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Charles Harris

Discussion in 'Miami Dolphins Forum' started by danmarino, Dec 7, 2017.

  1. jdang307

    jdang307 Season Ticket Holder Club Member

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    Not all players reach a ceiling at 6 years. Sometimes you get the "stall" (any real man who has smoked brisket or pork butt knows what the stall is) but sometimes they punch through.

    That said, Tannehill is a good starter in this league. Now, I want top 8'ish, but you don't get rid of top 10/12 until you're sure you have top 8.
     
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  2. KeyFin

    KeyFin Well-Known Member

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    Well, his last year was his best year so far...you can't say a guy has hit his ceiling when he's clearly still going up.
     
  3. Dolphin North

    Dolphin North Well-Known Member

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    I thought it was funny the number 6 came up the other day, because I said it would take about 7 when he was drafted. Then I changed it to 8-10 a couple of years ago. Really just guessing though, based on his history and how he plays. It's such a unique situation, being a starter in the NFL with so little experience before that.
     
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  4. cbrad

    cbrad .

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    OK KeyFin.. as promised it took about a week to figure out how to get around most of pro-football-reference's formatting issues, but I now have the individual QB records (year-by-year only.. not yet game-by-game) for all 142 QB's pfr says have at least 1,500 career passing attempts, at least for QB's whose first year in the league was 1969 or later.. years before 1969 have other formatting issues lol.

    What's shown below is each QB's passer rating relative to his first year passer rating, for all years where he started at least 6 games with the constraint that the first year was 1978 or later. The reason for 6+ games is because you get 150+ passing attempts for that year meaning it's relatively reliable, and the reason for 1978 is because rule changes led to a major shift in passer rating standard deviation pre-1978 vs. post 1978 (was much smaller post-1978) so it's best not to include both. All passer ratings are adjusted to 2016 because if you don't do that you see passer rating inflation in that graph that's not due to the QB, and the amount of that differs for era. The red line is the average improvement across all 119 such QB's.[​IMG]
    For the first 13 years, the values on that red line are:
    0, 3.8, 3.7, 4, 6.2, 4.2, 6.1, 6, 7.5, 6.6, 10.4, 11.7, 10.9

    Those numbers represent the average improvement in passer rating by year for all years starting 6+ games.

    The numbers show that for QB's that start 5-10 years you tend to get gradual improvement until year 5 after which you hit a plateau. If you don't make it to year 5, the plateau is ~2 passer rating points less on average. Average performance jumps up in years 11-13 is because QB's that can start 11+ years are usually the best QB's in the league. What happens from year 14 onwards is mostly just due to small sample size and is unreliable, though I think that drop-off is real at some point because many QB's end their career on a down note.

    One thing this shows that if you just go by average improvement for starting QB's, Tannehill is likely to have hit a plateau last year. What it says about Moore is a little less certain. Moore doesn't have 1,500 passing attempts and has only 1 year with 6+ games starting (he's not in that graph). So on one hand, you could argue more reps should improve performance based on that graph, but on the other hand you only get those reps if you show you're starting material. Either way, it's at least some data to go on and is actually more relevant to the Tannehill debate.

    One thing that is interesting is how many QB's have such huge changes from year to year, including from year 1 to year 2. That's real though.. like Steve DeBerg started 11 games his rookie year in 1978 and had a 40 passer rating his rookie year, then had a 73.1 his second year with 15 starts, etc...
     
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  5. Fin-O

    Fin-O Initiated Club Member

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    If you do not mind me asking...what do you do for a living?
     
  6. cbrad

    cbrad .

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    I'm a researcher at Johns Hopkins. Technically in Ophthalmology, but my research is mostly applied math at this point. So the discoveries I've made lately or am working on deal with improved methods for estimating the relative abilities of patients and/or difficulties of tasks that are important to them based on responses from questionnaires and other health metrics. So.. a more important kind of data analysis than sports haha.
     
  7. Fin-O

    Fin-O Initiated Club Member

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    Makes sense.
     
  8. KeyFin

    KeyFin Well-Known Member

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    First off, thanks for doing that. I wish you wouldn't have because it looks like a ton of work. Hopefully the spreadsheets eventually played nice and it was just plugging the stats and deviation into a graph.

    Second, do you know who the highest possible bar is? He was above most QB's already and then jumped almost 40 points in years 6-8, then retired very high in year 14. Could that be Manning? Because that would be a good argument to say that he was indeed the best ever.

