Kevin Kolb: Fourth Grade Bad-Ass, and Other Stories

Go read this. Now.

Fanhouse writer and mid-day WIP host Anthony Gargano went bass fishing with Kevin Kolb. The first part of his story was relatively tame, other than when Kolb recounted a story about how he killed a rattlesnake while hunting with his future wife at 17 years old. The second part of the story is much juicier.

It starts with honestly one of the most disturbing stories I’ve ever heard about any kid, that took place when Kolb was a helper on his football coach dad’s team. He was in fourth-grade and one of the eighth-grade players was teasing him:

And so there was this one time that one kid rode young Kevin Kolb extra hard, and Kolb challenged him to a tug of war with the bath towel wrapped in electrical tape the team sometimes used, and Kolb beat him. And Kolb was so emotionally charged, brimming with fear-breaking sick and tired, that he then beat that one kid with the towel wrapped in electrical tape into submission, whipping him to the ground.

“I beat him until they had to pull me off him,” Kolb spits. “They were like, ‘Kevin … stop!’ Stop! Kevin, stop!’ That kid was a little punk. I was never going to let that happen to me again. I was never going to let anyone make me feel that way again and I never did.”

Gargano writes splendidly, but he tries to gloss this incident over with a simple line that it provided Kolb with “the gift of fortitude.” I think it’s a little more than that. As a fourth-grader, Kolb beat up a kid probably twice his size, and would have continued if people hadn’t restrained him. That’s an incredible competitive fire to have in the Eagles huddle, but it’s also an incredibly violent and disturbing image.

There’s a ton more in the profile. How Kolb’s still “sick” over his interception to Ed Reed in 2008. How Kolb’s high school was basically a semi-pro team. How AJ Feeley thought Kolb should take it easy in practice to make Donovan McNabb look better. How McNabb felt threatened by Kolb’s presence from the beginning, and embraced Michael Vick to push his young challenger down the depth chart.

How former Eagles General Manager and current Browns GM Tom Heckert would have offered the farm for Kolb:

“Whatever Andy wanted, I would have given him,” Heckert said at the time. “A one (draft pick), a two … two ones. No joke. Kolb is legit.”

There’s so much to think about that perhaps I’m getting too hung up on the image of fourth-grade Kolb standing over another kid, beating his snot out. Yet it does repulse me at a very basic level. Hopefully Kolb can channel that “fortitude” into an team attitude that makes losing unacceptable in the Eagles locker room — and he never has to challenge anyone to a tug of war again.

Could Nick Cole be the Eagles' Best Pass Blocker This Year?

A week ago we looked at negative plays by offensive linemen. Astute reader Dave pointed out in the comments what I neglected to note in the main post: that the numbers skew unfavorably toward teams that pass more than they run.

I went back to the PFF numbers and, while I didn’t go through the whole NFL (yet), I re-ranked the Eagles offensive linemen based on negative pass blocking plays, out of the number of pass plays they were in on (Per Game based on passing every offensive down). That should make things a little more even.

Not a lot of complexity to these numbers, although again I’m surprised that Todd Herremans was actually worse than all but King Dunlap. My anecdotal recall of the line play doesn’t account for this.

Nick Cole and Max Jean-Gilles both were surprisingly good at pass protection according to this measurement, although they (and Jamaal Jackson) seem to have an advantage from playing on the inside. Based on the compilation last week, either there’s less pressure/mistakes on the centers and guards or its tougher to see when they make mistakes. Of course, Herremans’s numbers suggest that it isn’t all the “inside effect.”

The other caveat remains that the line, at the end of the day, is one unit. Breakdowns in communication probably cause as many protection problems as physical mistakes. So even if Cole looks good at center, if he can’t recognize blitzes or set up everyone else as well as Jackson did, that will have a negative impact on the rest of the line.

Reid and Banner, Together Forever

The inimitable Tommy Lawlor beat me to my story today, as he artfully deconstructed the Andy Reid-Joe Banner relationship better than I could, pointing out some places where the conventional wisdom is often the product of so much wishful thinking on behalf of the media.

