Dave Gettleman Vs. The Nerds

The following is a guest post by @sunset_shazz.

New York Giants General Manager Dave Gettleman is a true football man (#TrueFootballMan). He has no time for nerds who sit behind their keyboards. Though some may be concerned about drafting a running back second overall, he is not. From his recent presser after picking Saquon Barkley:

I think a lot of that’s nonsense. I think it’s someone who had this idea and got into the analytics of it and did all these running backs and went through their – whatever. Hey, Jonathan Stewart is in his 10th year and he’s hardly lost anything.

Gettleman appears to believe that the case against using a top 10 pick on a running back rests on perceived longevity. He is misapprehended.

Ben Baldwin, an economist (and Seahawks fan) who makes his living sitting behind his keyboard, summarized the case against using a premium pick on a running back in an excellent post at Field Gulls – do read the whole thing. I’m going to expand on two subsets of his argument: that rookie first round running back contracts are bad values, and bad risks.

The objective of the first round of the NFL draft is to sign an above-average player at a below-average contract for 4 years, with an embedded team option in year 5. Article 7 of the 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement specifies a rookie wage scale that varies based on the draft pick used to select the player. Importantly, after the 2011 CBA was implemented, the player’s position doesn’t matter: a player picked 2nd overall is paid the same money over 4 years, whether he is a quarterback, running back or long-snapper. Moreover, the market has reached an equilibrium where first round contracts are fully guaranteed. A quick survey of contracts at overthecap.com shows that position value for post-rookie contracts varies significantly in today’s NFL. As a result, the “rookie contract discount” varies dramatically by position. For example, a QB drafted with the 2nd overall pick in 2018 would be the 25th highest paid QB in the league (by average annual compensation) and would have the 15th highest guaranteed money. An RB selected 2nd overall would immediately become the 4th highest paid player at his position, with the highest guaranteed money – all before taking a single professional snap.

The chart above shows selected positions, with their leaguewide positional salary rank plotted against overall draft number (all data courtesy overthecap.com). Running back is the clear outlier – a top 10 pick is automatically among the highest paid RBs in the league.

Here is the same plot for guaranteed money (the rookie contract is compared to the veterans’ amount guaranteed on their current contracts):

Though the 2011 CBA’s wage scale typically serves as a price ceiling for rookies, with running backs drafted in the first round, it serves as a de facto price floor. In terms of guaranteed money, the three highest RB contracts in the league are Barkley (2018, drafted 2nd overall), Leonard Fournette (2017, 4th) and Ezekiel Elliott (2016, 4th). Here are the top 10 picks in this year’s draft, with their annual compensation and total guarantee compared to their league peers by position group (players in top 10 highlighted in red):

The New York Giants have thus expended the #2 draft pick (a considerable use of capital) for the privilege of paying Barkley the #4 annual salary and #1 guarantee at his position. They are paying (through the nose) not just once, but twice!

But perhaps Gettleman is merely acting upon justified conviction. If Barkley is a generational player, surely he’s worth it?

As Ben Baldwin notes in his piece, 1st round running backs have a high bust rate relative to other positions. Data scientist Dr. Sean J. Taylor sent me the following plot, exploring this idea further:

This plot evaluates the set of running backs drafted (or undrafted) between 2009 and 2014. The x-axis represents draft position. The y-axis is the player’s Wins Above Replacement (nflWAR) over the ensuing 4 years. NflWAR is a statistic developed by Yurko, Ventura and Horowitz of Carnegie Mellon University which uses multinomial logistic regression to isolate the contribution of individual players to NFL wins. NflWAR represents a novel effort to advance beyond Approximate Value (AV), and deserves wider recognition.

I draw 3 conclusions from the scatterplot above:

1.     Taking a running back early is risky (bottom left quadrant);

2.     It is possible to find success at running back in later rounds;

3.     Running backs don’t really matter very much (note the Y-axis scale – over 4 years, you get at best 1.5 extra wins from a running back, and typically 0.25 extra win; quarterbacks are approximately 4x more important).

The risk of a bust is even more acute with highly drafted running backs, because the financial commitment to the player is so much higher, relative to other players at the same position. A bust at QB taken at 2nd overall saddles you with the salary of a bottom quartile starter. A bust at RB at the same pick saddles you with a top 4 salary.

But there is no good alternative to taking such a risk, right? Don’t you need to take risks at RB in order to win championships? Ezekiel Elliott, Leonard Fournette and Todd Gurley (taken 4th, 7th and 10th overall, respectively) are commonly cited as evidence of risks that have paid off.

