2011 NFL Horse Collar Awards
Well I’ve finally finished my awards for the 2011 season. I know this is an unfortunate time to be putting out an awards blog for a season that ended in early February (and has now been eclipsed by many things, including the NFL offseason), but that’s just how I roll. As usual, this thing turned into a friggin’ monster. As I write this, we’re looking at 269 pages (double spaced but still).
I started writing this thing in mid-February. Before I knew it, March Madness had begun. I have to get this out now before spring training ends. There’s nothing I can do now to make the timing better. The longer I wait the more out of place it will feel.
Before we get to the actual awards, you know that I’ve got one or two hundred things to say about the process. So here we go.
Changes: As usual I’ve made a few changes to the awards format. Overall it’s very similar to last year but there are some major additions. This year’s format is modeled after my latest version of the MLB and CFB awards. You will notice that I’ve named each award after a former player. That just makes it more fun for me because I like giving tributes to the old school and it’s kind of my own personal touch. I’ve put an emphasis on symmetry in the player awards section and that sometimes leads to redundancy. I like it, however, because it feels inclusive and complete. There are many other aspects of the awards that are either new or expanded, but I will wait for the comments sections to expound upon them.
Other Notes: In case you’re wondering, I do take postseason play into account for all of the awards, but it isn’t more important than the entire regular season. For example, I’m not going to throw Eli Manning into the MVP discussion just because he had a stellar playoffs. On the other hand, if Drew Brees or Tom Brady had been excellent in the playoffs on the way to a championship it might have elevated them over Aaron Rodgers.
As you know from my MLB awards, I only use whether or not a guy played on a winning team as a sort of tie breaker. The same thing is true for my NFL awards. Keep in mind that I do include special teams performance for all of the awards, so if a guy was a successful return man it will help him.
I pick the best and worst front offices rather than selecting the best executive because it’s very difficult to know who is really in charge or responsible for the decisions in each front office unless you are a true insider. Teams use different titles for their front office personal in the NFL, and unlike the NBA or MLB not every team has one specific GM who is in charge of everything.
This season I decided to separate the postseason awards into players who won the championship and players who didn’t just like I did in the baseball awards.
One final note about the All-Conference and All-League teams: I either choose 2 RB’s and 3 WR’s or 3 RB’s and 2 WR’s depending on which players are most deserving. I split the linebackers into MLB, ILB, and OLB and pick 2 of each. In the future I may get more specific with the D-line. Right now I pick 2 DT’s and 2 DE’s. What I may do in the future is pick DT’s and DE’s for 4-3 teams and also pick DE’s and a NT for 3-4 teams. For this year I made no distinction between a 4-3 DE and a 3-4 DE or between a 3-4 NT and a 4-3 DT.
Actually, it’s a little bit more complicated than that because there are some guys who could be considered a DE or a DT (Haloti Ngata and Justin Smith are two examples). Also, in schemes with 3 linebackers the inside/outside definition can get a little fuzzy. Like I said, I plan to clean it up next year. For now, you’ll just have to deal with some blurred lines.
Obligatory Admission of Limitations: As I’ve written many times, particularly in the college football awards blog, there are some limitations inherent in my awards. One simply cannot get a complete picture of the sport of football solely by looking at statistics. In fact, there are parts of the game that stats barely touch. Of course I also watch a ton of football, but even as a sports freak, I can only dig so deep into the sport. I don’t have access to film; I don’t talk to coaches or players; and I can’t watch every play of every game.
The most glaring weakness that comes as a result of this is my inability to judge offensive linemen. I’ve covered this extensively in past blog entries. Suffice to say that I’m once again picking the best offensive line units this year rather than individual offensive linemen. I’ve said before that I will probably always do that, but I’ve actually changed my mind on that just as I have many things about my different blogs this year. It’s now 2012 and with all of the technology available I hope to one day be able to include individual offensive linemen into my awards (at least for the NFL) as well as non-kicking special teams players.