But I do want to point out a few more things about the general topic of Reid-Banner and the article that rehashed the arguments again on Sunday. First of all, this just doesn’t work as an example of Banner taking over:

When Eagles general manager Tom Heckert, Reid’s righthand man for nine years on player personnel issues, left for the same job in Cleveland, and Howie Roseman, Banner’s protege, became GM, it created an appearance that Banner had usurped Reid.

“Created an appearance.” To whom? Where I come from that’s just a phrase that means “We have no real proof of this, but it sounds juicy.”

Of course when you actually examine the switch, the theory doesn’t quite stand up as well. Heckert was always going to be second fiddle to Reid in Philadelphia. He was always going to be in Andy’s shadow (figuratively and physically) when it came to getting respect for building winning teams. Mike Holmgren may be in Cleveland, but as Team President he likely won’t be involved in all of the personnel decisions. Heckert has a chance to prove himself; it isn’t “the same job” at all.

This incident is pretty much the only evidence the Inquirer poses to even show that Banner has usurped power from Reid. Sure, there are a few anonymous quotes:

“If you ask me who’s running the show, I’d say Joe Banner, without question,” said a team source who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. “All along, Joe’s the boss. Jeffrey’s the owner, Joe’s the boss. Everybody knows that.”

But at the end of the day, of course Banner is, in some respect, “the boss.” Along with owner Jeff Lurie, he hired Reid. I imagine he has some sort of power (with Lurie’s permission) to fire him. However, that doesn’t mean things are that simple.

For one, Banner is a smart man. He knows what he’s good at — allocating cap space and crafting player deals. And he knows what he has no experience in — football decisions. Even if Banner had complete control over Andy, it would still be smart to delegate all things not related to money.

There are two things which back this up. First, Andy hasn’t left Philadelphia. It’s not like anything’s tying him to this city. His kids are older. He’s been around the country and back again as a coach. And he’s demonstrated that he can create winning teams. If Banner was taking away his power as “football decider” (a role Andy fought to have), Reid wouldn’t have to stick around and take it. Half the teams in the NFL would jump at a chance to have him.

And, from Banner’s perspective, what do you gain by exerting more say over the team? The partnership has worked for years without problems or major disagreements. They have the wins to show for it. Even the Donovan McNabb trade — perhaps the single biggest decision made by the Eagles in years — went down without as much as a hitch. Does Banner want to go back to finding a new coach who almost certainly won’t be as good as Reid, let alone as compatible?

Sometimes when everyone says the same thing, it isn’t because everyone’s lying and there’s some nefarious backroom plot going on to keep the whole operation from falling apart. Sometimes it’s just because the truth is that easy. Reid and Banner have maintained a succesful partnership for eleven years. Let’s stop trying to invent reasons to think otherwise.

False: The McNabb Deal Can Be Judged in 2010

I generally like Don Banks and the other NFL guys at SI, but this is just wrong:

It’s going to be fairly easy to determine the success or failure of the move because the standings will tell us. If the Redskins make the playoffs and the Eagles don’t, it’s a big swing-and-miss for Reid and revenge for McNabb. If the Eagles make the postseason with Kevin Kolb and the Redskins don’t with McNabb, Reid gets the check mark and a sense of satisfaction.

Yes, this trade, which affects the short and long-term futures of two franchise quarterbacks, two well-regarded coaches, and two rival franchises is incredibly simple. If the Redskins make the playoffs, they win. If the Eagles make it, they win. So easy.

It’s not like there could be many years of ramifications based on the play of each quarterback. And of course the two high draft picks the Eagles received in the trade don’t factor into any long-term equation.

Everyone’s going to be closely watching the Eagles and Redskins this year, and this probably won’t be the first time a writer makes this case. In fact, I would bet good money that if Mike Shanahan and Donovan come into town the first week of October and win, local and national guys alike will go crazy for that story. It could in fact begin even earlier than that, if Kolb starts out slow or McNabb looks great from the start.

