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28 Jul 2009
FOA 09 MEDIA: Cincinnati, Florida State, New York, Washington
Today in the magic mystery tour that is the FOA 09 Virtual Media boondoggle, we head to...
-Cincinnati, where Joe Reedy has an ongoing position-by-position breakdown of the Bengals, with help from our Robert Weintraub. He's currently up to linebackers.
-Florida State, where the Tomahawk Nation blog has two pieces on our analysis of FSU in this year's book. Part I is linked above, and you can check out their piece on running back success rate here.
-New York, where some Tanier guy has a piece in the New York Times regarding our Giants projection.
-Washington, where our friend Greg Trippiedi has a two-part series of his own, on the Redskins' hits and hurries. You can read Part II here.
Of course, if you do see or write a feature related to FOA 09, please send it in to bill - at - footballoutsiders.com, and we'll make sure it gets in here.
2 comments, Last at 29 Jul 2009, 2:21am by Greg Trippiedi
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Comments
Re: FOA 09 MEDIA: Washington
The Redskins article suffers from not recognizing small sample size (you can't learn anything from just 25 plays with 7+ rushers) and from simple math errors (12.2% is not 7 times more than 5.3%, it's 7 percentage points higher or 2.3 times as often). However, the author may be correct that the team blitzed 6+ rushers to increase sack numbers despite the hit and hurry numbers being better on 5-man blitzes. Or, it could be a coincidence and hits, hurries, and sacks are in reality all equivalent indicators of pass-rushing success and fluctuate randomly (I suspect the latter).
In the second part, the author concludes that 6-man blitzes are not less effective than rushing 5 or 4 overall, just different. This is probably accurate. He tries to explore interceptions, which is pretty stupid because 13 is too small a sample to determine anything, but wisely moves on without trying to make any conclusions.
His overall conclusion (that you need 6-blitzes to get sacks, and you need sacks to be successful) also does not follow from the stated analysis. Obviously sacks are good, but he never attempted to compare how much more successful a sack is than a hurry. I suspect that hurries have a significant, measurable impact and they should not be casually dismissed as failed sacks.
To improve his analysis, the author needs to understand what sample sizes are too small to analyze and he needs to demonstrate how sacks compare to hurries in terms of success instead of just assuming that hurries are useless.
Re: FOA 09 MEDIA: Washington
Criticisms noted and legitimate.
I should point out that the spirit of the research was not to establish a conclusive argument that the Redskins should blitz more or less, but to investigate my original claim that the Redskins would have been better off not blitzing as much. I should have probably stated that up front instead of leaving it implied.
The statistical analysis probably suffered significantly from the way it was presented, which was to say, not to a FO-type reading base, however, that's no excuse for fuzzy math (I had to correct the numbers, and forgot to correct the corresponding analysis).
Ultimately, there's some argument to be made from the data, I'm just not sure how close I got to it. My original thought was pretty conclusively off the mark though.
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