I’ve gone over a lot of different statistics over the past few months, most of which illustrated just how bad the Eagles were last year.  Throughout that effort, I’ve been attempting to come up with a way to visualize all of these stats together.  The goal is to create a kind of dashboard that shows, at one glance the strengths and weaknesses of the team and its performance relative to historical averages.  Today, I’d like you to look at a first draft.

I’m far from an expert at Excel (at least when it comes to the graphing tools), so if you know of a better way to visualize the data, please let me know.  Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Below are several charts that each contain 6 data points.  They are as follows:

Max, Min, Avg, +1 StDev, -1 StDev, and the 2012 Eagles

I’ve highlighted the 2012 Eagles in Red and the Average in Yellow.  The timeframe for included data is noted at the top of each chart.  

For example, here is Points Scored:

So the 2012 Eagles scored 280 Points, which is significantly worse than the time period average (345), but within 1 standard deviation (272).

Simple enough?  It’s not elegant, but my hope is to create something for which I can show a lot of charts next to each other with minimal explanation.  Hopefully, since they’re all formatted the same, it will be easy to visualize everything at once.  I’ll list a few more below so we get a better idea of what it would look like.

In the run-up to the season, I hope to put a comprehensive set together so we can see all of last season, statistically, at a glance.  Hopefully, this will also help illustrate which areas of the game we should expect significant improvement in.

Interesting? Suggestions?

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Tonight is the NBA draft.  Normally this isn’t that noteworthy of an event, unless the Sixers have a high lottery pick (tonight they pick 11th).  However, the Sixers have a new GM, so perhaps something interesting will happen.

Most mock drafts have the Sixers taking a Big (C/PF), noting that the team “needs” help at that position.  That analysis is remarkably short-sighted.  Given the structure of the game (small rosters, 5 men on the court at a time, etc…), the NBA is HEAVILY dependent on “stars”.  This means that NBA teams should draft BPA no matter what.  It is even more important to do this in the NBA than it is in the NFL (and we’ve seen how vital it is in the NFL).

Fortunately, the new GM (Sam Hinkie), is a member of the “analytics” crowd, so surely he knows this.  I don’t follow the NBA draft nearly as much as the NFL draft, so I won’t make any specific player recommendations.  However, even though he hasn’t made a single move yet, I have more confidence in Hinkie than I’ve had in any Sixers GM during my lifetime (28 years).  That itself is cause for optimism.

It may be time to start paying attention to the Sixers again.  If you’ve tuned out the past couple years, let me catch you up on everything you NEED to know:

– Jrue Holiday is VERY good, and has a legitimate shot at being a “star”-level player.

– It is VERY difficult for the Sixers to sign marquee free agents because Pennsylvania has a state income tax (unlike Florida or Texas).  It might also be because Philly is not a “warm-weather” location, but I think that aspect is largely overblown (you’ll hear it a lot from the press).

There you go, you’re caught up.  The rest would just make you sad and remind you why you tuned out in the first place.

A few weeks ago, Tommy Lawlor from IgglesBlitz suggested I take a look into whether there is a connection between plays run and injuries.  Today, I’ll do that.  The theory is relatively straightforward, if you run more plays (for instance, out of a no-huddle offense) you have more opportunities for players to get hurt.  Additionally, we can assume that relative levels of fatigue increase with the number of plays.  I think it’s also safe to assume that there MAY be a positive connection between fatigue and injury rate.

I guess it’s theoretically possible for fatigue to LIMIT injuries (players aren’t moving as fast or cutting as quickly), but I think it’s more likely to work the other way.

In any case, given Chip Kelly’s state preference for running lots of plays on offense, it’s a worthwhile endeavor to see what, if any, the negative effects will be on the Eagles players.

Methodology

Here’s the tough part.  There are A LOT of variables that go into injuries.  Additionally, to get a full answer, we’d have to delve very deeply into the plays per game numbers.  The ideal way of measuring (as far as I can tell) the correlation would involve logging individual players’ number of plays versus their individual injury occurrences.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the data (nor the time/resources) to accomplish such a complete project.

However, I’ve taken a shortcut in an effort to get a quick look at the issue.

