welker would be cut before training camp ended and said at best he'd be a 30 catch guy. I bet him that Welker would have over 50 catches for first downs alone and that was where his value was, in moving the chains. He had 65 catches for first downs that season.

This board was really split about him being worth a second.

 

[BSR]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

The issue is not that the statistical prediction was wrong. It was that the data used to generate the prediction was so subjectively selected. Troy Brown's performance at ages 32-34 was taken to be representative of Wes Welker. Maybe a bigger factor: Welker's limited number of snaps in Miami wasn't even taken into account. Look at yards per snap-- he was VERY efficient and would have done more, even with those awful QBs, if he had been used better, but certain Miami coaches viewed him as a "special teams guy".

Nobody could have predicted how amazingly well he would do in NE. It certainly didn't take a genius to think his production would rise a least a little in NE though, and not go the other way.

I live in south Florida. Dolphins fans had mixed feelings about the trade- getting a 2nd round pick and a 7th round pick seemed like good value (he had been a waiver pick-up), but it was also obvious that Welker was going to fit in perfectly in NE because he would be going to a coaching staff that would figure out how to use him.

You think the prediction was way off because of the Troy Brown output comparison and not the fact that the offense was totally reinvented? Quibbling over the criteria for comparison is irrelevant. It doesn't matter what year of Troy Brown's performance he selected since none of them are even remotely comparable. Totally different players, scheme and dynamic. Its apples and dumptrucks. If he had used Troy Browns 2000-2002 numbers it doesn't make it any less wrong even if it had made it closer to the actual. The flaws are only emphasized because of the ridiculous levels at which that 2007 offense performed.

Personally, I remember thinking very highly of Welker and loved what he could bring to this offense. I would have predicted his numbers to be much higher than what Barnwell predicted for some of the same reasons outlined in this thread. However, I can still understand why a statistical model might come out with the conclusion that it did when it imperfectly has to rely on past performance to come to that conclusion.

 

[patchick]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

This board was really split about him being worth a second.

What I remember most was the FURY at the Pats for throwing in the extra 7th to secure the deal.

 

[patchick]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

I remember posting the 2007 season with the Pats regular season record prediction of 10-6 :bricks:

I don't usually go in for game/stats predictions, but I can recap for you my confident explanations of why the Patriots obviously will not select Brandon Meriweather in the 1st round.

 

[chris_in_sunnyvale]

Re: Take a moment to read and laugh: Football Outsiders pegged Welker as a reach pre-

IIRC, the general feeling prior to the start of 2007 was that Moss and Stallworth would be getting the lion's share of targets and there wouldn't be enough to go around for Welker. Remember, Stallworth was a deep-threat stud for the Eagles. Turns out that Welker and he replaced roles of importance. Barnwell and *many* others missed on this.

People love to boast about their right predictions and stick it to others when others get it wrong, but really it's an odds game that they won/lost more than anything. As a hypothetical example, let's assume all factors were taken into account when evaluating 4 primary outcomes of SB46 prior to the game. Let's assume odds were placed on the Pats D playing lights-out vs. okay vs. horrible, Ahmad Bradshaw going off for 200 yds, Deion Branch having another 11-catch SB, etc. and this ended up being the pre-game scenario:

Pats win big: 15%
Pats win close: 45%
Pats lose close: 35%
Pats lose big: 5%

Anyone who called the "Pats lose close" option and start crowing about "I KNEW it!" isn't a genius. They just guessed right. Of course it's an educated guess, but a lot of luck (think about how those 3 Giants fumbles bounced) and randomness (Welker's tough drop, Manningham's great catch) played a role. This is true about most predictions, including predicting how players will perform in the coming year.

I love Barnwell's stuff over at Grantland. And he'll be the first to admit he misses the boat on a lot of predictions. Still, his stuff is very interesting.

Regards,
Chris