Can we trade next years #1 for...

I doubt we could fit that deal under the cap.

 

we can make the trade, but not sure what the salary cap hit would be.

 

A 1st round draft pick for a 36 year old Offensive Tackle? Williams may be an 11 time pro bowler but at 36, so you trade a pick designed for building a team’s future for a player that has only a few seasons left at best?

He’s great but that would be utterly insane.

 

Don't really need a tackle.We need guards

 

Well, I think that we all hope that we don't have next year's #1 pick. That would be a horrible disaster!

(sorry, the use of "#1 pick" instead of "first round pick" has been a HUGE pet peeve of mine in the NFL since the 90s)

 

Too old

 

As everyone else has said: too old, too expensive and he’s not a guard.

 

Jaylen Waddle was a really good pick, love that dude, but Penei Sewell was the better team building option there. Instead Sewell goes to the Lions who also got Amonra St Brown in the 3rd round, that's how a draft should be run.

 

“Team building” is very subjective. Each team has differing needs. This Dolphins’ offense has shown that they can function at a really high level without elite OL players. Waddle is most certainly a better pick for this offense than Sewell would have been.

 

I would say the line works against bad teams but not playoff teams.
Don't remember actually numbers but I know our offence struggles playing against good teams.They should have extended Hunt.last year With Wynn still hurt and Driscoll a bust our interior is way worse this year going into the season than last year.And this is before the injuries we will.no doubt have.

 

I don’t think the OL was to blame for bad play againstthose teams. Injuries were number one and this offensive scheme sometimes struggles against good DB play. Except short yard runs, which they rarely called, this offense has excelled in both the run and pass. Great defenses are going to slow down nearly all offenses. That’s why they are great. McD has to better game plan against those defenses and figure out why they have struggled and call better plays.

 

Not 100 percent sold on this philosophy yet Dano but talk to me after this year

 

I don’t think anyone is sold just yet because we haven’t won anything. It’s trending upwards though. And even with that said I think it’s easy to see that a WR like Waddle is needed more for this scheme than a player like Sewell. That, of course, may change down the road if and when they tweak that scheme.

 

Hard to call better plays when ur line cant block.
Not easy to win if u get beat in the trenches on both sides of the ball

 

I would personally disagree - I think McDaniel could do some big things with a guy like Sewell in the run game. And frankly, he would have been a better choice for MOST teams that passed on him, including the Bengals/Chase and Falcons/Pitts. He's just a massive and devastatingly dominant force. Yeah, we can survive with Lamm in for Armstead, but there is a difference. Now input a dude better and healthier than Armstead.

It is interesting to see some of the butterfly effect in action here though. If we get our preferred target of Aiyuk the year before, would we care about Waddle? If we did have Aiyuk and Waddle would we bother bringing in Hill? Who do we use that first rounder on then? Just some interesting thought exercises.

In the end, I can see Waddle as a good to great WR but probably not a HoF caliber guy. Sewell is a HoF caliber guy, a top 3 guy at his position and likely will be for a decade plus.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think McD and the Dolphins would be failures with Sewell. I think McD could use his skill set and have a successful offense, but would those offenses be better than what we’ve seen the last 2 years? I doubt it. This scheme is predicated on having a very accurate QB and super fast/quick WR’s.

We can butterfly effect all day, but everything else being equal, Sewell without Waddle < Waddle without Sewell and the offensive numbers make that belief seem pretty plausible.

Also, if Waddle averages over his career what he’s been averaging (and plays around 10 seasons) he’ll be a shoo-in for the HoF. It’s just that he happens to be playing with the best player in the league and that kind of diminishes his accomplishments.

Ideally we could have Sewell and Waddle, but if I had to choose I’m taking Waddle. (In this offense)

 

Well, it depends. He’s obviously calling great plays with average to below average OL play. Unless you think he’s calling every good play in existence and there’s no way to create better calls in this same scenario, then I have to disagree. And part of the “bad play” statement includes when he’s calling certain plays and not just the plays themselves.

 

All teams struggle on the road in the playoffs. All warm weather teams struggle in the cold. Historically, even when we had SB winning teams and Marino with fantastic OL’s the Dolphins struggled on the road in the cold weather. I’m not just buying into the thought that the OL, on one of the league’s best offenses (historically good in some cases), is somehow not good enough. I mean, I think even the best OL’s have weaknesses.

I think injuries are the main case for late season failure along with cold weather and strength of schedule. Add all that up and it’s hard to win.

 

I think that's over-analyzing. If you look at the injury stats for last year there's no sudden spike in injuries that would explain the Baltimore disaster where we lost by 37 points for example.
https://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/mia/2023_injuries.htm

The injury stats for 2022 also don't coincide with our late season collapse:
https://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/mia/2022_injuries.htm

Statistically, winning only 4 out of 14 December/January games with McD in 2022-2023 is still small enough sample size that it's consistent with a team that wins 58% of games in December/January (95% confidence interval goes up to 58.1%). We need larger sample size to see if the late season collapse is "real" with McD regardless of the reason (injury, cold, away games, strength of schedule, etc.).

Also, the correlation to win% of injuries to starters from 2010-2019 is only -0.212, meaning only 4.5% of variation in win% was due to injuries to starters. Causal fans vastly overstate the effect of injuries. If you don't think so, keep track of pre-game predictions based on the injury report, and you'll see it doesn't correlate well with what actually happens.