From Teamrankings.com, I’ve downloaded the number of offensive plays run for each NFL team from 2008-2012.  On the injury side, I’ve used Football Outsiders’ Adjusted Games Lost metric.  Note that this statistic is not a straight man-games lost measure.  It accounts for the differing injury report designations along with the relative importance of each player (i.e. losing a starting QB is much worse than a 3rd string DE).

While this doesn’t directly address the issue at hand (is injury occurence positively correlated with plays run), it does get at the higher level issue (and perhaps more pertinent question) of how big of an effect will Chip Kelly’s uptempo offense have on the Eagles injury rate.

Note I only went back to 2008 because that’s the earliest season for which I could find the FO AGL stats.

Results

Good news for Eagles fans (at least not bad news); there does not seem to be a connection between Adjusted Games Lost and Offensive Plays run.  Here is the chart, the correlation value is -.019.  Don’t read into the fact that the correlation is negative; the magnitude suggests there’s no connection either way.  UPDATE: I had the X and Y (dependent/independent) flipped in the original chart, now fixed.

As I said, this is by no means a definitive analysis.  I’d like a larger sample.  It also doesn’t account for TYPE of play, nor does it account for the change in personnel on the field for each play.  For example, a kneel down will count as an offensive play despite not carrying any significant risk of injury.  Similarly, teams running out the clock with their backups will factor into the data, whereas we are not really concerned with those situations.

Regardless, it’s at least an indication that the Eagles should NOT expect to see a significant increase in rate of injury as they increase the number of plays run.  There are a number of potential reasons for this.  First of all, the rate of injury is actually very low, so an individual play carries a very small risk.  Therefore it should require a relatively large increase in number of plays before we see any effects.

Also, injury rate itself is so variable that we can’t immediately attribute more injuries to more plays.  We have to allow for the possibility that increases to overall injury rate are random (though we didn’t see an increase here).

There’s certainly a lot more work that can be done on this subject.  There MUST be some correlation, for no other reason than more plays = more opportunities to get hurt.  The real question is magnitude, which appears (in this analysis at least), to be very small.  We also don’t know whether injury rate is flat or whether it increases as the game progresses (do more injuries occur later in games, perhaps shedding light on the fatigue factor).

For now though, there’s no reason for Eagles fans to worry.

A couple other major takeaways from the data:

– There is a relatively surprising lack of variation in the number of plays run by each team.  Over the past 5 seasons, the leader in plays per game has been New England, with 67.9.  That makes sense.  However, the lowest average belongs to the Buffalo Bills, who ran an average of 59.94 plays per game.  Notice the difference between the two teams is just 8 plays per game.  As you can imagine, injuries a rare enough that an 8 play increase should not have a major effect on the number of injuries.

– The Eagles averaged 64.64 plays per game over the same timeframe, placing the team 7th overall.  Essentially, the Eagles under Andy Reid ALREADY ran more offensive plays per game than most teams.

– The NFL Average from 2008 to 2012 was 63.15 plays per game.

– The highest number of plays run per game in an individual season belongs to last year’s Patriots, who averaged 74.3.  The lowest was 56.7 by the 2010 Titans.

Short post today.  I’ve gone through and found what I believe to be some interesting/surprising NFL stats.  No deep meaning or long analysis, I’ll let the numbers mainly speak for themselves.

– Matt Stafford has thrown more Passes per game than any QB in history.  By itself, that’s not a big surprise.  However, the size of his lead is ridiculous.  Here is the top ten of all-time, taken from Pro-football-reference.com:

By comparison, Donovan McNabb, during his time with the supposedly “pass-crazy” Andy Reid Eagles, averaged 32.06 attempts per game, nearly 30% fewer passes per game than Stafford.

– Tony Romo has the 5th highest Passer Rating in history, just 1 tenth of a point worse than Peyton Manning.  Check out the top 5:

– Michael Vick has just 13 more career passing yards (20,274) than his cousin, Aaron Brooks (20,261)

– Adrian Peterson, Gale Sayers, and Barry Sanders all have career yards per carry averages of 5.0….

D’Angelo Williams, Napoleon Kaufman, and Tatum Bell all have career YPC averages of 4.9.

