In terms of PFF numbers, a catchable pass that isn't caught likely counts as a drop. As well, PFF cannot account for poor catch radius. If Stafford overthrows Megatron, then that is a terrible pass. If T-Hill overthrows Wallace, due to his poor catch radius, it could have been a near perfect pass. PFF stats do not account for these discrepancies. Having said this, I would like to see which QB has suffered 4 easy dropped TDs as T-Hill has (Sims v NE, Hartline v Buff, Clay v Detroit and Wallace v NYJ). I sure would like to see if any other QB has had to endure this. Instead we see Brady throw a high pass to Edleman, have Edleman break a tackle then scamper for a 69 yard TD. Trust me, I compare T-Hill to a lot of QBs.
I strongly doubt Tannehill's being in the 0th percentile in the league in downfield pass yardage in the air is accounted for by someone's "poor catch radius." It's interesting how that issue wasn't mentioned with regard to Wallace last year, but has been all but reified this year to explain the lack of improvement in Tannehill's downfield passing game. The reality of the situation, unfortunately, is that Tannehill's downfield passing game is so extremely poor that it isn't likely to be explained accurately by anything other than his individual play. If he were among the middle of the pack in the league, and we were trying to explain why he wasn't a bit higher, perhaps, then we might talk about someone's "poor catch radius." As it is, however, he's so far below the league norm in this area that a "catch radius" can hardly account for it.
Poor catch radius not being discussed last season? That's all we talked about last year. As for percentile, that number only means something when you have a large same size - like thousands, not 32. I go by what my eyes tell me. I've seen perfect deep passes dropped. I've seen highly catchable but contested balls fall incomplete. And yes if you are only throwing deep to one person then yes his catch radius is a major factor. Again last year...didn't T-Hill throw a frozen rope 39 yards out to Hartline vs Cleveland for a TD? That was a gorgeous pass.
It sounds like we should probably agree to disagree at this point. I don't go by what my eyes tell me.
But they don't. This is the NFL, and you don't get to build very long. Coaches and GMs have a short leash and owners aren't that patient. You bring together a team and you have maybe 3-4 years to do something with it before it gets blown up. If you go deep into the playoffs or get to the SB or better yet win one, you buy more time. If you don't do any of those, the new coaches and GMs don't generally build on what was left, they get rid of it. We are looking at more rebuilding with different names, and unless Ross pulls his head out of his butt, it'll be the same story 3-4 years from now.
While I agree that we lack players with great catch radius, I would say the biggest issue far and away is our turnstyle OL. You simple can't blame the QB or the OC for not throwing deep more often when the OL can't give you enough time to let deep routes develop.
While our perceptions of this issue in general may be inordinately influenced by Dallas Thomas's poor day yesterday, it remains the case that Tannehill has been pressured on 36.6% of his pass dropbacks on the year, which isn't significantly different from the league norm, and he's been sacked in 2.5 seconds or less five times, which also isn't different from the league norm. He also gets sacked in 3.22 seconds on average, which also isn't significantly different from the league norm. Moreover, when he throws the ball in 2.5 seconds or less, his QB rating is 101.7. When he throws the ball after 2.5 seconds, his QB rating is 79.
There is no way to put some stats into proper context with out the application of subjective analysis. You wind up doing things like saying Bess is a better deep threat than Hartline.
And how often does Ryan throw 2.5 or quicker compared to league average? When on average does pressure reach him? Those are key stats your post is missing, stats that could paint an entirely different picture.
Regardless of the evaluation method used, people are going to be right some of the time, and wrong some of the time. Using statistics alone, in an area in which there is great poential for subjective bias such as this, decreases the potential for inaccuracy the most in my opinion.
He throws in 2.5 seconds or faster 57.7% of the time, not significantly different from the league norm. How quickly pressure reaches him on average, and how that compares to the league norm, is an unknown. Certainly we shouldn't say it's known definitively because some people may believe it occurs at a certain speed.
this guy is arguing on behalf of the stats?, i think its an interesting angle..cant wait to go up against it in the evaluation dept.
To quantify the quality of something like current or past team play I agree. To quantify the quality of future individual performance in a team play environment with the teammate play dependencies of a sport like football, I do not. This isn't baseball. Statics are more relevant when pared with "expert" opinion. It is why it's so hard to project in football, why a 1st round pick has a 1 in 3 chance of being a bust. I'm using generalities here. There are some stats that are outliers. For instance, it's fair to say a player with 100% TD rate with over a 100 nfl passes thrown is the greatest qb ever to play, and will likely continue to be based on that Stat alone. More importantly, do you really just want to talk stats? Sounds like discussing coding algorithms.
Right. There are statistics that I think should be considered valid in telling us how someone is playing currently, while having unknown validity in telling us how they'll play in the future.
It would seem to me to be an issue with sample size. When players support altogether different teams and those teams have altogether different schedules and there are only 16 games per year, you can't make much of a case. There will inevitably be tons of outliers in the form of underachievement and over achievement. You need several years of quality data which just isn't available until we're discussing those elites who have had 10 year careers.
