I keep hearing that Bly wouldn’t give up so many completions if the Broncos had a better line and if they utilized him properly by having safety coverage over the top, but why should that apply any less to Foxy? And those who say Foxy at Atlanta and Bly at Denver last year is an unfair comparison are missing the point. Bly probably would have done better at Atlanta and Foxworth did do better at Atlanta, and can tackle besides which means he’s more versatile. When the Broncos used him at safety in a key game a few years ago he came through with around 14 tackles and collapsed after the game, because that’s how hard he played. Did we have such a surplus of top safeties last year that we couldn’t have used him there?

and if they the results will follow.

I like your stuff, too, like your awesome tight tend piece. I think it was more like the death of a thousand paper cuts. It seems to me Shanahan inherited a pretty decent defense but had no talent for building one and its effectiveness slowly declined over the years. He won two superbowls by building an overpowering offense while the defense was still pretty good. I think the slippage accelerated as he aggregated more power, which made it less likely that his choice(s) of defensive coordinator could mitigate his weakness on that side of the ball. That defensive line talent was too expensive to retain said a lot about his priorities and defensive knowledge. I like physical and crebral, too.

and now, as we wait with bated breath for the rebuilding of the Broncos’ defense, hours will be like
days and days like years!

Picone, I mean. What started me on this line of thought years ago was reading that Red Auerbach started a player, either K.C. or Sam Jones, because Auerbach noticed that when he was in the team had a much better points differential than when he wasn’t. It says something about Knox that he noticed that about one of his players and acted on it. It wouldn’t be as easy in football to see the difference a player makes, but Knox and (apparently) Bellichick show that it can be done. Long before I heard of Shane Battier I saw Bill Laimbeer as a player with few skills who made his team better. Conversely, I’ve never understood the fuss people make over Alan Iverson. Several years ago he missed a bunch of games and the 76ers went on a winning streak. More recently Detroit traded Billups to Denver for Iverson and Denver immediately started playing better and Detroit has struggled ever since. I hope McDaniels is getting rid of our Iversons and I hope he’s good at identifying the unsung heroes that make a team a winner.

I wasn’t aware of Lewis at all until I read that article. I was blown away by his ability to see beneath the surface and recognize the subtleties of a “winner” who has “obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths.” Now, thanks to the info you just shared, I’m not going to be satisfied until I’ve checked out Moneyball.

every page (and the article is a satisfying 8 pages long) brought up more and more topics and ideas that i wanted to explore. Team vs. individual, stats vs. tape, contextual vs. intrinsic, etc. I don’t really know where to start…

but the stats Lewis cites seem to say otherwise. He says McGrady is one of the players who was a plus 6 last year, meaning the team is 6 points better per game when he’s playing than when he isn’t. The whole point of the new approach to evaluation, I take it, is you trust the figures even when they’re counter-intuitive. McGrady, unlike Allen Iverson, is an asset when he’s on the floor, albeit not the bargain Battier is, who gives you that same plus 6 for a whole lot less salary.

I can’t say for certain that Xanders subscribes to this way of thinking, but he is noted for introducing dataprocessing and information management science to player evaluation at Atlanta. It seems to me that the only reason you would need that sort of analysis is if you are trying to base decisions on a lot of subtle data instead of the traditional seat of the pants, “we like this guy” approach.

We will have to see.

Except he said it better than I could have. I was only vaguely aware of the facts he cites, having a sense that he was an example of the kind of modern thinking exemplified (in football) by Belichick and Schwartz. Also, I was guessing, in seat-of-the-pants fashion, that the apparent compatibility between Xanders and McDaniels reflects in part a similar orientation to player evaluation and team management, even if they arrived at it from different starting points (different mentors, etc.).

Okay, your explicit comparison of Moneyball and The Blind Side, in addition to what jaffe28 has said, has persuaded me to take a hard look at the former. Certainly Lewis is compulsively readable regardless of the sport or activity he’s analyzing. What makes him so readable, from my perspective, is not just the detailed, behind-the-scenes analyses but the explicit historical dimension. He’s a great storyteller. I’ve found that I can best understand a subject by seeing how its elements came into being, for instance economics via Robert L. Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers. I find an historical or developmental perspective congenial, hence my attraction to Kuhn’s attempt to understand how science works by studying how it has evolved over time, or Vygotsky’s attempt to understand how the mind works by studying how different psychological processes emerge, interact, and combine with one another in his version of cognitive developmental psychology.

I don’t necessarily see a direct connection between Moneyball-driven football statistics and the search for “team” players, but rather a shared global orientation. In traditionally seeking out the best players the implicit assumption has been that the teams with the best players are the best teams, all else (e.g. coaching) being equal. What strikes me is that the new, emerging orientation, whether embodied in seat-of-the-pants searches for “team” players or in subtle statistical analyses aimed at determining which players give a team the best chance of winning, is a clearer recognition that the bottom line is winning, not having the best players per se. One side of the equation emphasizes teamwork and the acquisition of players who enhance it, the other the identification via statistics of players who somehow make the team better. The latter is especially difficult in football and is therefore not as well-developed as similar efforts in baseball and basketball, but I don’t think it’s impossible. If we broaden the latter category to encompass the use of mathematical techniques to enhance team success, then Xanders is more clearly an example of the latter and McDaniels of the former, hence my sense of them being complementary to one another.

But don’t those stats measure offensive players (Defense-adjusted VOA)? What I was referring to was the difficulty in creating new stats for defensive players.