Enough. There’s plenty to discuss and debate about this deal for years to come. No reason to rush to judgement, even after a full season. Let’s just wait and see.

The Meteoric Rise of the Other Football

It’s easy to write off soccer in this country. We have our own “more exciting” sports that are built into our historical self-image, and the rise of soccer has been long predicted with little to show for it. That’s changing however, in the one metric that truly matters when comparing sports against each other in this country: television ratings.

Last month’s 2010 World Cup in South Africa showed that soccer is no longer a bit player on the sports stage in America. It has become a major sport, and is only increasing.

Take a look at the following graph, showing television ratings over the last 20 years for the biggest games across all the major sports (source: Nielsen and TV by the Numbers). The results may surprise you.

I had to leave out football, which dwarfs every other sport here. But overall you can see the fading of two historically “major” sports over the last two decades. Both the NBA and MLB have lost huge numbers of viewers. In basketball’s case, you might be able to attribute that to a weaker product. Baseball’s decline – by about 50% — could be related to their aging fan base. The median world series viewer is six years older than he was in 1991. Both sports need big name teams like the Yankees, Lakers, or Celtics in the championship to redeem their ratings.

In contrast to the decline of those two traditional American sports, look at the rise of soccer in the last decade. That jump is due to a number of factors. The masses of kids who played soccer as kids is growing up. The exposure to soccer on cable is greater than ever before. A better USA team to root for. And finally the huge influx of hispanic immigrants in recent years has brought millions of soccer fans to our nation — there are already more Mexican national team fans than there are NHL fans, by this measurement.

You can see that World Cup soccer already rivals, and in some cases surpasses, the NBA and MLB. Sure, maybe the MLS would be a more even comparison, but the league was only started in 1993. You could even argue that the soccer numbers are unfairly lower than they should be. Time zone problems that place games during the workday puts the World Cup at a distinct disadvantage against the other sports, which operate almost exclusively in prime time. If you subscribe to this theory, 2014’s World Cup in Brazil could be the most popular in America yet.

World Cup soccer now only sits behind only the olympics in popularity. Yet, in some ways, soccer has a higher ceiling. The olympics drama isn’t so much about the sports — most people have never swam, jumped hurdles, or ice skated competitively before. Soccer is a different story. It can provide the national pride as well as an engaging sport that people eventually follow even between World Cup years.

The bottom line is this: in a World Cup final that fielded two countries Americans care little about, in subprime television viewing time, garnered significantly more viewers than either the World Series, NBA Finals, or other events such as the Kentucky Derby.

Soccer has arrived.

Negative Plays by Offensive Line: Eagles v. NFL

We’d all love for the Eagles to have one of those dominant offensive lines, one that knocks defenses back all game. But to some degree, offensive linemen are judged more by their mistakes than their positive plays.

To that end, I put together the following charts of “negative plays” by offensive lineman, according to the stats guys at Pro Football Focus. I calculated a negative play to be a penalty, sack, hit, or pressure. Obviously these individually are not equal. A sack is far worse than a simple pressure. But overall a lineman who’s letting a lot of guys get to his quarterback probably isn’t doing such a good job, and sacks are often based on luck — who has the quarterback step toward him, etc.

I added all the negative plays up and divided them by each player’s snap count: the number of times the guy actually played. For the purposes of this exercise I also limited the players to those who were on the field for at least 25% of their team’s total snaps (except for Eagles’ linemen). Finally, to make the number a little bit more digestible, I multiplied those fractions by the average number of defensive plays in an NFL game (~62).

Behold Negative Plays per Game. Click each to see the large version in a new window/tab. Tackles on the left, guards in the middle, and centers on the right:

           

In terms of the NFL in general, you certainly recognize a lot of the players on the top of these lists. Clearly there’s a correlation here: great offensive linemen don’t make negative plays.