One recurrent theme here at MoK is the application of insights from behavioral science to football. Our past posts have relied heavily on the work of Gary Becker, Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, William F. Sharpe, Kahneman and Tversky again and Joseph Henrich. Today’s post is dedicated to 1990 Nobel Laureate Harry Markowitz who demonstrated that a portfolio of individually risky assets can collectively carry less risk than any of its underlying constituents, even when adjusted for its prospective return.

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The above chart shows the three commonly cited high pick successes, and the RB-by-committee groups of the two Super Bowl teams. The “Draft Capital” column dispenses with the archaic Jimmy Johnson scale, instead using Dr. Michael Lopez’s blended draft curve which improves on prior efforts by not only paying attention to expected/modal outcomes, but also giving weight to the probability of drafting a superstar (i.e. the right tail of the distribution). PHI and NE expended between 1/4 and 1/7 the draft resources for their running backs as JAX, DAL and LAR. Though PHI and NE paid relatively high 2017 cap numbers, they locked up minimal resources over the long term (i.e. they could cut bait in 2018). The “gty” column shows guarantees over the entire contracts of those players (Sproles’ and Blount’s initial guarantees for PHI, Gillislee’s, Burkhead’s and White’s for NE).

The advantage of the portfolio approach is: you can be wrong, and still have success. Donnel Pumphrey is not good at football and Darren Sproles was lost for the season. Gillislee, Burkhead and White did not cover themselves in glory in 2017. The portfolio approach diversifies you against injury, suspension or disappointing play. Yet, each portfolio achieved similar yards/attempt and total yards as the 3 high draft picks, for less overall guarantee / draft capital. As a team, NE and PHI ranked 1st and 8th in offensive DVOA, respectively (the Eagles won the Super Bowl). Also, note that NE’s total 2017 expenditure, while high, was less than Le’Veon Bell’s cap number. JAX additionally paid $6MM in 2017 for Chris Ivory, who offered minimal return for this expenditure. As Harry Markowitz showed, the portfolio approach offers something vanishingly rare in economics: a free lunch. A properly constructed portfolio lowers risk, without sacrificing expected return. (Though running backs are risky, they are independently risky. Idiosyncratic risk is diversifiable.)

In summary, Dave Gettleman in his press conference constructed a straw man. The case for positional value does not rest on running back longevity. Instead the TL;DR argument is as follows:

• Using a high draft pick on a running back is a bad bet. At best, you expend draft capital in order to pay a guaranteed contract at a market equivalent price for a good player. At worst, you overpay twice: in draft capital and guaranteed salary for a bad player.
• Drafting a running back is risky.
• By assembling a portfolio of RBs, one can achieve similar performance to drafting a star, while diversifying risk, and saving draft / guarantee capital to deploy elsewhere.
• Your mother was right about eggs and baskets.

The above argument relies upon the prior work of a number of individuals who sit behind keyboards, all of whom have advanced degrees in a quantitative field such as economics, and none of whom have played a snap of professional football. Gettleman, a #TrueFootballMan, will confidently dismiss this argument, regardless of its merit, due to its provenance. Eagles fans should pray he never gets fired, and lives forever.

Offense Taken

The following is a guest post by @sunset_shazz.

Earlier today, DN columnist David Murphy published a contrarian piece purporting to show that the Eagles have neglected the offensive side of the ball in the draft under Chip Kelly. His lazy “analysis” consisted of counting up Eagles draft picks for the offensive and defensive units over the past 3 years. Even the dullest of readers can see the problem: this method equates the pick of Lane Johnson with that of Jordan Poyer. Or Zach Ertz and David King.

When pressed upon this obvious flaw by friend of the blog Noah Becker, Murphy accused his interlocutor of poor reading comprehension:

The Eagles spent 2 1sts, 3 2nds, 1 3rd round pick, and a 4th round pick on offensive players since 2013. https://t.co/avOT0i8dSu

— Noah Becker (@Noah_Becker) November 17, 2015

@Noah_Becker but i'm not going to annotate the piece for you. if you legitimately can't see it, then, yes, you are a poor reader.

— David Murphy (@ByDavidMurphy) November 17, 2015

Well, Mr. Murphy, we at McNabb or Kolb are both literate and numerate. One can easily assign values to the Eagles draft picks to determine the actual allocation of draft resources to each unit. The canonical draft value chart was developed by Jimmy Johnson in the early 1990s. For many years, this provided a sufficient first order approximation of relevant draft value. However, in 2012, the excellent Chase Stuart conducted an exhaustive analysis which used the approximate value provided by a player in his first five years with a team to construct a draft value curve; like all good scientists, he published his results.

