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*Standard Disclaimer* I've agreed to do a post every week until the draft breaking down some of the metrics of the draft. In honor of NFL Network's Path to the Draft, this weekly post will be Math to the Draft. Each week I'll be looking at a position group, a player, or actual statistics about the NFL Draft and I'll be posting them exclusively in the VIP forum for a week before moving them to the main draft forum. Hope y'all enjoy.
This week, I wanted to break down some of the stats behind the two top consensus Tight Ends in the NFL Draft, Coby Fleener from Stanford and Dwayne Allen from Clemson. Although there are many pressing needs for the Dolphins, a seam-stretching, receiver of a TE could be a good weapon for future Dolphin QBs. In light of that, I wanted to look at the routes, distances, and blocking of these two late 1st round, early second round prospects.
Routes Run:
I'm going to break this down kind of like how I did with the Quarterbacks, I'm going to start with the distances and locations of the routes these players run. Obviously, the routes they run are a product of the coaching and the scheme, but we can get a sense for how and where they are used to running in the college game.
I watched 5 games each and noted the distance of every route they ran. Luckily the ACC and Pac-12 have camera angles conducive to seeing the whole field. So for instance, we see that 32% of Allen's routes were within 1-5 yards.
In addition, I thought it would be interesting to see where the routes were ending horizontally on the field. I broke the field up into a section from the:
Left Sideline to the Left Hashes to the Center to the Right Hashes to the Right Sideline
Notes:
But routes are great and all, but let's look at where they actually catch the ball. These are the number of catches in a zone as a percentage of their total catches. For example if you see 33% of 11-20 are catches, that means that out of the 12 balls he caught, 4 were in that range. It's not a percentage of the total targets. Also in this stat, I pretended as if all misses from the QBs were caught. This includes Interceptions, Deflections, and straight up misses. The only incompletions are drops. This is the PQB, or Perfect Quaterback rating
One more stat in the passing game, before we move to blocking/ total plays. Like I said, I counted their total targets from the Quarterbacks, Andrew Luck and Tahj Boyd.
I didn't try to really quantify any aspects of blocking, or quality of blocking. I just looked at the quantity of plays they were either pass blocking, run blocking or running routes. Here are essentially per game averages for Run Blocking, Pass Blocking, and Routes Run
This week, I wanted to break down some of the stats behind the two top consensus Tight Ends in the NFL Draft, Coby Fleener from Stanford and Dwayne Allen from Clemson. Although there are many pressing needs for the Dolphins, a seam-stretching, receiver of a TE could be a good weapon for future Dolphin QBs. In light of that, I wanted to look at the routes, distances, and blocking of these two late 1st round, early second round prospects.
Routes Run:
I'm going to break this down kind of like how I did with the Quarterbacks, I'm going to start with the distances and locations of the routes these players run. Obviously, the routes they run are a product of the coaching and the scheme, but we can get a sense for how and where they are used to running in the college game.
| ============ | Fleener | Allen |
| Routes | Total% | Total% |
| Screen | 0.00 | 5.04 |
| 1-5 Yards | 23.28 | 31.65 |
| 5-10 Yards | 22.41 | 22.30 |
| 10-20 Yards | 37.93 | 24.46 |
| 20 + Yards | 16.38 | 16.55 |
I watched 5 games each and noted the distance of every route they ran. Luckily the ACC and Pac-12 have camera angles conducive to seeing the whole field. So for instance, we see that 32% of Allen's routes were within 1-5 yards.
In addition, I thought it would be interesting to see where the routes were ending horizontally on the field. I broke the field up into a section from the:
Left Sideline to the Left Hashes to the Center to the Right Hashes to the Right Sideline
| L-Hash | Hash-Mid | Mid-Hash | Hash - R | |
| L-R Zone | %Throw | %Throw | %Throw-- | %Throw |
| Fleener | 31.03 | 20.69 | 25.00 | 23.28 |
| Allen | 35.25 | 17.99 | 15.11 | 31.65 |
Notes:
- I found the amount of 1-5 yard routes that Allen ran interesting, over 33% of his routes were within 5 yards of the line of scrimmage. That doesn't preclude him from being a deep threat, but it is his most route run zone, not the deeper 11-20 or 20+ zones
- A huge amount of Fleener's routes were in the 11-20 range and over 50% of his routes were past 11 yards, which bodes well for him as a future deep threat- at least in terms of being used to running these type of routes
- They are almost identical in terms of 20+ routes run
- Both of their route zones are fairly well distributed, neither of them is running any route way more and ignoring another zone
- Fleener's routes are more likely to be between the hashes than Allen - Allen runs about 66% of his routes outside the hashes while Fleener has almost an even distribution across the horizontal stretch of the field
But routes are great and all, but let's look at where they actually catch the ball. These are the number of catches in a zone as a percentage of their total catches. For example if you see 33% of 11-20 are catches, that means that out of the 12 balls he caught, 4 were in that range. It's not a percentage of the total targets. Also in this stat, I pretended as if all misses from the QBs were caught. This includes Interceptions, Deflections, and straight up misses. The only incompletions are drops. This is the PQB, or Perfect Quaterback rating
| =========== | Fleener | Allen |
| Catch% | Catch% | |
| Screen | 0.00 | 5.71 |
| 1-5 Yards | 33.33 | 25.71 |
| 5-10 Yards | 11.11 | 31.43 |
| 10-20 Yards | 38.89 | 22.86 |
| 20 + Yards | 16.67 | 14.29 |
- Found it interesting that 33% of Fleener's catches were 1-5 yard range. Despite running far more deep routes, we see a pretty solid amount of his catches coming from the short game
- However, we still see a huge amount of catches in the 10-20 yard range at 39%. He caught over 50% of his balls past 10 yards.
- This is in contrast to Dwayne Allen. 66% of Allen's catches were either screens or within 1-10 yards of the LOS
- The majority of Allen's catches come from the 5-10 yard range, mostly on In/Dig Routes and Curl Routes
One more stat in the passing game, before we move to blocking/ total plays. Like I said, I counted their total targets from the Quarterbacks, Andrew Luck and Tahj Boyd.
- Out of all of Luck's throw attempts during the games I looked at, Fleener received 12.7% of Luck's total targets
- Out of all of Boyd's throw attempts, Allen received 19.9% of Boyd's total targets
- Those don't really mean anything, I wouldn't say that because Fleener received less targets he's less awesome or anything. I just wanted to put the number out there for anyone interested.
I didn't try to really quantify any aspects of blocking, or quality of blocking. I just looked at the quantity of plays they were either pass blocking, run blocking or running routes. Here are essentially per game averages for Run Blocking, Pass Blocking, and Routes Run
| GameAvg | Fleener | Allen |
| Run | 11.4 | 21.4 |
| Pass | 23.2 | 27.8 |
| Pass Block | 5.3 | 12.2 |
- Allen played far more snaps on the whole during a game than did Fleener. If you add those up, Fleener was averaging 39 snaps per game and Allen was averaging 61 snaps per game
- Fleener was hardly in to block on pass plays, that's not to say he's not a good pass blocker, but over the course of a season he has far less experience than Allen in pass blocking
- Allen also was in on double the run plays, often leading through the hole for the RB in an almost FB type of role or on the playside. Versus Fleener who was more likely to be on the back-side of the play
