I didn't say that Tennessee's opinion determined his ability. I'm saying that Tennessee, who knows exactly why they called the plays they called, are confident in Tannehill's ability and signed him to a significant contract. As opposed to your opinion, knowing nothing about why they called the plays they called, concluding that Tannehill's ability is low. Ability: possession of the means or skill to do something So, by definition, if you are able to do something once, you've shown that you have the ability. Doing it repeatedly is not ability, it's consistency.
That wouldn't be the first time a team made a mistake with a contract. So the fact that a contract was signed doesn't make Tannehill's future performance based on his performance in 2019. His future performance will still be based on his future performance, not on 2019. That's actually not my opinion. My opinion is that his ability is unknown, and can be determined only in the future. I'll ask again: what ability did Andy Dalton in 2015 and Nick Foles in 2013 demonstrate, and is that the same ability Drew Brees has?
I gave you the actual definition of ability, yet you are arguing that ability doesn't mean that. Dalton and Foles demonstrated that they possess the ability to play at a high level. Just like Tannehill. If you want to argue that Tannehill has not demonstrated that he can sustain that play, that's one thing. But once a player has shown that they possess the ability (Dalton/Foles/Tannehill) then the discussion should no longer be questioning their ability, but their ability to maintain that performance.
What would you call the thing that quarterbacks possess when their performance varies from year to year at a level significantly higher than that of the average QB? Whatever that is -- and I don't care what you call it -- that's what we don't yet know Tannehill has. He is not Drew Brees just because of 2019.
I've already told you several times what it is. "Consistency." It would be easier if you just admitted you are conflating"ability" with "consistency", then we could all just move on. If I shoot a free throw, and make it, I've demonstrated the ability to make a free throw. That doesn't mean I'll be able to hit 10 in a row. That is consistency.
Again, I don't care what you call it. If you call it "consistency," then quarterbacks make the Hall of Fame because of "consistency." They are distinguished in a highly positive light from other QBs because of that trait (whatever you want to call it). Drew Brees will be making the Hall of Fame on his first ballot, and Andy Dalton and Nick Foles will never make it. We don't know yet if Tannehill has that trait. A league-leading passer rating in just one year doesn't tell us. (Personally I wouldn't call it "consistency," because quarterbacks can be consistently bad. But I'm not going to debate every topic.)
Andy Dalton is able to produce at a level that results in a passer rating of 106. Nick Foles is able to produce at a level that results in a passer rating of 119.2. They haven't (so far) been able to consistently do so. The reasons why would involve a more in depth look. We don't need to see another passer rating of 106 from Dalton or 119 from Foles to determine if they have that ability. That has been demonstrated. Passer rating is a good metric but it is just one metric and shouldn't be looked at in a vacuum. That is why things like on target %, expected completion percentage, intended air yards, etc. are all useful. I haven't studied how Dalton or Foles achieved those passer ratings, but I don't discount what they did that season just because they haven't done it since. I would only discount what they did if I had some other objective, relevant information that showed that their achievement was less impressive in some way. For example, if they were throwing to wide open receivers all season, or if their receivers broke an unusual number of tackles, etc. But, to fairly discount their achievement, you'd have to similarly discount every other QBs achievements. Good luck with that.
Consistently bad is no less consistent than consistently good. I'm not sure why you want to continue to argue about ability. Tannehill has shown he has the ability. Dalton showed that. Foles showed that. Jon Kitna showed it one year in Dallas. Consistently playing at that level is very different than showing you have the ability. It's why I said, I think you're getting into the processing/mental side of the game. Tom Brady, for instance, doesn't have the same physical ability as Marino. Or as Tannehill, for that matter. What differentiates Brady (if we presuppose that the cheating doesn't factor in), is his processing and decision making. Chad Pennington is another....didn't possess innate physical ability, but the mental side made up for it. But we use the Wonderlic to test the mental. Lol
No, I would just need more than one season of data, and then determine the level at which the QB's performance varies. And then I'd be discounting (or highlighting, in the case of a better QB) several years of performance, and not just one. This is why some QBs make the Hall of Fame, for example, and some don't. The Hall of Fame isn't discounting Andy Dalton's one great season by inducting Drew Brees and not Andy Dalton. It's simply saying that Drew Brees had a better career (i.e., multiple seasons) than Andy Dalton.
Sure. But the HoF isn't inducting based on ability. They are inducting based on consistency. Those players consistently played at the top of their ability.