Using these values, we can compute the approximate draft value allocated to each unit by the Eagles in the Chip Kelly era:

As is shown above, over the past 3 years, the Eagles picked 6 players on offense, at an average draft position of 48th overall. Although they picked 15 players on defense, these averaged at a draft position of 152nd overall. Using Chase Stuart’s draft value weights, the Eagles allocated 58% of their draft value to the offense and 42% to the defense; a balanced allocation, reflecting the front office’s desire to build a balanced team. Murphy’s claim that the offense was neglected in the draft is simply untrue (unless you believe a 1st round pick is equal to a 7th rounder).

Moreover, during our research we also discovered the earth-shattering news that the NFL has a salary cap. In 2015, the Eagles allocated $69.4 million to the offense, the highest(!) number in the league. To argue that the Eagles have neglected the offense in their allocation of resources is either lazy or disingenuous. Or both.

The Eagles’ woes are more prosaic: rather than being inattentive to the offense, the front office suffered from poor execution. Allowing the offensive line to age while failing to build adequate depth, using three high picks on one position in two years, guaranteeing money to the insipid Riley Cooper, over-allocating salary to an aging running back who has carried more than 400 times the previous season, cutting their best receiver for #footballreasons without recompense, trading a draft pick for a speculative upgrade at QB – these are all legitimate criticisms of the front office strategy. But accusing Chip Kelly of neglecting to spend resources on the offense… the evidence doesn’t support that extraordinary claim.

It’s one thing to mail in a column. It’s quite another to insult your readers’ intelligence when your obvious shortcomings are pointed out. Eagles fans and Daily News readers aren’t as dumb as some writers make us out to be. 

@sunset_shazz is a Philadelphia Eagles fan who lives in Marin County, California. He previously wrote about Chip Kelly's Oregon bias and also contributed to the 2015 Eagles Almanac.

Geno Smith and Expected Draft Value

I hope everyone is reading Brent Cohen's work over at Eagles Rewind. ​He's playing with stats and coming to interesting conclusions, especially with his PVM (Positional Value Multiplier) prospect rankings that add a discerning adjustment to the standard draft preparation.

​Brent's goal is to take the consensus draft prospect rankings and apply two main modes of adjustment. First is a risk factor that attempts to quantify how reliable different positions are. He shows that offensive tackles, for example, have a bust rate of only 26%, compared to 50% for quarterbacks and 66% for running backs. One can quibble with the metric (you might adjust for likelihood of Pro Bowl appearances instead of failure to start), but it's a good one to have. The second main adjustment is for positional value, i.e. how much one player is worth relative to another at a different position. Brent uses salary cap data to show a clear hierarchy, from centers and guards at the bottom to defensive ends and quarterbacks (far and away) at the top. Again, you can quibble with the exact numbers, but it's quite promising stuff.

The PVM rankings that emerge are interesting to look at. Certain players receive bumps -- especially quarterbacks. Others fall slightly, like guards and centers. The final result is not a radical departure from the original consensus, but that's not Brent's goal.

It is mine, though. I look at the numbers pulled, especially on salary cap figures, and it's obvious to me that there's a huge disparity in value between different positions. Brent's cap percentages are at right, and you can see that while the middle group is close, there are certain spots that vastly outweigh others. As I described above, the PVM rankings make an adjustment along these lines, but it doesn't come close to matching the discrepancies in value. In expected value terms, if you have two similarly-talented prospects -- one a center and one a defensive end, you should take the defensive end every time. In fact, if you take it literally, the center would have to be three times as good of a prospect as the end to warrant consideration. 

Maybe this is too extreme of an adjustment for your tastes. If you want something closer to the consensus prospect values, Brent's PVM should serve you well. But I think this more accurately represents the reality on the ground. Chance Warmack may become a Pro Bowl guard -- many scouts rate him as the best player in the draft. But there's a strong case to be made, based on this data, that he would have to be 1.5 times better than the next best cornerback, 1.8 times better than the next best defensive end, or 2.7 times (!!!) better than the next best quarterback.

Plenty of caveats apply here, including the risk factor that I mentioned above. And you may either disagree with the salary cap distinctions entirely or have a more refined model based on it. I also haven't run my own projections for using this data to provide an updated draft list.

