I’ve spent quite a lot of time the last couple of months trying to understand how the NFL works. Most of what I’ve found I’ve been arguing to death around here for quite some time now, but some of it is hard to get across when splattered over multiple conversations and different threads. I expect to get bombarded in this thread and that’s fine. You probably won’t agree with most things I have to say here but my hope is that I can provide and few things that will make you view things differently.
The Fins are really in a special position this time around as they have the opportunity to start over with tons of assets and space under the cap. They’re basically an expansion team on steroids. In this post I will just illustrate some of the flaws in thinking that plague a lot of teams in the NFL and how the Fins can avoid them and then explain some of the edges that exist in the NFL and how they can exploit them.
“We are 1 or 2 players away”
This is the most obvious flaw around in the NFL. Teams are trying to win next season and it causes them to make crucial mistakes that they weren’t making when actually building that team to be 1 or 2 players away, it causes them to go flat out bonkers and puts them in all or nothing mode where everything falls apart when that window closes.
“Defense wins championships”, “Passing is crucial for scoring points and winning games” are heavily debated here and both hold some truth, but reality is great teams win championships. Most focus on how to win next season instead of focusing on how to build great teams that last.
Spend most of your time trying to illustrate what a good decision looks like in every aspect of building a team, and then just focus on making the right call at every decision point, regardless of the outcomes. Outcomes are full of noise and are very likely to steer you in the wrong direction more often than not.
I think most GMs truly believe that their edge lies in their ability to identify talent better than other teams. I might catch some flak here but I think that thinking is fools gold and very likely to be a losers game. Ever heard something around the lines of “80% of people believe they are above average drivers ” ? Well Im flat out certain that this also applies to NFL GMs.
Instead of trying to outsmart everyone, look for unexploited edges that are splattered all over the place in all aspects of team building and football strategy and pound them.
The NFL draft
“Best player available”, “Filling needs” and a combination of both is outdated. Ever since they installed the rookie wage scale, the draft has been a completely different animal, yet most teams still draft the same way they used to before that event. It isn’t about filling needs and trying to find the best players any more, it’s about getting value.
The reason I’m saying that is because draft picks have actually become free cap space tickets. Literally. The rookie you pick will get paid a pre determined amount regardless of the position he plays. In a way, having a starting QB(picked in round 1 or 2) on his rookie contract will save you from around 12M per to 8M per for 5 years depending on his draft slot.
For comparison sake, a RB drafted in the same rounds will actually net you at least -3M per against the cap since they are such an underpaid position. I picked the most extreme case to illustrate my point but it’s absolutely something teams should consider.
Ignoring this concept because you are 1-2 players away doesn’t make it any less of a mistake, filling teams needs or trying to outsmart everyone thinking you can ID good players better than anyone while ignoring value is a mistake. Small mistakes add up pretty fast in the NFL and this is how you end up in cap hell.
I’ve already gone deeper on this subject, if you’re interested to read more about it, the following posts explain the concept in more depth and also include visuals.
“Offensive Coordinators”
J-off-her-doll is actually the one who caught my attention on this subject and while I haven’t done any research about it, I feel the role is just to important these days to keep it out of the discussion.
This is all opinion but I feel the role is mismanaged in general. Most of them hold the responsibility of teaching players how to execute different plays on top of having to elaborate an overall offensive strategy and execute/call that strategy in game.
Call me crazy but those 2 roles are so far from another when it comes to the skillset required to be good at one or the other that Im sort of baffled as to why teams feel the need to give both those roles to one person. Again, this is only my opinion but teams should absolutely explore the possibility that they would be better off having 2 specialists for the job.
Get the best teacher you can get your hands on to teach the players how to execute your plays, and go out and get the best strategist you can get your hands on to build and execute your strategy in game. The offensive coordinator and the playcaller.
Most NFL teams do stupid things
… And it’s understandable. Most of these guys get hired and have so little time to show results that the long term is not something they can afford. They flat out start behind and are most often forced into making costly mistakes that accumulate fast and quickly become a big part of their demise.
I think the Fins FO and CS just might have a decent enough leach that they’d have the time to really build a strong foundation of making good decisions that profit the long term as well as the not so long term. Don’t try and “win this season”, make decisions that are optimal at every turn and the great team will follow, and it will be a sustainable one.
Further discussion
While I’m pretty much done with this post, there are many many more edges to be exploited in the current NFL, those were just some obvious ones to me. Free agency and in game strategies are full of them and I’d encourage anyone who has some ideas on this subject to post them in this thread.
I don’t expect anyone to agree with everything I just said, TBH I expect that alot of you will flat out throw rocks at me and that’s fine. My hope is that some take some nuggets in there and it gets you to think about how the NFL truly works behind the scenes.