That’s not to say that the causation is total. Again, there’s more to being a lineman than NOT giving up bad plays. That may be why a number of Pro Bowl guys fall down on the lists — David Diehl, Alan Faneca, Leonard Davis, etc. Or maybe the numbers expose that they aren’t quite as good as their reputations or paychecks would suggest (see: Peters, Jason).

One other note: the Jets have a kick-ass line — dominant run blockers who don’t make many mistakes. Two top-5 tackles. A top 3 guard. The number 1 center. And their only weak link, Faneca, left in free agency.

On the Eagles:

For tackles, both Peters and Winston Justice were above average. Justice was more reliable (nothing new there), but scouts seem to consider Peters’ 2009 as a down year. If he can stay healthy and cut down on the penalties, he could jump back to the top group. Todd Herremans, when subbing at tackle, played at about an Alex Barron-level, i.e. Dallas’s potential starting LT this year. With an even smaller sample size, King Dunlap was horrible. Hopefully his newfound girth can help him improve.

Herremans was also surprisingly mistake-prone as a guard. Maybe that was rust or lingering issues from missing the first 6 weeks, but it clashed with my past perception. He earned a 1.20 score in 2008, which would have been good for 15th last year, and is about what Nick Cole got. Cole may not have been dominant at guard but he didn’t make many mistakes. Both Max (Now I Can Fit Into) Jean-Gilles and the lesser but less-crazy Andrews brother have things to prove this season.

As for centers, Jamaal Jackson was great in 2009. Nick Cole wasn’t so hot, but he was better than four-time Pro-Bowler Andre Gurode. Make of that what you may.

Franchise Quarterbacks and Andy Reid's Legacy

What Andy Reid is attempting is the rarest of feats. Finding and tutoring not one, but two franchise quarterbacks, switching seamlessly from one to the other, and succeeding with both is a venture that no coach as achieved in recent NFL memory. Coaches have executed parts of this formula, but never the whole undertaking.

It’s hard enough to find one franchise quarterback. This is where most coaches fail first. Look at the infamous 1999 QB class. Tim Couch took down two coaches with Cleveland: Chris Palmer and Butch Davis. Akili Smith grounded two more in Cincinnati: Bruce Coslet and Dick LeBeau. Daunte Culpepper was great for a while, before putting Dennis Green and Mike Tice out of jobs. And Cade McNown’s failure doomed Dick Jauron’s regime in Chicago.

Only Reid found an elite quarterback from that bunch. Or perhaps he was the only one able to craft a great quarterback out of what he was given. Both scouting talent and coaching it are vital, and most coaches fail at one part. Sometimes a Brad Childress or a Sean Payton can grab a rare free agent veteran to lead their franchise. Sometimes coaches like Jon Gruden or Bill Cowher or Brian Billick build winning teams in the face of inferior talent behind center. But that’s a slightly different skill.

Of course, discovering and teaching aren’t enough. The coach has to build a winning team around the player. Mike Shanahan drafted Jay Cutler but couldn’t create a winner. Jim Mora couldn’t engineer a playoff win for the young Peyton Manning-led Colts. Neither could Marty Schottenheimer with Drew Brees or Philip Rivers.

Andy has succeeded at that. For eleven years he guided the Eagles to the top of the NFC again and again. Sure, no Super Bowl, but he built winners. Tony Dungy did the same thing with Peyton Manning. Bill Belichick did the same with Tom Brady. Cowher eventually found Ben Rothlisberger and won a championship. Same with Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning. The duos of Mike Smith and Matt Ryan, Mike McCarthy and Aaron Rodgers, Rex Ryan and Matt Sanchez are all reaching for similar goals.

Successful coaches find their franchise quarterback, tutor him, and flourish with him at the helm — none of which are easy tasks. Yet no coach above found a new franchise quarterback to replace the old. Cowher bowed out while his quarterback was still in his prime. Same with Dungy. A whole list of other great coaches did too. Bill Walsh left as Joe Montana’s time with the 49ers was winding down. Mike Holmgren jumped to Seattle instead of sticking with Brett Favre, then left again when the Matt Hasselbeck era was slipping away.