But if you look at the draft through this qualitative lens, it's easy to make an affirmative case for a quarterback, even Geno Smith. At this point I don't expect the Eagles to draft him. Most scouts consider Smith the best quarterback prospect, but also suggest that he wouldn't be so in previous years. Average rankings seem to consider him about 20th overall. That doesn't seem like the type of player you want to use your top five pick on.

However, I've said before that you always take the quarterback if you think he's your guy and the data backs that up. A good starting quarterback is worth nearly 50% more than the next most valuable position, according to salary cap numbers (and one might argue that's understating it). It's importance towers over other concerns. That means that even if Smith has a worse chance than average to become a good starter, his expected value from that smaller probability is still high -- likely higher than many players who will be drafted ahead of him. Smith may not be the safe pick, but if the goal is to maximize value, he may be the right one.

​Photo from Getty.

Free Agency Strategy for a New Era

Free agency kicks off this week (finally). The Eagles are sitting on over $30 million in cap space, and that number should jump over $40 million once they cut Nnamdi Asomugha. That kind of cap flexibility positions the team as a major buyer. The question, as always, is who is worth buying and at what price. But more broadly, how should the Eagles use this free agency period to set themselves up for long term success?

I don't need to rehash the dangers of free agency. You can draw a straight line from the summer of 2011 to the downfall of Andy Reid. But just because there are dangers doesn't mean the Eagles would be better off ignoring the rash of veterans on the open market. Looking back at the Reid era, we saw how making the right decisions can immensely help your team. Take Jon Runyan for example. He was signed in 2000, only Reid's second offseason. He became one of two bookend tackles that anchored the offense for the next decade.

The Runyan deal obviously looks great in hindsight, but you can see why it was likely to succeed. The team purchased a young player with top talent at a premium position. Those are really the only types of acquisitions I'm rooting for this time around. The Eagles have too many holes to think they can turn this around in a single offseason. Rather than try to plug everything, play the long game.

You obviously want to avoid older players, including stars. Even if the next Asomugha or Babin played well, they wouldn't still be good when the rest of the team is ready to make a leap. Furthermore, I see little benefit in buying up middling talent at this stage. This isn't a Super Bowl team about to make a run. Better to let youngsters battle it out with playing time than give snaps to a mediocre band-aid player.

Overall, and maybe this is common sense, but you should look at every potential acquisition and ask yourself, can this player be an integral part of a deep playoff run in 3 years?​ Actually, that's the same question you should ask about the players on the current roster. If the answer isn't a resounding yes, don't waste your money. Move on, get younger, start over.

​Photo from Getty.

How Joe Banner Became Obselete

Sam Lynch, in the Banner post everyone should read:

To understand why Joe Banner is leaving, in my view, you have to understand what he became after the 2006 CBA. Like I said earlier, the new question in the NFL was whether a player was worth the price he was asking for. It was now all about putting the right dollar value on the available guys.

Of course, this had always been a critical part of the process. Now, however, it was an unusually large part. And Banner had a view on what a player was worth. Think about that for a second, though. Valuing talent is what you would want the GM types to do — this guy is good, this guy isn’t. What Banner should be doing is figuring out how to fit as much of the good players under his cap as possible, not figuring out what the guys are worth.

Just to add a relatively random point, the Banner-Roseman mentorship is probably a good case study for not promoting your natural replacement quite so quickly.

5 Eagles Veterans Likely to be Cut for Cap Space

Free agency is nearly upon us, and the Eagles have just under $10 million available to spend. Some of that money will hopefully go toward locking up young stars like LeSean McCoy. Other funds will be freed up when they trade Asante Samuel (sooner, rather than later if they want to make any free agent splash).

But there are some veteran players they can cut if they need more room under the salary cap. Here are the most five most likely, with numbers from Eagles Cap:

Jamaal Jackson — Cap Savings: $1.9 million
Jackson really should have been gone last offseason. Jason Kelce may not have been that good, but he’s the future at center.

Winston Justice — Cap Savings: $2.3 million
Justice is only two years removed from signing that long term extension. But then he was inconsistent in 2010, injured in 2011. Presumably the Eagles will retain King Dunlap as swing tackle, making Justice expendable. And with his $4 million price tag, no one is going to be clamoring for him in a trade.

Darryl Tapp — Cap Savings: $1.6 million
Compared to other NFL defensive ends, Tapp played well in a rotational role last year. But compared to other Eagles players, he generated the least pressure. Why keep him around when you can get the same or potentially better production out of Philip Hunt, at one-fifth the cost?