For this year I stuck with picking the top offensive line units. To determine this I relied heavily on Football Outsiders and their offensive line rankings. I looked at several of their metrics, as well as the raw sacks allowed and rushing numbers, and made my picks based on that information. It may not sound like a highly scientific method but there is good science behind it, I just let other people do most of the hard math. I’m glad we have sites like FO out there trying to go deeper into the stats than mainstream sites (much more on this later).
I should also mention that I’m limited to a lesser extent in terms of grading defensive players. My awards are probably going to include players that guys who cover the sport for a living wouldn’t have on their lists. This is because the only way I have to measure defensive players is through stats and watching games throughout the year. There may be a DT out there who took on two blockers every play and was the most valuable player on his defense, but if he had 1.5 sacks and 17 total tackles he’s not going to end up in my awards.
Defensive back is the trickiest defensive position for me to judge. The statistic that jumps out is interceptions but those numbers can be deceiving. Make no mistake: while I understand that turnovers are somewhat fluky, they are still important, and no one will ever convince me that INT’s don’t matter. However, truly elite CB’s don’t get thrown at as much as other DB’s so they naturally have fewer chances. On the other hand, CB’s who are specifically targeted by other teams may get burned on 15 plays, but what shows up in the box score is that the guy made 12 tackles and intercepted a pass.
I don’t have access to stats like “number of completions allowed” or “receiving yards allowed.” I’m sure the data exists for teams and certain media people to access but it’s not available for the average Jose (or if it is available somewhere on the internet I haven’t come across it). Anyway, as I’ve written many times before, I know there are limitations, but I try to do the best I can with the resources I have. That’s all I can do.
Some Bitching and Moaning About Stats: I apologize in advance but I need to complain for a moment about the state of NFL statistics. I realize that I’m spoiled by baseball but it’s remarkable how bare NFL stats are in general. I mean considering how much of a monster the NFL is in terms of popularity in this country, it shouldn’t take hours of searching the internet to find reliable and easily accessible individual player stats.
As for just why this is the case, I think supply and demand explains a lot of it. Besides the game itself and rooting for particular teams, there are two major elements (for lack of a better word) that drive interest in the NFL: gambling and fantasy football. These are the things that motivate fans to look at coverage on different websites, so the different sites focus on the type of information useful to those specific areas.
So for the most basic or traditional interests there are game recaps, highlights, standings, and basic stats. Most of the betting information is based on team results (home/away, ATS, splits, etc.) or injury status reports. As opposed to fantasy baseball (which is driven by intellectuals and nerds), fantasy football is driven by casual fans and meatheads, so the focus is almost exclusively on offensive skill position players (non-linemen). To summarize the point, there aren’t nearly as many people interested in individual defensive stats or in depth player stats, so different sports sites don’t put much effort into providing that sort of thing.
If you’ve heard enough about this topic then please feel free to skip ahead, but I need to explain the problem a little further. There are many different ways in which statistical coverage of the NFL sucks.
General Lack of In-Depth Data: I used the example of “completions allowed” for DB’s earlier, but it doesn’t even have to be that in-depth. I couldn’t find a site that listed the number of tackles made by a player on special teams. I couldn’t even find a resource that listed the leaders in blocked kicks or QB hurries. Believe it or not, there are actually some non-basic statistics that are better covered in college football than the NFL. I could not find a site that listed the leaders in all-purpose yards or even total return yards (KR and PR combined).
Spotty Coverage: One of the most annoying things about the whole process of trying to find stats online is that you have to go to so many different sources. Just to analyze one aspect of the game with the available data, you have to have 8 different windows open at once. If one site has info on the number of punts pinned inside the 20, you’ll have to go to a different site to find the number of punts pinned inside the 10. One site will have information on total yards (rushing and receiving) but not total touchdowns. You’ll find one site that has FG’s broken down into different distances but that site won’t have any information on kickoffs. It’s ridiculous.