Partially this is due to the simple fact that coaching in the NFL is grueling, and it’s difficult to last for more than a decade or so in one place — even when you have success. Holmgren showed the ability to pick a second franchise quarterback and tutor him, just with another team. Walsh grabbed Steve Young from the dark recesses of Tampa Bay, only didn’t stay to coach the team’s future Hall of Famer.

Coaches who last past the first decade, and there aren’t many of them, have trouble finding a second elite quarterback to pick up the slack. Jeff Fisher is a good example. Fisher drafted Steve McNair third overall in 1995 and stuck with him for a decade, amassing two division titles, five playoff wins, and a lone Super Bowl appearance (sounds a little familiar). However, since trading McNair in 2006, Fisher has had trouble finding a consistent replacement. Vince Young has looked like the future at times but never received the mentoring he needed coming out of college. Kerry Collins is a stop-gap. The Titans don’t really have a “franchise quarterback” at this time.

Some teams do manage to switch directly from the old franchise quarterback to the new — Montana to Young, Favre to Rodgers, Drew Bledsoe to Brady — but it’s been almost exclusively a new coach who makes the switch: George Seifert, Mike McCarthy, Belichick. The guy who didn’t draft or coach the older veteran, who’s committed to a long-term solution even when the old player may have a few more years left.

That’s what makes what Reid is trying to do so extraordinary. His ability to find, groom, and win with Donovan McNabb has deservedly helped build his reputation as one of the best coaches in today’s NFL. But if he manages to make lightning strike a second time with Kevin Kolb, and pulls off the seamless transition, Reid’s accomplishment, in my mind, would make him one of the best coaches of all time.

Now, as for that Super Bowl…

Production Per Paycheck: Eagles Players in 2009

Last month I looked at EPA/Play as a way to see the Eagles’ defensive playmakers. There were several caveats to those numbers, biggest of which was the lack of any kind of cost analysis. It’s great that Darren Howard was making plays — but given his contract, could his production have been bought for less? That’s what I’m exploring today.

I went back to Win Probability Added (WPA) from Advanced NFL Stats, and paired it with the 2009 salary data at EaglesCap.com. I figured the cap number was the most accurate figure to use, even though some of that is inflated from impossible to reach bonuses, etc., because taking just the salary doesn’t account for some of the massive signing, workout bonuses. Here’s what I got for the offense:

Observations:

• DeSean Jackson is a ridiculous bargain. That went without saying before, but these numbers just emphasize it. In terms of performance for the money, DeSean was worth two Jason Avants, five Leonard Weavers, or fifty-six Kevin Curtises in 2009.
• All three starting wide receivers were really good deals last year, even with Jeremy Maclin’s rookie contract. Of course, it remains to be seen if Avant’s new deal keeps him among the value group. Ditto for Weaver.
• Considering Kevin Kolb only really played in two games, it’s interesting to note that he was still pretty cost-effective.
• Before Brent Celek’s new deal bumped his salary/bonuses by about $3 million, his WPA/$ per Mil would have been 1.44, the highest on the offense. Wow.
• If Michael Vick becomes a victim of his latest run-in with the law, that would mean all the bottom six on this chart would be gone this offseason — a strong trend.

Moving on…

• Asante Samuel, Darren Howard look a lot less valuable when you factor in the money they were making.
• Almost anyone who was playing for close to the minimum, yet was good enough to make the team, was a good deal for the Eagles: Akeem Jordan, Moise Fokou, Jeremiah Trotter, Macho Harris, Antonio Dixon. This is why it’s tremendous when a late-round draft pick or undrafted free agent can contribute.
• No wonder Sheldon Brown was unhappy. He produced the third-most +WPA for the team, but was paid less than Joselio Hanson.