Joselio Hanson — Cap Savings: $1 million
The Eagles already cut Hanson once right before last season, and he’s turning 31 this year. Depending on how the coaches view the progression of young corners like Curtis Marsh and Brandon Hughes, they may decide it’s time to give them a try instead.

Moise Fokou & Akeem Jordan — Cap Savings: $1.3 million
Alright, so this is two players. But both Fokou and Jordan are expendable, low-upside pieces at a position that the Eagles are likely to add anywhere from two to four new players this offseason.

Photo from Getty.

The Smartest Front Office in the NFL?

Last week, I wrote about the Eagles front office outsmarting and outflanking the rest of the NFL during free agency. That analysis was only based on a single report detailing how the Eagles set up their offseason plan months in advance.

Now we know, however, that the planning actually began years ago, not just months. That’s the takeaway from New York Times NFL writer Judy Battista, who talked to Banner and Lurie recently:

The structuring, it turns out, began not long after N.F.L. owners decided in the spring of 2008 to opt out of the collective bargaining agreement. The Eagles examined the rules that would be put in place and realized the 2011 free-agency period, if it happened at all, would present an extraordinary buyer’s market.

Because players who would usually have been unrestricted free agents in 2010 were tied up instead, two free-agent classes would be rolled into one, at the same time as teams would again have to work within a salary cap after having none in 2010 — meaning some teams would not be buyers because they were close to the cap number.

So began the meticulous preparation for what finally came to fruition in the last two weeks. In contracts they made late in 2008 and 2009 — including those for Asante Samuel and Jason Peters — the Eagles purposely made the 2011 cap numbers the lowest of the contracts, which is unusual because most contracts have their lowest cap numbers early in the deal.

“You’ll have twice as many players available as usual, and we’re either locked out or there is a reduced cap,” Banner said. “You don’t have to be a brilliant person to figure out there’s going to be huge opportunity. You can’t have increased supply and reduced dollars and not have it. We didn’t know the names, but we did it to take advantage of what was clearly going to be a very team-friendly marketplace. There was a strategic element to this. There was luck as well. Frankly, it turned out better than we hoped.”

No, Joe, you don’t have to to be brilliant. But apparently you have to be smarter and have more foresight than everyone else.

I suppose, if you’re unwilling to trust Banner, you could be skeptical that the Eagles really planned so far in advance. But the Samuel and Peters contracts are intriguing evidence. Check out Eagles Cap if you don’t believe the team structured their contracts this way from the beginning.

After years of mismanagement, the Eagles finally have a front office that’s often a step or more ahead of the rest of the league. Philly fans are naturally predisposed to cynicism, and will probably revolt when this team fails to live up to our expectations in 2011. But at this point, all I can do is shake my head in appreciation. Unfortunately, this group won’t be around forever.

Photo from Getty.

Is Joe Banner More Valuable than Andy Reid?

Andy Reid certainly isn’t universally beloved in Philadelphia, but overall I think Eagles fans do credit the coach with the team’s decade-plus success. It has been his offensive schemes, his player decisions, his strategic choices that have driven the Eagles to so many winning seasons.

But I wonder, just as devil’s advocate, how much of the success is attributable to Reid, and what percentage of the credit actually rests with the only man in the organization who is more detested: Joe Banner.

I’ve previously talked about how we can’t really separate the two, often after reporters suggest a big rift in the Eagles front office. But it’s an interesting case to make. Coaching and personnel decisions are probably more important than financial ones, but how much more?

As good as Reid’s been, I don’t think many people would make the case that he is the absolute best coach in the NFL. He’d be in everyone’s top five, but rarely number one. On the other hand, there’s a good argument to be made that Banner is the single best financial/salary cap executive in the game. In today’s NFL, that might be more valuable — or at least closer than you might think.

Let’s be honest. How much success could Reid have had without Banner keeping the team active on the free agent market every offseason despite consecutive playoff appearances? The NFL, as noted recently, has the most financial parity and revenue sharing of any professional sports league. It’s extremely difficult to outspend other teams (although that doesn’t stop Dan Snyder from trying). Therefore, most franchises go through winning and losing cycles tied as much to salary restrictions as player performance.

Reid is responsible for the high quality of the product on the field, while Banner enables Reid to coach without significant restraints or restrictions. It will be interesting to see if the team can sustain success if one of them departs before the other.

Photo from the Philadelphia Eagles.