Befuddling Non-Uniformity: This is a related but different problem from the previous issue. It’s both amazing and utterly maddening how little uniformity there is in the terminology and description of stats among the different entities that cover the NFL. For example, some sites refer to combined yards from scrimmage as “total yards.” However, you will find some sites that consider “total yards” to be combined passing and rushing yards. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that, as mentioned in the previous section, you have to use multiple sites to get all of the available data.
To use another example, most of the sites you run into will define “Passed Defended” or “PD” as the combination of passes broken up and passes intercepted. So you’ll be going along and analyzing the stats and all of the sudden you’ll realize that this particular site excludes INT’s when calculating passes defended. Or consider the way that NFL.com lists tackle stats for individual players. They split the tackle numbers into 3 categories: Ast; Total; and Combined. After a while you figure out what they’re talking about, but it’s confusing because almost any other source is going to list the 3 categories as Ast; Solo; and Total. For some reason NFL.com wants to call “solo” tackles “total” tackles. What most sites list as “total” tackles NFL.com wants to call “combined” tackles. That’s the sort of irritating variation you run into constantly.
Presentation: Even when you can find the info you’re looking for it’s often a chore to really get anything out of it. For some reason, very few sites break total numbers down into per game averages. Or let’s say you want to figure out who had the best yards per carry average in the NFL. You could figure it out, but you’ll often have to separate the guys with less than 10 carries from the guys with 150 carries on your own. Not only is there apparently no standard minimum for 95% of these stats, you probably won’t even find a site that will allow you to create your own parameters. That just seems lazy to me. How hard could it be?
You may find a site that lists sacks along with “stuffs” (tackles for loss on running plays) but for some reason they don’t list the combined number of tackles for loss. Or maybe you can find a site that lists information like QB hurries on a player’s page, but they don’t list it among the individual player stats, so there’s no way to compare that number to any other player’s number. If you want to compare players at specific positions you’ll probably end up having to look at 5 or 6 different sites to get the whole picture. And even then you’ll be amazed to find that some players are listed as defensive ends on 3 sites and as defensive tackles on 3 others sites.
Accuracy/Reliability: There’s no telling how many inaccuracies there are amongst the data given by even the most mainstream sources. During the process of creating these awards I realized at one point that one of the sites I was looking at had inexplicably omitted Vince Wilfork from the record books. He just wasn’t there. I spent 5 minutes trying to figure out what was causing the problem before I came to the conclusion that he just wasn’t included in their data.
Lack of Imagination: There are some sites that are trying to look deeper inside the numbers of the NFL. However, most of these numbers deal with team performances. In addition, it’s just hard to know what a lot of this stuff even means or if it means anything important at all. For the most part, however, sites that cover the NFL just aren’t trying to go past the basic yards, receptions, touchdowns sort of thing.
I mean honestly: how hard would it be to figure out how many times a particular left guard has allowed the guy he was responsible for blocking to record a sack? Again, I’m sure the info is out there for coaches and front office personnel to look at, but the average fan is going to have a hard time finding it.
I’m Done Complaining: Okay, sorry for the extended breakdown of how annoying it is to try and find stats on the internet. That’s all I have. Along with the individual awards I’ve included some team awards and just for fun awards as always. I’ll explain any of the other nuances as we go along.
By the way, I’m going to have to split this entry up into a few different entries just like I did with the baseball awards. This thing just got way too big to fit into one long entry.
Finally, because of the unusual size of this entry there is a greater chance of typos and spelling/grammar mistakes than usual. I hope there aren’t any obvious errors, but if there are, I apologize in advance. I must also ask that you excuse the lack of uniformity in the way that different stats are titled and abbreviated. This thing just got so big that it would take another week for me to go through and make sure the stats are all abbreviated in a consistent manner. No matter what, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out what the abbreviations mean.
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