    Third, I don't think it tells us enough about Moore but it does speak volumes about Tannehill (if you consider his path "normalized" nder many different coaches/coordinators). IF he has an upswing next season then it's safe to say that he's above average in growth since your chart says he should plateau. But I don't know how accurate that is since he's missed over a year...Tannehill just has a lot of unique intangibles the average one-team quarterback under one or two head coaches doesn't face. In fact, I'm guessing that just being in the same offense alone pays dividends for any QB....but I'm going to stop writing so you don't start computing.

    I appreciate the insights and the study though!
     
  9. cbrad

    cbrad .

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    Alex Smith:
    https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/S/SmitAl03.htm

    Guy had a pitiful first year with a 40.8 rating, but in his 7th year starting (plotted year 8 because he missed 2008) he had a 104.1 which is over 60+ in rating. And this year he's back there again at 104.4. It will be interesting to see how he affects the tail end of that graph in years to come.

    Yeah this type of analysis is more useful for Tannehill. Here's the same graph but where we separate QB's that improved in both years 2 and 3 like Tannehill did (in gold) vs. those that didn't (in purple):
    [​IMG]
    This graph also has breaks in it and you can see years where a QB didn't play, like 2008 (year 4) for Alex Smith is missing. In any case, the trend for the gold group mirrors Tannehill's progress so far. Tannehill's ratings from 2012-2016 are: 76.1, 81.7, 92.8, 88.7, 93.5, giving you values on that graph of: 0, 5.6, 16.7, 12.6 and 17.4. The gold line there is: 0, 10.2, 17.6, 10, 16.4, which is pretty close all things considered.

    So that there provides even more statistical evidence that your expectation should be that Tannehill has plateaued, though obviously there's a lot of individual variation. It is interesting that the purple line never gets up to that gold line until sample size is too small to care. That means you can really see in the first 3 years whether you likely hit on a potentially successful QB or not. So from that point of view it's good news for Tannehill because that suggests he's not likely to tank either!
     
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  10. danmarino

    danmarino Tua is H1M! Club Member

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    @cbrad
    You say RT most likely plateaued last year, but what if you take into account the first few games of the season being with a (yet again) new system? If you look at RT's last 6 or so games he had a passer rating over 100, right?
     
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  11. cbrad

    cbrad .

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    The database I'm using doesn't tell you when the system changed, nor when coaches changed so I can't look into that.
     
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  12. danmarino

    danmarino Tua is H1M! Club Member

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    Thanks for doing all this work, BTW.

    I'm not insinuating that you do this, but if you looked at those QB's and pulled out just those who had to play with 2 or more HC's, OC's, and systems in their first 3-5 seasons I bet we'd see a different average all together.
     
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  13. Rocky Raccoon

    Rocky Raccoon Greasepaint Ghost Staff Member

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    Black Ice looks pretty good yesterday getting the start. I'm really excited for him as well as the other young players on defense (Howard, Tank, McCain, Godchaux, Taylor). Hopefully Raekwon comes back healthy next season and balls out as well.
     
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  14. dolphin25

    dolphin25 Well-Known Member

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    Taylor was a 3rd round pick wasn't he?
     
  15. Boik14

    Boik14 Season Ticket Holder Club Member

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    Ya he was. Still a HOFER with a slow start to his career
     
  16. hitman8

    hitman8 Well-Known Member

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    Not the same situation, neither taylor nor wake were first round picks, so they were not expected to contribute a lot right away and were not given primary roles. Harris is a first round pick and has been given a primary role on the defense with lots of pass rush opportunities and has only managed 1 sack all season long. He is right now the worst producer out of all of his fellow top rookie edge defenders.
     
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  17. Dol-Fan Dupree

    Dol-Fan Dupree Tank? Who is Tank? I am Guy Incognito.

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    That is a fan expectation.

    No one looks back at a hall of fame career and says, "I am going to vote no. They were a 1st round pick and did not start to play well until year 4."
     
  18. danmarino

    danmarino Tua is H1M! Club Member

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    You can keep saying that, but it will still not be true.
     
  19. danmarino

    danmarino Tua is H1M! Club Member

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    And out of the 13 rookie edge defenders that have played in at least 25% of their defense's snaps he's ranked 6th in PFF's "Pass Rushing Productivity".
     
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  20. hitman8

    hitman8 Well-Known Member

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    I am not arguing wether they are HOFers or not. What I am arguing is that since they were low round or undrafted picks they did not receive primary roles and as many pass rush opportunities their rookie seasons. Hence their production in their first season would naturally be less. Even so harris with all the snaps he has gotten is still on pace to do worse than both taylor and wake did in their first seasons.
     