The Fins are really in a special position this time around as they have the opportunity to start over with tons of assets and space under the cap. They’re basically an expansion team on steroids. In this post I will just illustrate some of the flaws in thinking that plague a lot of teams in the NFL and how the Fins can avoid them and then explain some of the edges that exist in the NFL and how they can exploit them.
“We are 1 or 2 players away”
This is the most obvious flaw around in the NFL. Teams are trying to win next season and it causes them to make crucial mistakes that they weren’t making when actually building that team to be 1 or 2 players away, it causes them to go flat out bonkers and puts them in all or nothing mode where everything falls apart when that window closes.
“Defense wins championships”, “Passing is crucial for scoring points and winning games” are heavily debated here and both hold some truth, but reality is great teams win championships. Most focus on how to win next season instead of focusing on how to build great teams that last.
Spend most of your time trying to illustrate what a good decision looks like in every aspect of building a team, and then just focus on making the right call at every decision point, regardless of the outcomes. Outcomes are full of noise and are very likely to steer you in the wrong direction more often than not.
I think most GMs truly believe that their edge lies in their ability to identify talent better than other teams. I might catch some flak here but I think that thinking is fools gold and very likely to be a losers game. Ever heard something around the lines of “80% of people believe they are above average drivers ” ? Well Im flat out certain that this also applies to NFL GMs.
Instead of trying to outsmart everyone, look for unexploited edges that are splattered all over the place in all aspects of team building and football strategy and pound them.
The NFL draft
“Best player available”, “Filling needs” and a combination of both is outdated. Ever since they installed the rookie wage scale, the draft has been a completely different animal, yet most teams still draft the same way they used to before that event. It isn’t about filling needs and trying to find the best players any more, it’s about getting value.
The reason I’m saying that is because draft picks have actually become free cap space tickets. Literally. The rookie you pick will get paid a pre determined amount regardless of the position he plays. In a way, having a starting QB(picked in round 1 or 2) on his rookie contract will save you from around 12M per to 8M per for 5 years depending on his draft slot.
For comparison sake, a RB drafted in the same rounds will actually net you at least -3M per against the cap since they are such an underpaid position. I picked the most extreme case to illustrate my point but it’s absolutely something teams should consider.
Ignoring this concept because you are 1-2 players away doesn’t make it any less of a mistake, filling teams needs or trying to outsmart everyone thinking you can ID good players better than anyone while ignoring value is a mistake. Small mistakes add up pretty fast in the NFL and this is how you end up in cap hell.
I’ve already gone deeper on this subject, if you’re interested to read more about it, the following posts explain the concept in more depth and also include visuals.
The way I see it...
The value of draft picks is directly associated to your team composition.
If somehow, we were able to establish an absolute value for each specific position on a football team, we'd actually be able to assign a perfect value for each specific draft pick in the draft, for every team participating in that draft.
Of course, we're no where near that but we can still make some assumptions.
For one thing, we can assume pretty confidently that QB is the most important position in football and that the #1 overall pick is the most valuable pick in the NFL draft.
From that, we can then form the theory that the #1 overall pick is more valuable to a team that doesnt have the QB position solved than it is to a team that isnt still looking for a QB. In other words, the team that already has the QB cannot benefit from the value of the best QB in the draft while the team without absolutely can.
But the team that already has the QB doesnt get exposed to the variance implied with making that pick, it already has the position solved. So it is perfectly fine with that particular pick having less value to him, compared to his opponent. The value of the player he is picking doesnt change, while the value of the pick is lesser. This is how you add value.
My takeaway is, solve critical positions first... The more critical positions you have solved, the more likely you are to get a player with more value than the actual pick you used to get him on your team.
Im finished with the data part of the project.
Some things confirm what we already knew, although I did not expect such a gap between QB and other positions. You'll also notice the slope starts going up for all positions and then drops down again. While I havent tried to play with the data to explain this yet. My off the top of my head crack at it is the rookie wage scale... Which looks like this: (sorry for the ugly chart lol)
View attachment 35312
Thats a very steep slope and as you'll see in the EV chart, the EV starts to stabilize around the same place where the salaries slope stabilizes.
A few things to consider, the elite category was harder to separate from the good for a few positions. All OL positions, ILB and interiorDL are part of this group. Whats interesting is that also showed up in the salaries, OL for example didnt have a big gap between elite salaries and good salaries, that even extended to jag players. And this is not driven by my analysis, I used quantiles to define group vet salaries...
What I get from this is, it is just as hard for NFL people to evaluate those group as it is from us. The lack of quantifiable data makes it hard for everyone to separate them into tiers.
Also notice that a couple of positions are actually undraftable at the very top of the draft.
