Sheil Kapadia:
Greg Cosell of NFL Films has been Tweeting out notes on draft prospects while watching film the past few weeks. Here’s a roundup of his thoughts on defensive players, along with my Eagles slant on each position.
Great draft resource for those wanting short takes on all the defenders the Eagles might be interested in the early rounds.
Bowen, Domo, McLane, Tamari, and Kapadia work their way through a first round mock draft in glorious style. The picks inspire discussion, and banter is even better. Enjoy.
Eagletarian:
Westbrook took to Twitter today to gauge the fans’ views on McCoy’s contract situation, and add his own.
“So basically everyone feels that he should get paid??,” he tweeted…
“Like Arian Foster? I think he is definitely if not the best, at least the second best back in the league right now and deserves it #payMccoy”
“The only leverage players have in this situation is to hold out! Unfortunately its still not a lot of leverage!! #payMccoy”
“Players dont want to have to worry about their contracts during the season which is why the off season is the time to get it done”
This probably isn’t true, but I like the idea that McCoy is speaking through Westbrook here. Arian Foster money, here we come.
I’m a big believer in the market economics of the NFL. If 32 NFL teams pass on a player until the sixth round, he doesn’t have a particularly high chance of success. It’s the same with free agents who don’t receive serious interest on the market.
Derek Landri, who re-signed with the Eagles yesterday, would be in the latter category. He was a productive back-up with the team last year, but even after perhaps his best season as a pro, no other team offered him a long term deal — and the Eagles weren’t anxious to get him back either. He seems to still have an uphill battle to make the roster, especially if the team jumps in with a first round defensive tackle.
The same thought process leads me to question Demetress Bell’s value as well. Bell shopped himself around quite a lot, visiting a handful of different cities in order to seek a long term deal. But he was never offered one, even by the suddenly desperate Eagles.
Technically, Bell’s contract is 5 years, $35 million, but everyone knows he’s not coming back after 2012. The $8.5 million roster bonus in 2013 makes that a foregone conclusion. What does it say about Bell that in the modern NFL where left tackles are one of the top two or three most important positions on the field, he couldn’t find one team to give him a legitimate multi-year deal? Is he really any better than King Dunlap?
On the other hand, he was undoubtedly the best player the Eagles could get when they learned that Jason Peters was lost for the year. That has to count for something. And over the last two seasons, he’s been as good or better than Todd Herremans according to Pro Football Focus’s pass blocking efficiency statistic:
Maybe Bell will play up to his potential this season, or even exceed his past performance now that he has Howard Mudd as a guru. Maybe he’ll manage to stay healthy the whole year. Or maybe he’ll give the Eagles exactly what they paid for, a questionable veteran on a relatively meager deal.
Impossible to say for sure, but I’m not really looking forward to finding out the answer.
Photo from Getty.
Bo Wulf, for the Eagles Website:
“After the visit (with the Eagles), I talked to him and I said, ‘Jason, what do you think about coach Mudd?’” said Bell. “He said, ‘He’s the real deal … If you want to be a Pro Bowler, come here and you have coach Mudd and me behind you and you don’t have a choice.’ So that’s a great business decision for me.”
You don’t get much better endorsements. Apparently, Mudd is also the reason Demetress changed the spelling of his name.
(via Derek)
Jimmy Kempski does an amazing job in this post, culling the video for all sacks Michael Vick took in 2011. More than anything, the Eagles quarterback doesn’t come out looking too good. Many of the sacks are poor decisions by Vick, and a number of the others look suspiciously like poor blitz recognition and protection adjustments at the line of scrimmage.
The one thing that is worth keeping in mind is these are only 24 plays, and by definition are likely to show the worst mistakes. There isn’t a companion video that shows how many times Vick escaped pressure in his face and turned it into a positive gain.
I’m also not sure I follow Jimmy’s logic at the end, where he notes poor right tackle play from Winston Justice in 2010 as a reason to keep Todd Herremans on that side. But all in all, really informative and interesting.
When you looked at the 2011 Eagles roster as a whole, it was plain that the team had enough overall talent to win more than eight games. But over and over again they demonstrated that they were less than the sum of their parts, failing at all the little parts of the game, like tackling and holding on to the ball.
Another one of these factors was kickoff returns. Dion Lewis, the rookie running back who didn’t return kicks in college, took nearly all of the Eagles returns. And he was (predictably) dreadful at it.
As you can see above, out of 47 players who returned at least 10 kickoffs, Lewis ranked 43rd. His 21.7 yards per return was 3.3 yards from the median, which cost the Eagles an extra 100 yards (over 30 returns) they surely could have used.
Lewis’s longest kickoff return was a mere 33 yards, again 43rd in the NFL. Whatever vision or explosiveness or speed that an kick returner needs to break through for a big gain, he didn’t show it last year.
Note: Long returns do skew the average kick return results, obviously. In some ways that’s good — achieving that is part of what makes a good returner. However, a returner could be overall below average but have one big return that skews everything upward. For the record, taking out the top return does little to improve Lewis’s numbers relative to everyone else.
It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t a problem solely related to the rookie from Pitt. Lewis is only the latest in a string of poor kick returners, who you can see at right. He was actually better than Jorrick Calvin. Quintin Demps, back in 2008, was the last above-average returner the Eagles employed. It would be nice to see the Eagles try to correct that in 2012, although I won’t be holding my breath.
Photo from Getty.