  21. Dol-Fan Dupree

    Dol-Fan Dupree Tank? Who is Tank? I am Guy Incognito.

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    What Wake was cut in his first season. He didn't even make the NFL.
     
  22. hitman8

    hitman8 Well-Known Member

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    As I have said before, that is a vague and subjective rating dependent on what the observer interprets as pressure or not. As far as actual productivity in terms of sacks, tackles, TFL, PDs and INTs, harris is last or almost last among the top 10 rookie edge defenders. I think only Tyus Bowser and Taco Charlton have done worse than him so far.
     
  23. Dol-Fan Dupree

    Dol-Fan Dupree Tank? Who is Tank? I am Guy Incognito.

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    Well technically tackles are rating dependent on observer interpretations which is why they are not official NFL stats.
     
  24. hitman8

    hitman8 Well-Known Member

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    Not really, at least not solo tackles. Assisted tackles you could say has some observer interpretation dependence, but still not as much as pressure ratings.
     
  25. Dol-Fan Dupree

    Dol-Fan Dupree Tank? Who is Tank? I am Guy Incognito.

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    Now you are just arguing semantics. Tackles are not official stats in the NFL because how they are counted are varied team to team.

    You cannot disparage pressures and then champion tackles.
     
  26. hitman8

    hitman8 Well-Known Member

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    I meant his first real NFL season, he was undrafted and didn't even make it to a training camp out of college. He went straight to the CFL. His first real NFL rookie season was his first season with the dolphins.
     
  27. Dol-Fan Dupree

    Dol-Fan Dupree Tank? Who is Tank? I am Guy Incognito.

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    That is a poor comparisons though. Harris did infinitely better than Wake during their first seasons. Harris blew Wake out of the water, and knocked him into another country.
     
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  28. hitman8

    hitman8 Well-Known Member

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    Not really, because wake did not get the same opportunity coming out of college. You could say Harris had a better college career than wake, but not a better NFL rookie season. Wake's first NFL season was with the dolphins.
     
  29. dolphin25

    dolphin25 Well-Known Member

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    But, Harris was 1st round pick. they always get more reps and time.
     
  30. Dol-Fan Dupree

    Dol-Fan Dupree Tank? Who is Tank? I am Guy Incognito.

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    Wake did not earn the same opportunity. Wake did not play well enough in the NFL to make the team. Wake's first NFL season was with the Giants. Wake was a failure who got his head back in the game, and then worked his butt off in Canada and turned his career around.
     
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  31. hitman8

    hitman8 Well-Known Member

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    Not arguing semantics, imo when a guy makes a tackle it's a lot more clear cut situation than when he gets accredited with a pressure.
     
  32. Dol-Fan Dupree

    Dol-Fan Dupree Tank? Who is Tank? I am Guy Incognito.

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    1st round picks do generally get more reps and time than people who are cut. Mostly since they are cut and do not make the team.
     
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  33. Dol-Fan Dupree

    Dol-Fan Dupree Tank? Who is Tank? I am Guy Incognito.

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    you are arguing semantics when you are arguing which arbitrary statistic is more arbitrary.
     
  34. hitman8

    hitman8 Well-Known Member

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    Again wrong, wake never even got an opportunity to prove himself in training camp. The giants signed him as an UDFA out of penn state and cut him within two weeks of signing him before training camp even started. He didn't even play a single preseason game or participate in a training camp scrimmage to get a chance to prove himself. Again, his first real NFL season where he got an opportunity to play at all was with the Dolphins.
     
  35. Dol-Fan Dupree

    Dol-Fan Dupree Tank? Who is Tank? I am Guy Incognito.

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    You are wrong. He did not earn it.
     
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  36. danmarino

    danmarino Tua is H1M! Club Member

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    I could have been the greatest QB in NFL history if I was only given the chance.
     
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  37. dolphin25

    dolphin25 Well-Known Member

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    So Harris would look better then any cut player, doesnt mean he is good though right?
     
  38. Dol-Fan Dupree

    Dol-Fan Dupree Tank? Who is Tank? I am Guy Incognito.

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    It doesn't mean he is bad.
     
  39. danmarino

    danmarino Tua is H1M! Club Member

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    "Worst DE"....bwhahaha






    upload_2018-1-4_10-21-33.png
     
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