So let me just ask you this then: why will Drew Brees be making the Hall of Fame on his first ballot, while Andy Dalton never makes it?
And that's precisely what we don't know whether Tannehill can accomplish. We don't know whether he needs the stars to align to play at the top of his ability, or whether it's something more easily replicable. If he needs the stars to align, he's Andy Dalton. If it's something easily replicable, then he's Drew Brees. You and your pal here should be happy I'm even leaving room for the possibility that he's Drew Brees, and saying that's simply an unknown at present.
I'd be happy if you'd admit you're conflating ability with consistency. And you also threw in "stars align" comment, which is odd, since you've been claiming Miami was average, and haven't shown that Tennessee was above average.
I'm saying the surroundings in Miami and Tennessee are also unknowns, precisely because nobody has shown anything definitively objective about them. So what we need are more data from Tannehill. That'll tell us what we want to know about the consistency with which he can exhibit the performance he demonstrated in 2019.
Then you shouldn't use phrases like "when the stars align" that implies you know the surroundings in both cases.
?? Being able to do something consistently IS a form of ability. In fact, when you estimate abilities of people in all kinds of scientific experiments (e.g., the ability of a person to detect a known spatial pattern in background noise) the math used assumes random variation. It's the distribution of responses that determines the estimate of that person's ability, NOT the best result that person obtained on the test. So if anything, consistency is the measure of ability used throughout the sciences, not the maximum observed value. That's also true for physical measurements: you almost never care about the maximum or minimum value but the average (and standard deviation). So for QB's, it's Brees' consistently high level of play that suggests he has greater ability than someone who only does that rarely.
Again, you have to differentiate cbrad. Look at something simple, like shooting a free throw. What separates Steph Curry from Shaq? Both guys can make a free throw. Shaq struggled to ever get above like 60-70% though, whereas Curry is like 90%. Both have shown the physical ability to make them. So, same thing for Brees vs Tannehill. Both have showed they possess the ability to play at elite levels. The truly elite players, are able to consistently maintain that. Think like with a robot. You can use a machine to test golf clubs. It will execute a perfect strike on the ball every time. A human cannot do that. The truly elite players, though, are able to execute closer to that level every time. So, I don't believe that we are talking the same thing. That's why I said I think it gets into the processing and mental side. But we have no really accurate way of measuring mental or processing ability of players. Again, I'll point out, put Tannehill in a competition against Brees throwing without pressure at targets. I'd bet the difference between the two would be marginal at best, if it existed at all. Do that with almost every NFL QB. The difference comes when you have to process things at a high speed, and you have to have the mental aspect of dealing with problems while you're playing.
It's entirely possible that mental/emotional factors are what distinguish the great QBs from the lesser ones. Two things, however: 1) that distinction will still be measurable in their performance, i.e., the great ones will have better performance metrics than the lesser ones, even though the difference between them is driven by mental/emotional factors, and 2) you're actually nominating something that could explain Tannehill's performance in 2019, such that when his load is lightened, as it was that year, he's better able to execute mentally/emotionally, whereas when the predominance of the offense is on his shoulders, it diminishes his mental/emotional execution.
My issue with the second point, is that it doesn't jive with Tannehill throwing into some of the tightest windows in the league, at a farther distance than almost every other QB. If your are trying to lesson the load, then you'd have them throw shorter, easier passes.
Again.. machines/people have different abilities to do things consistently. If you just say Tannehill has shown the ability to play at Brees' level, that's a true statement. But it's also true that he has not shown the ability to do it consistently. I'm just pointing out this isn't really a semantic issue either because practically every measurement made of humans is based on "ability to do something consistently" instead of "maximum level of performance". The rare exceptions are in certain sports where they take the best measured value (e.g., in the Olympics for many sports). But in almost everything else I can think of it's consistency that matters (e.g., in practically everything in medicine regarding measurement of patient ability that's true).
Right, but he did that within the context of having less responsibility for the offense than is customary, to the tune of virtually a two standard deviation difference from the league norm. Everything he did in 2019 happened within that context and cannot be divorced from it. Secondly, the difficulty of his throws wasn't extreme. As measured by CPOE, they were just shy of a standard deviation more difficult than the league norm. The league rank in this case ("almost every other QB") is misleading, owing to the low degree of variation among QBs in this regard.