– Muhsin Muhammed had 860 career receptions, nearly 100 more than Eric Moulds (764) and more than 100 more than Michael Irvin (750), Andre Rison (743) and Donald Driver (743).

– Noted statue Peyton Manning is tied for 2nd all time (with Dan Marino) for low sack percentage (3.13%).  Michael Vick’s career sack percentage is 8.60%.  QB Mobility is overrated…

– Jim Kelly is in the HOF.  Here are some of his career NFL numbers, side-by-side, with Donovan McNabb:

It’s no secret that the Eagles sucked last year.  The team was 23% worse than league average in Points Scored and 22% worse than league average in Points Against.  There are a lot of explanations for what happened, but there’s no denying the fact that the team’s production was awful.  I’ve previously discussed the Turnover issues, specifically predicting that the 2013 team will perform better if for no other reason than better luck.

Today, let’s expand that topic a bit, moving beyond turnovers.

What happens to a team the year AFTER it performs TERRIBLY?

To find such teams, I looked at the last decade in the NFL (2003-2012) and found every team that was more than 20% below league average in BOTH Points Scored and Points Against.

There are only 15 such teams (out of 320 in the sample).  Also, 3 of these team seasons occurred last year (Eagles, Raiders, Jacksonville).  Since I can’t see the future (still working on that), those obviously won’t help us much.

That leaves 12 teams from which to draw information from.  Here they are:

These are the WORST teams of the NFL from 2003-2011.  What happens the following season?

On the right side of the table, I’ve shown the CHANGE in Offensive and Defensive performance relative to league average (Points For and Points Against).  I’ve also shown the CHANGE in Wins for each team in the subsequent season.

To overemphasize, those numbers are CHANGE, not absolute.  So the 2004 Cardinals won 6 games (4+2), not 2.

Now that I’ve cleared that up, let’s look at the results, which I’ve highlighted in Red.  On average, the teams improved their offensive production by 13% (relative to league average) and their defensive performance by 18%.  Those are obviously HUGE gains.  Perhaps most importantly, the teams above, on average, improved by nearly 4 wins.

Why?

There a number of reasons for expecting a large improvement this year from the Eagles.  Injuries, bad luck, new coach, etc…  However, another major factor is that the NFL is DESIGNED to ensure really bad teams don’t stay bad for long.  That’d be a big problem for developing and keeping fans.  To alleviate this, the NFL uses two strategies:  The NFL Draft, and the Schedule.

Everyone here is probably familiar with both (definitely how the draft works).  Quickly, the NFL schedule uses the standings to create the non-divisional match ups each year.  So the Eagles, by virtue of finishing last in the division, will play other teams this year that also finished last in their respective divisions.  The upshot is that the Eagles have games next season against the Lions, Bucs, and Cardinals.

For the teams in the chart above, these factors also played a role in the subsequent improvement.  Basically, if your team is terrible, you SHOULD get an impact player in the draft (perhaps more than 1).  Also, by pitting bad teams against each other, the league ensures that at least one of them will win those games (ignoring the rare tie).

That does a long way to explaining the general improvement, but I’m still surprised at the average magnitude.  If you look closely, you can see that 3 teams are pulling the average way up, the 2012 Colts, the 2008 Dolphins, and 2010 Rams.

What happened to each of these teams?  I explored this a few months ago, but let’s go again.

2011-2012 Colts:  This one is easy.  Andrew Luck.  The 2011 Colts were terrible and were then awarded the #1 draft pick.  The team also got a new coach (Chuck Pagano), though I’m going to assign most of the credit to Luck, perhaps the greatest QB prospect in my lifetime.

2007-2008 Dolphins:  The team improved by an amazing 10 wins.  Why?  Well the Dolphins, after finishing with 1 win, received the #1 overall pick, selecting Jake Long.  The team also changed its front office (bringing Bill Parcells and Jeff Ireland in) and its coaching staff (hiring Tony Sparano).  The team also brought in a new QB, Chad Pennington.

My twitter followers will know that Chad Pennington has a career passer rating above 90 and holds the NFL record for completion percentage (66%).  He was a lot better than people remember.

2009-2010 Rams:  Again, the team received the #1 draft pick and took a QB, Sam Bradford.  The coaching staff did NOT change, though Steve Spagnuolo was entering just his 2nd year (so 2010 was his first year with “his” quarterback).