But that's exactly what makes those statistics valid. When you can look at a list of QBs with fairly lengthy careers and see a strong correlation between YPA and the quality of those QBs, and then you consider the fact that YPA is strongly correlated with winning in the NFL, you've obtained a very important measure of the individual ability of quarterback play that can be applied to assess a QB. Again, that's not to say that measure is predictive of future play, but it's valid in measuring current play. If someone's position is that the statistic is invalid in measuring current play, then they'd be making the implicit conclusion, as well, that Aaron Rodgers's career YPA is meaningless, and says nothing about his tremendous individual ability, or, conversely, that Joey Harrington's very low career YPA is also meaningless, and says nothing about his.
Firstly, I like your approach very much. I'm certainly far more interested in predictive rather than descriptive models. I agree that data features like YPA may have something to tell us. I'll trust the numbers that are presented. However, I would be cautious in evaluating Tannehill too closely because we have 2.8 years of production which is highly suspect. One of those years was his rookie year. Another one of those years was a restructuring of the offense during which things were very boxed in and the early games were quite indicative of the growing pains one would anticipate.
You didn't address my point about football being a very team oriented sport. I agree, you can use stats independent from subjective analysis to show how successfully someone is playing. That however, is not the same as how "well" someone is playing. Success too often comes from team effort over individual effort. The best analysis uses expert subjective opinion to put context and value on objective stats.
I look at it the other way around. Any subjective opinion should be supported statistically, regardless of how "expert" it is. If it can't be supported statistically, then we have no idea what validity it has. And we may be fine in some cases saying we don't know how valid an opinion truly is, but I'd rather support (or refute) the opinion statistically and then have a much better idea of its validity. If there is no statistical check and balance of the opinion, then it becomes far too easy to simply say an opinion is valid if it's consistent with what we want to hear, and invalid if it's inconsistent with it. At that point you're in the territory of "religion," rather than reality.
I do believe, I'm a hearing a soft shoe Officially out of the running by early December again And the payoff for being a Dolfan is what is exactly?
We ain't dead yet. But it seems like the fans who want to go down swinging are being drowned out those who prefer abandoning ship at the earliest possible moment.
Do you really see this team going down swinging? where was the swinging vs Baltimore? That was certainly a great time to swing in a HUGE game at home. Abandoning ship? Nope. Just a big dose of reality that our execution and injuries give us little or no hope these last few games. I don't think anybody is being drowned out. Anybody optimistic about our meager chances to make the playoffs are not seeing how we have usually finished or how we are playing.
In games such as that one (a must-win against an equally good team), leadership among the players creates the drive and the will to win, and that leadership stems from big plays that are made by the players during the game. Who made those plays? No one. The team has no one to count on in such games, which makes it a much poorer team than one that has such players.
While I tend to agree with the overall view point of the OP (welcome too BTW DolphinGreg), I just don't think Philbin has what it takes to be a successful HC in the NFL.
I agree that no one ,offense or defense made any plays to make a difference. Same problem we had the last two games last year. Which is why I am confused as to why some people think that all of a sudden, we will start making these big plays over our last three games.
I don't have a dog in this race, but if you thought you were going to beat Baltimore, that's your own fault. I think Miami is doing a great job considering where you were before Philbin. Trust me, I know what it's like to not see meaningful change in the W-L column..... 7-9, 8-8, 9-7 & I know the "wait 'till next year" talk is frustrating, because next year won't be much better. Chances are anyway. But you've built yourselves a nice little team that has a bright future, I think. Over the last three years, you've done a good job of beating the teams that you should. Sounds easy, but it's not. Look around the league, lots of teams are losing to teams they shouldn't. You managed to beat New England once already. Whatever the circumstances, it doesn't matter. There was an opportunity there & you made it happen. Pretty soon, because of those two... beating the teams you should & taking advantage of opportunity, there are going to be more teams that you "should" beat. You've got some explosiveness on both sides of the ball.... very nice collection of talent. I don't know that Philbin should stay or go, I have no thought on that matter, except the team is only going to buy what he's selling for so long. Next year is going to be rough... you're going to be playing the NFC East & the AFC South. Indy, Houston, Philly, Dallas, you'd be lucky to go 2-4 there. Jax & Tenn are a lot better than their records, lots of talent & pretty good coaching. You should beat the Giants & Skins though. I wouldn't count on splitting with the Patriots next year, it could happen, but I wouldn't count on it. Probably split with the Bills. Probably sweep the Jets. 8-8 against those teams (next year) would be good in my opinion. Better would be better & it could happen but I wouldn't fire my coach for going 8-8... 6-10 I'd be looking for a new one. 10-6, I'd be happy to extend him. But if he finished 8-8 next year, I'd have all kinds of outs in the contract.
There was plenty of swinging vs Baltimore, though clearly not enough. I'm not going to predict 2014 results based on how previous teams finished previous years, if I did I might find myself thinking we would upset NE in week 15, as we did last year. As long as we have a shot we have a shot. Before last week, Baltimore was the team that failed to get a win at home with the playoffs on the line vs San Diego. It happens.