**I sorry I couldnt separate DBs into CB and safety categories, my datasource did a bad job of labeling them and while I did have some correctly labeled, the vast majority were labeled as DB. This could have been corrected, but it would have been time consuming as **** as different sites name players differently. Just decided to put them all together. So for the DBs, just assume CBs have a bit more EV and take off a couple of points for safeties.**
Here's the chart: (the interactive one is linked underneath)
View attachment 35314
https://public.tableau.com/views/NF...ille2?:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link
I quoted my post because I want to expand on what I said there. I just got done with what amounts to about a month of work on this, not full time of course, but still a ****load of hours so I was kind of excited to finally have the results in front of me.
This figures to be a long *** one, as I will explain the whole thing and how *I think* it relates to team building.
IMO the salary cap is the actual amount of talent you're allowed to have on your team. At least theorically. And the number of picks you get per year is your pipeline for adding talent. In order to quantifiy the value of a draft pick, we need to connect the 2. This was the main idea that drove me to start this research. What is the value of a draft pick?
Expected value is a well known term,
And so I took 30 years worth of draft picks, classified them into 4 categories: Elite, Good, Jag and bust. This part was a grind, I tried alot of different ways to get those right, at some point realized that no matter what metrics I'd use for different positions, the ratios would change very marginally.
Then it was all a metter of getting odds for every category and positions for each draft picks. We cant use the raw data by itself, we need to smooth out the curves a little bit. So I built a multinomial logistic regression for that part. This is how I got the % used for the EV formula.
Then I needed the outcome, which is player salary. Here we assume that money is directly associated with talent. Which can be flawed on a case by case analysis but seems to hold true when used on a whole population. All I needed was the average salary for 4 different groups[elite, good,jag,bust] and around 10 different positions.
Then its just filling up the EV formula. I substracted the rookie salary associated with each pick to result. The slope of the rookie salaries was simply to steep to ignore, had it been more linear, I might have just ignored it.
Now what I think it all means?
Those results pretty much confirmed what I originally thought...
Now to elaborate on my previous post...
- QB obviously
- T theorically I know it makes sense but I was somewhat surprised it actually came out 2nd
- WR again, Im surprised, but this just pretty much follows the theory that the passing game is king
- Bunch of positions really close to each other
- RB, TE and interior OL basically undraftable at the top of the draft. Does that really surprise anyone?
For a team starting from scratch, we could view the actual expected value of draft picks for that team to be the average of all of the positions available to them's expected value.
This average EV is shown as the red line on the chart
The average EV when a team already has QB sloved is the yellow line on the chart
The average EV when a team has both QB and T solved is the green line
View attachment 35374
Now nevermind that those positions are QB, T and WR in that order, the real takeaway here is that by nailing higher value positions, you are lowering the actual value of a draft pick to your team. While this might sound counter intuitive, this is actually a good thing. We've all heard the saying getting value from the draft, IMO the way to get value from your draft picks is to get players who have more value than the pick you used to get them.
Sure as a GM, you are looking at this problem and trying to fix your end of it, get better at picking good players... But fundamentally, I think trying to increase the value of the players you pick might just be thougher, and more out of your control, than just trying to nail high priority positions first, thus lowering the overall value of your draft picks, making it easier for you to actually get value.
“Offensive Coordinators”
J-off-her-doll is actually the one who caught my attention on this subject and while I haven’t done any research about it, I feel the role is just to important these days to keep it out of the discussion.
This is all opinion but I feel the role is mismanaged in general. Most of them hold the responsibility of teaching players how to execute different plays on top of having to elaborate an overall offensive strategy and execute/call that strategy in game.
Call me crazy but those 2 roles are so far from another when it comes to the skillset required to be good at one or the other that Im sort of baffled as to why teams feel the need to give both those roles to one person. Again, this is only my opinion but teams should absolutely explore the possibility that they would be better off having 2 specialists for the job.
Get the best teacher you can get your hands on to teach the players how to execute your plays, and go out and get the best strategist you can get your hands on to build and execute your strategy in game. The offensive coordinator and the playcaller.
Most NFL teams do stupid things
… And it’s understandable. Most of these guys get hired and have so little time to show results that the long term is not something they can afford. They flat out start behind and are most often forced into making costly mistakes that accumulate fast and quickly become a big part of their demise.
I think the Fins FO and CS just might have a decent enough leach that they’d have the time to really build a strong foundation of making good decisions that profit the long term as well as the not so long term. Don’t try and “win this season”, make decisions that are optimal at every turn and the great team will follow, and it will be a sustainable one.
Further discussion
While I’m pretty much done with this post, there are many many more edges to be exploited in the current NFL, those were just some obvious ones to me. Free agency and in game strategies are full of them and I’d encourage anyone who has some ideas on this subject to post them in this thread.
I don’t expect anyone to agree with everything I just said, TBH I expect that alot of you will flat out throw rocks at me and that’s fine. My hope is that some take some nuggets in there and it gets you to think about how the NFL truly works behind the scenes.