What does it all mean?

The Eagles will be better in 2013 than they were in 2012.  There are MANY factors working in their favor.  Additionally, as seen above, a new coach is often the key to a quick turnaround.  Note that the new coach effect sometimes flames out, but for now we are just looking at next season.

Also, the common denominator above is a new QB.  The Eagles don’t exactly have one of those (I’d be very surprised if Barkley won the job), but it’s not like Nick Foles has been a long-time starter, so I believe he can have a similar effect (I’m not expecting Luck-level improvement here).

However, another key from above is the importance of high draft picks.  Put simply, Lane Johnson has to be an impact player…

IF Johnson isn’t a bust, the Eagles can easily win 7-8 games, with a realistic chance at getting to 9-10 wins and a division title.  To get to 7 wins, the Eagles need to win 3 more than last year.  7 of the 12 teams above improved by 3+ wins.

Also, looking at combined Offensive and Defensive performance relative to league average, if the Eagles improve by just the average measure above (+13%, +18%), the resulting performance would correlate to almost exactly 7 wins. (Maybe I’ll run that graph tomorrow).

P.S. If gambling were legal, the following lines would look VERY attractive to me:

Eagles Division Title: 5/1

Eagles Wins Over/Under:  7

Today, let’s look at some other teams’ performances from the last decade.

First up, the Patriots.  Remember the yellow highlights are SB winners, the red highlights are SB losers:

An extremely impressive decade all around (obviously).  The defensive performance is perhaps a small surprise, since the offense gets so much attention.  One of the most puzzling aspects of the Brady-Belichick run has been the lack of press attention on the defense.  Notice the Patriot defenses of the last three years don’t come close to approaching the defensive performances of the Super Bowl winning teams from 2003 and 2004.

Also, notice the Patriots 2003 title came with a team that was just 5% better than average on offense.

The Saints (otherwise known as the Drew Brees effect):

I like the Saints’ table because it clearly illustrates just how quickly teams can change their fortunes with a new coach/QB combo.  Look at the offensive side of the table above; can you see when Payton/Brees joined the team?  I thought so.

It’s also interesting to see how badly the defense has trailed the offense.  If the Saints’ defense was just consistently average, the team might have played in another SB or two.

The Giants (sorry):

The Giants’ performance further highlights the relative randomness of the two Super Bowl titles.  In the past ten years, the Giants have had two REALLY good teams, 2005 and 2008.  Naturally, neither of those teams went to the Super Bowl.

The 2007 title team remains perhaps the most puzzling SB Winning team in more than 30 years (maybe ever, but I prefer to stay within my lifetime).  Not only was the 2007 team remarkably average, but they defeated the greatest team in modern NFL history.

If you want a great example of the “any given Sunday” saying, compare the performance ratings of the 2007 Giants with those of the 2007 Patriots (in the table above).

Want to feel better?  Take a look at the Raiders:

No comment needed other than to say the past decade in Oakland has been one of ASTONISHING futility.

Lastly, any time you’re disappointed or frustrated by the Eagles, take a deep breath and say “thank god I’m not a Browns fan”.  Check out the offense:

Went to the U.S. Open practice round yesterday, hence no post.  Biggest takeaway?  Players are going to score, but only those that avoid the rough at all costs.  My wrists hurt just watching players try to get out.

Today’s chart stems from a commenter’s suggestion.  I’ve graphed the offensive and defensive performance (league-average adjusted) for all NFL teams from the last ten years and highlighted the Super Bowl teams in Yellow.  It’s a little tough to read, so to be clear:

The X-Axis (left-right) is OFFENSIVE performance.  So the farther RIGHT a dot is, the better the OFFENSE.

The Y-Axis (up-down) is DEFENSIVE performance.  The HIGHER the dot is, the better the DEFENSE is.

So the best teams are in the upper-right quadrant (the 1st if my high-school geometry memory is correct).  The worst teams are in the lower-left quadrant (the third).

I did not label the Eagles teams, since doing so crowds the graph too much.  However, below is a table showing the Eagles’ performance going back to 2000 (note the graph only goes back to 2003).  The 2004 team is highlighted red because they lost in the Super Bowl.