 

Like Finatik stated, who is injured plays a big part. Losing Tua in 2022 doomed the team. Last year we had Tua, but both starting DE’s were out, both Waddle and Tyreek were banged up and not at full strength… each missing all are large parts of games. Not to mention having 4/5 of the oline either injured or playing positions they don’t normally play.

It’s a fact all teams have injuries, but all injuries aren’t equal. It’s pretty objective to say that the Dolphins not only suffered an inordinate amount of injuries, but injuries to more key players. Then add into the fact that the teams they played had some of the league’s best defenses and weather and we see reasons other than “McD can’t call a game” or “Tua sucks” as to why we lost.

 

That we didn't lose Tua last year only strengthens the argument that injuries to other positions had even less effect than the stats I showed. Also, the Dolphins were ranked #21 in 2023 in terms of AGL = adjusted games lost due to injuries. So we were a bit worse than average. It definitely wasn't close to league worst. That was Houston followed by NE and Carolina.

So no, injuries weren't that big a factor statistically speaking in our late season collapse last year.

 

The Dolphins were ranked #24 in AGL in 2023, which means only 8 teams were worse. That’s definitely close to league’s worse. And AGL doesn’t really tell the entire story. Cinci was ranked 3rd lowest in AGl, but the injury to Burrow ruined their season. A low paid guy, say a player on their rookie deal, isn’t counted as high. But that newer player can be a staple. The Dolphins starting OL, excluding Armstead, wasn’t highly paid last year, but they missed a lot of games. As average (or worse depending on your opinion) as they are, them missing so much time hurt a lot. And that’s not even talking about losing Chubb and JP.

 

You're looking at the wrong stats. AGL for total is what you need to look at, not offense, and we were #21.
https://ftnfantasy.com/nfl/texans-lead-2023-agl-numbers-with-ol-injury-record

More importantly (back to ranks aren't measures) we had an AGL of 76 while the mean AGL in 2023 was 68.9 and the standard deviation 30.8. That means we were only 0.23 standard deviations above the mean. That's very close to the mean. 41% of teams on average (or an expected 13 teams out of 32) will be above that value with large enough sample size.

So we were only slightly above average in terms of adjusted games lost due to injury. Couple that with overall low correlation between injuries and win%, not losing the QB (which further lowers that correlation for non-QB players) and no sudden increase in key injuries at the time our losses started, and you have the necessary statistical evidence to claim injuries were not a major factor in last year's late season collapse.

 

You’re right… they were 24th in offense. What’s the correlation between wins/losses and injuries to offense vs defense? And again, position/players matter. If Team A has injuries to multiple back-ups and less important players are they worse off than Team B that has no injuries except to their QB and starting RB? I think most people would say Team B. Houston suffered a high AGL last season, what “important” players did they lose? Their offensive line and QB were mostly healthy, no?

 

I forgot to add… and some teams can lose an important player and have their back-up come in and play just as well. That wasn’t the case with the Dolphins. Depth also matters.

 

Haven't seen a breakdown by offense vs. defense. However, that 4.5% of variation in win% (on average) explained by all injuries includes the QB. That means that you're very unlikely to explain much more variation in win% if your QB doesn't go down. It's true that if the QB does go down and some other key position players go down, then the effect on win% goes up (4.5% is an average). But that's really hard to argue in our case. I think you might be able to argue 1 in 20 games we might have lost due to key non-QB injuries, so maybe 1 game last season. But not a late season collapse spanning several games.

 

In other posts you attribute the QB with about 10% for wins. How can other players being injured not be attributed to more losses?

 

10-15%. That's the effect of the "QB", not effect of an above average QB over a replacement player. WAR = wins above replacement would be the stat you'd want to look at. For QB, I've shown that on average an "elite" QB adds maybe 2 wins extra per season (and some of the best even more). So if an elite QB is out the entire season then the effect is pretty big, far more than just 4.5% of win%. But if they're out only 3 games then it's much less (0.35 games lost in that case).

That's the other key variable: how many games on average is a starting QB or any player out per season. The less it is, the less the overall effect of injuries. A key position player out the entire season would probably be worth at least 1 win. But how often are they injured? To get to that 1 win you need that player to be out the entire season, not 3 games (over 3 games that would mean losing 0.18 games!).

So three things explain that 4.5% upper bound I'd place for the Dolphins in 2023: 1) only a few key position players are injured, not all; 2) we didn't lose the QB; 3) players were out only a few games to explain a late season collapse.

Also, keep in mind you'd need to look at the difference in injuries between opponents to see what the net effect is, not just an effect relative to no injuries to starters for the opposing side.

 

Too old and he wants a crazy extension that has never been done at his position with his age.. pass..


I think and hope the dolphins will find guard help before the deadline.. id give up a first for a top tier guard for sure

 

It's data-driven analysis, which is a hell of a lot better than each person acting like their opinion is "the truth".

 

I don’t take what cbrad is doing as “the truth” and I don’t think that’s what he’s implying.

Let’s put it another way. If there was a predictive method that showed you could have. 50/50 chance of winning the lottery would you use that method? Knowing that you have a 1/350,000,000 million chance of winning if you choose numbers at random, would you use the predictive method or not?
That’s what stats do. They get us closer to the “truth”, but they aren’t 100%.

 

The best way to determine what is "the truth" is to see what maximizes predictive power (fewest assumptions to minimize predictive error). That's how science does it, and you see the results of the scientific method all around you.

I gladly state the uncertainties associated with the statistics. Once again, it's FAR better than so many people around here claiming their opinion is "the truth".