I don't believe there is this natural or clear distinction between the players who make the clutch plays and ones that don't. All players make them sometimes and no players make them every time. This was a game where nobody really stepped up late, but even the great players have games where they don't step up. That's one of the reasons why even the great teams lose one out of every 4 games or so. Nobody stepped up late for the Pats against GB. Nobody stepped up for Denver against ST. Louis. Etc.
Right, but not all of those games were must-wins against virtually equally good teams. This Dolphins/Ravens matchup was a must-win for both teams, and you could argue there was a zero-point spread (Dolphins by three, which is typically equivalent to home-field advantage). Under those circumstances I think we'd find it rare to see that one team had virtually no plays made by anyone after the first quarter, and the fact that the Ravens won the game by a margin that was so much greater than that by which the Dolphins were favored I think was a testament to that imbalance. I think this is as clear a game as you'll find in terms of an indication of how leadership among the players is a critical variable. The Dolphins were simply "out-charactered" in my opinion. One team has a winning character (fueled by player leadership), and the other does not.
I don't agree with that. Virtually every playoff game ever was a must-win game matching two good teams. Yet every great player in NFL history, no matter how clutch they are perceived to be, has lost many of those games. For example, Tom Brady is 9-8 over the last decade in those games and Peyton Manning is 11-12 for his career in those games. At around .500, does that mean those players lack leadership or are the very definition of mediocre in that regard? I don't think so. The Dolphins weren't "out-charactered" any more than Baltimore was outcharactered the week before against San Diego or New England was outcharactered against GB. Those were similarly important games between evenly matched teams in which one team made the plays to win and the other didn't. It happens all the time and there is no real basis to attribute it to leadership or character.
We'll have to agree to disagree on that. I happen to believe that playoff wins are accounted for by player leadership (and consequently team character) the vast majority of the time. What else would account for the majority of those wins, when those teams are so evenly matched, and there is so much on the line? Random events? And I realize that can be neither proven nor disproven, which is why I'm saying perhaps we need to agree to disagree. However, I'll leave you with this, which is from Pittsburgh's run toward a Super Bowl win years ago: [video=youtube;gpOG9K02F_g]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpOG9K02F_g[/video] That's the sort of thing I mean. Player leadership. Team character.
I agree. I just do not see this NE game as a great chance to get back into the race. Baltimore had a huge playoff implication game after their home stumble and got themselves in a good spot. Even if we beat NE(big if) it seems to be too little.. too late. Too many teams ahead right now. Would have been better to beat Baltimore than the Pats the way things shook out
Our D has a sort of quite calm...Wake, Odrick, Starks...these guys are motivated, and they give the occasional rah-rah speech on game-day, but they aren't the blinded-by-emotion types that Ray Lewis, Joey Porter and others are. In my life though performance talks and BS walks, so I've always take that "vocal leadership" stuff with a grain of salt. Life is a game in which you motivate yourself. Very little motivation can be exchanged from one person to another because it so quickly bleeds away. In my line of work, when you go into an interview room, you don't sell yourself as a great follower because you know the company is looking for a self-motivated person. No company in the world, including a football franchise, has time to motivate everyone each and every day. If you don't do that yourself as an employee, you will become a mediocre contributor no matter how many pep talks the boss gives you.
Someone has to win. The better team wins most of the time, but random events, coaching, matchups, etc. all play a role. If it was really about player leadership and team character we'd see certain players and certain teams winning almost every time. As indicated, over the last decade or so guys like Brady and Manning, who are supposed to be the best of the best in terms of leadership and character, are just around .500 in those games. Brady and Manning both have playoff losses to Mark Sanchez-led teams. Do you think Mark Sanchez is a better leader or those Jets teams really had more team character? I certainly don't. I think PManning is 0-3 in playoff games against Rivers/SD. Does that mean he is less of a leader or his team had less character? Tom Brady is 0-2 in Super Bowls against Eli Manning and the Giants. Do you really believe Eli is the superior leader and those Giant teams just had more team character? I highly doubt it. Do you have any kind of evidence that leadership or character has ever been the deciding factor in any NFL game? I suspect not, because it is not something that can be measured, proven or isolated from other factors. In that sense, your belief in the effect of leadership and character is like religion -- you believe it because you feel it, but you can't offer any proof of it. And like religion, I suspect that nothing I or anyone else can say will change your mind.
We're in the same predicament Baltimore was in last week. Elimination game, on the road. NE is clearly the better team but we should have sense of urgency on our side.
Does your line of work involve a group of people pursuing a common goal, who see each other's performance and count on each other to reach that goal? If it does, I suspect that when one person "makes a play," it inspires the rest of the team. That's leadership. And if the person gets "vocal" after the play, it can be even more inspirational. If your line of work is relatively solitary, however, and doesen't depend as much on team functioning, then perhaps that isn't anywhere near as relevant. Team (or group) functioning is its own animal.
i don't disagree with you in theory, but there are head coaches out there that instill mindset, push buttons, cultivate and motivate to get that player to perform better, harder, more focused, for a longer period of time.
I see a much bigger upside for Baltimore beating us than us beating NE, playoff wise. Quick question for you. If we play real poorly over the next 3, what is your call on Philbin?