Looking at the chart above, we can clearly see the teams that won with great offenses (Saints) and those that won with great defenses (Steelers ’08).  We can also see that the 2004 Patriots were the most balanced Champion (best?) by a fairly wide margin.  Also, the 2007 Patriots are the blue dot by itself on the right.  In terms of regular season performance, that was easily one of the greatest professional teams ever, regardless of sport.

While comparing the Super Bowl winners above is interesting (clearly illustrates the relative strength of each team), I’d also like you to take a look at the axis scales.  Notice the offensive axis (left-right) has a much higher maximum than the defensive axis.

No team in the last ten years has finished with a defense more than 40% better than league average (Points Against).  Conversely, over that same time period, 11 teams have finished with an offense at least 40% better than league average (Points For).  Clearly, though, a great offense does not lead to a Super Bowl win with any certainty.

If we go back to the post earlier this week.  We can see the visual illustration of the necessary-condition strategy.  Basically, to win a Super Bowl, you MUST be on the right side of the Y-Axis (average offense or better).  The same rule does not hold for defensive performance.  However, it also appears as though, for Offense, the point of diminishing returns is reached rather quickly (i.e. going from -5% to 5% has a much greater effect on winning than going from 40% to 50%.)

Lastly, here are the Eagles.  I’ve listed them in (X,Y) order so you can easily place them in the graph above.  Remember, Off (X) is right-left, Def (Y) is up-down.

Today we look at the defense.  Here are the best defenses since the 2000 season, adjusted for league average scoring.  Yellow teams are Super Bowl Winners, Red are Losers, and I’ve highlighted the Eagles in Green.

Whoa…a lot more yellow than the offensive table.  Also, we can clearly see the Andy Reid Peak here.  While McNabb was the face of the franchise, the defense is what really carried the best Reid teams.

Again, this isn’t much different from our pervious look (which didn’t adjust for points inflation).  However, it seems pretty clear from that table that a GREAT defense can go a very long way towards winning a Super Bowl.

Notice also that the 2002 Bucs are at the very top of the list.  I’ve said before that the 2002 Eagles were the best of all the Andy Reid teams.  Unfortunately, it ran into a historically great defense that year.  Is it possible that single game led to a Reid overreaction and strategic shift away from the defensive focus that led to so much success?   Yes, yes it is.

After that game, everyone talked about how inept the Eagles offense was.  Meanwhile, it’s quite possible (likely?) that the Bucs that year would have shut down ANY offense.  They were that good.  However, I’ve talked about that before.  Back to today’s topic…

Similar to yesterday’s table, here are the past ten Super Bowl winners and their defensive performances:

For reference, here is the offensive chart for Super Bowl winners:

The performance of teams in both areas is strong (as it should be), but it’s clear the bar for defensive performance is significantly lower.  Not only do we have 3 teams that Won a title with a below-average defense, we have 2 teams that won with a significantly below average defense.

Also interesting to note is the fact that the only Super Bowl winner with a negative offensive performance (the 2008 Steelers) had a historically great defense (37% better than league average).

What about the Super Bowl losers?

Strong performances again. In fact, the average performance of the losing teams is better than the average for the winning teams.  However, we also see that, while defense is clearly important, it is not necessarily mandatory.  The Arizona Cardinals of 2008 were 21% below league average on defense and still managed to come within a Santonio Holmes tip-toe of winning the Super Bowl.

Lastly, here is a chart of the past 10 Super Bowl Winners showing their defensive and offensive performance.

At first glance, it doesn’t look like a huge difference, though average offensive performance is better by 3%.  However, if we look at the minimums on both sides, we get a clearer picture.

After all that, our original thesis stands:

– An average offense (or something extremely close to it) is required to win the Super Bowl.

– An average Defense, while certainly helpful, is NOT required.

THEREFORE

Teams should focus on the offensive side of the ball until they’ve met the average threshold, and then turn towards maximizing defensive performance.

P.S. The table above also makes it extremely clear that the Giants teams that won in 2007 and 2011 are, BY FAR, the weakest winning teams of the last decade.  I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse, but it supports my assertion that those teams were largely lucky, and not good (not that it matters).