Horse Tracks 1/30/10 - Martindale offers first comments since becoming Broncos DC

I am excited to see what Martindale does

Yay, we may never have to see Brenda Warner’s ugly mug again.

I really don’t expect him to pull a Favre either.
I’ll miss watching him play.

…sure doesn’t sound like a guy thinking Miami.

as much as I love Terrell Davis, if Kurt Warner goes in ahead of him, #13 deserves it. No one gave Warner a chance. Everything he got is from the sweat of his face and I’ve never had a qualm with him. Favre is trash, Warner is class. Have a good day, fellow Broncoites!

What a silly statistic from Football Outsiders.

Are they actually saying that losing one of the best RT’s in the league means less than a #2 WR that was easily replaced, because he missed fewer games?

So… which team is worse off:

One that loses a backup QB for an entire season or one that loses, say, Peyton Manning for half a season?

Sorry, Dude, but sometimes stats annoy me.

predicts Broncos draft NT Cody (Alabama) with their pick.

Mock draft link

Seems a pretty solid mock overall. I don’t like the idea of Dez Bryant going to the Chiefs and McClain going to the Raiders so hope he’s wrong about those. (The latter is probably too logical and smart for Raiders to do it.)

Here is my response to Stuart on his site:

Most of you who have a sub-HOF opinion of Floyd Little never saw him play. I know that because I am of the generation who did, and I was very young at the time, and I would be considered by most as “an older gentleman,” or maybe an “old man” now. I don’t care about Stuart’s arguments: Were it not for Little, you would not have a Denver Broncos to cheer for. That is a fact.
bq.
Moreover, I was there to read that contemporaries of Little, Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick, considered Little to be the best running back in football during his time. That Little ran behind perhaps the worst offensive line in football is not an excuse: It is fact.
bq.
 In addition, when comparing Little to Terrell Davis or any other of the running backs more contemporary to our time, we must remember that the rules were not as favorable to the offense as they are today. For instance, the blockers had to keep their elbows out and their hands inside the parameters of their bodies. They way they block today would have been “holding” back then. So the Broncos had a pathetic offensive line who could not use their hands.
bq.
Floyd Little WAS the Broncos. He was realistically the only playmaker they had. He was very highly respected throughout the league . . . just about the only Broncos offensive player who was.
bq.
Yes, Little is very deserving of the HOF, the most deserving in Broncos history, now that Elway is already in. I know. I was there.

And in a following one:

One more comment for the stats guys: Take a look at Elway’s stats and then some stats of those to whom Elway is more highly regarded. If stats alone were the consideration, Elway would take a precipitous plunge down the rankings of all-time quarterbacks. Does that sway your opinion of Elway? Probably not because you saw him play, right?
bq.
All most of you have of Floyd Little is stats. Try to put your uninformed impressions aside and listen to some of us who saw him play.

Schwab addresses a subject I’ve pondered, that is — the move from ZB to a more power running game.

First, he addresses a comment that has recently made the rounds, that ZB teams haven’t won the SB since the Broncos last SB win, and he appropriately dismisses it.

The ZB was clearly an effective and productive scheme in the Broncos’ hands but there was one shortcoming that Schwab also addresses:

The zone-blocking scheme may have struggled a bit in short yardage, but it’s impossible to argue the results.

I loved the results that came from using ZB and I said so, but one the one flaw that occurred to me was short yardage/RZ. Steve Nichols weighed in on this and said that there should be no inherent problem using ZB in short yardage. I accept Steve’s comment and there’s also our own past success to support his comments, but I think there’s still more to this argument.

One of the problems with ZB teams is that their OLs are ZB types — lean, athletic, etc. Having ZB-type OLs makes you better at running ZB (of course), but it also means that you’re poorly adapted to a power running game. To illustrate this general idea using something completely different — ‘specialists’ in nature suffer when their environment changes. Dominating one’s own niche in nature is a successful strategy but it suffers when that niche is lost, such as when there’s environmental degradation. Generalists in nature, who adapt to a variety of environments and food sources, are less efficient at what they do than the specialists but are often more successful because of their versatility. They’re also opportunists, and can take advantage of any food source that appears, so they’re well-positioned to take advantage of windfalls besides being versatile and thus not being dependent on any single food source.

When I first contemplated the problem of specialization in nature, it appeared to be a zero sum game; being specialized meant greater efficiency while being versatile meant was lower efficiency but without the disadvantage of niche dependence. You could be good at one thing or sort of good at many things but there were always tradeoffs. However, generalists in nature often do both — they adapt their strategies in order to specialize, and they also share their knowledge with their young, thus experiencing a gain in efficiency that accumulates over lifetimes. Being altricial helped, their young were born undeveloped and thus capable of learning from their elders, who were repositories of knowledge that had been developed over lifetimes.

Note that intelligence is a key factor for altricial organisms. their ability to learn allows them to specialize within a single lifetime. They also are advantaged by having a social unit, since they can learn from whichever member of the unit that possesses knowledge relevant to their situation, besides enjoying the advantages inherent in a group, such as common defense.

There are obvious parallels between strategies in football and nature. One limitation that occurred to me concerning ZB is the apparent RZ deficiency — although it may not be a scheme deficiency, per se. McDaniels recently offered some comments on this subject that are very revealing.

“The teams that run the zone play, that’s predominantly what they do,” McDaniels said. “Because if you’re going to be good at that, you’re going to have to be good at that all the time. We’re not doing that. There will be some zone in there, but we’re not going to major in it.”

In my analysis on this subject, I had tentatively concluded that our problem might be niche dependence. We had clearly been proficient in the running game while using ZB, but the question was whether we had excluded the possibility of success using other strategies by investing too heavily in ZB. And part of our problems of late traced to personnel. Nalen’s absence, although not felt initially, and Hamilton’s decline had hurt our OL’s performance. Even without the loss of considerable talent in the interior-OL, our size was inferior to most teams, and a big disadvantage against some teams. The question I have is whether ZB is a general advantage but a disadvantage in some situations and against some teams. One of the misleading aspects of the statistic citing the prevalence of ZB for SB winning teams is that it identifies our OL according to scheme. While it’s true that we used ZB, it’s misleading to attribute our success to ZB alone. Those were very talented OLs, and many of the best players were not developed in ZB schemes. Mark Schlereth was very talented at pulling, and Zimmerman’s talent had little to do with ZB. My understanding is that many of the good things that those OLs did went beyond the use of a stretch play. They were very physical OLs, although they may appear small now when compared to current standards. It’s not as if we’re abandoning what made us great, which makes ZB into a trope for our OL’s success, what we’re really trying to do — IMO — is get back to the physical nature and versatility of OLs during the SB years. Our successful adoption of the ZB became a double-edged sword in time, and we became increasingly dependent on it. And our OLs gradually became smaller. Like a creature whose environmental niche is threatened, our OL struggles this season pointed to a problem that existed in an area that was previously a strength. We could attempt to re-invigorate our ZB ways and become a one-trick pony once again, but I think that ‘that’ was part of the problem.