We could look at the numbers and see if there was anything extraordinary about Derrick Henry's performance in 2019. We could compare his season to the seasons of other RBs to find out if this was truly a "stars aligning" situation. We would see that was not markedly better than several other RBs last season and certainly wasn't an all time great season. We could compare the passer ratings of other QBs that were supported by similar seasons and determine whether all QBs get a commensurate bump in passer rating (and therefore not a factor of the QB) or if Tannehill outpaced other QBs in similar circumstances.
Please explain how a 30 yard out to a tightly covered receiver on the run with a pass rusher in your face changes difficulty if you pass on 55% of the plays or 60% of the plays....... LOL at the "just shy of a standard deviation" phrase....... your weasel wording is getting worse.
Yeah I've already said I won't be speculating about a mechanism of action. Just suffice it to say at this point that Tannehill's load was extremely light, and it wasn't caused exclusively by his own performance. If the case really rests at all on the wording used by a nobody on a message board, then the case must suck.
In the case of team sports, you have the added complexity of the surroundings (both the player's team and the opponents). Every single QB experiences changes in passer rating from year to year. Many have large swings of 10, 20, or 30 points. Do you think those swings are a result of inconsistent play from the QB in identical situations, consistent play of the QB in different situations, or a bit of both? Tom Brady had a passer rating of 87.9 in 2006 and 117.2 in 2007. Did his ability change from one year to the next?
You ARE speculating. You claim his pass ratio made things easier....... Stop talking about how something was easier if you cannot support the claim.
He didn't have less responsibility. He was responsible for all the protection calls, changing plays and the LOS, and executing the offense, just like every other QB that is given full responsibility. He is asked to make every read that can be made and is asked to make every throw. In fact his throws are more difficult than normal.
Well along those lines, I've already done the work to show the following: 1) Andy Dalton in 2015 and Nick Foles in 2013 had lighter passing loads than the league norm those years, Dalton by a standard deviation and Foles by 1.72 standard deviations. 2) In 2015 the correlation between Dalton's passer rating and the Bengals' yards per rush, game-by-game, was 0.47. That would've been 2.04 standard deviations above the league average in 2019. 3) In 2013 the correlation between Foles's passer rating and the Eagles' yards per rush, game-by-game, was 0.34. That would've been 1.5 standard deviations above the league average in 2019. 4) Previously in Tannehill's career (88 games with the Dolphins), the correlation between his passer rating and the Dolphins' yards per rush, game-by-game, was a mere 0.15. So obviously 2019, in which the correlation was 0.64, was an outlier for him. 5) Likewise, elsewhere in Dalton's career (77 games, before and after 2015), the correlation between his passer rating and his team's yards per rush, game-by-game, is a mere 0.05. 2015 was an outlier for him. 6) Elsewhere in Foles's career (56 games started, before and after 2013), the correlation between his passer rating and his team's yards per rush, game-by-game, is a mere 0.06. 2013 was an outlier for him. So here we have three different QBs, all of whom posted one season passer rating that was extremely different from their career norms, and all of whom experienced at the same time 1) very strong correlations between their performances and those of their running games, when compared to their norms in that regard, and 2) substantially lighter passing loads than the league norm. Does this mean Tannehill, like Dalton and Foles, will have only one season of his career in which his passer rating is extremely high? No, but it should probably help determine how much money you'd want to bet on his replicating his performance in that area in the future. I wouldn't bet much, myself, and Vegas's odds agree.
This is why ability is measured as the level at which performance varies. Tom Brady's performance has varied at a very high level. This is why you aren't asking the question, for example, "Tom Brady had a passer rating of 55.9 in 2006 and 84.2 in 2007 [the same roughly 30-point differential as above] -- did his ability change from one year to the next?"
They're always due to both. The problem is estimating how much is due to both. What you want to do is to get an estimate of the variance in passer rating due to different players. So, for a given QB what is the variance in (adjusted) passer rating? That one's easy. Now you need to do the same for individual players, or if that's not possible at least for other units like "WR" or "OL". That is either hard to do or can't really be done with the stats we have. But theoretically, if you have an estimate the variance for each position, you can subtract the expected proportion of the variance due to everything else except the QB and answer the question you posed (the variance is proportional to the influence that player has on the stat). All in theory of course. The stats we have really don't enable this.
Every other QB in the league did that in 2019, and the average one had nearly two standard deviations more of his offense on his shoulders. The ones above-average in that regard had even more!
Compare to every other QB that has enjoyed the success of a running game. Compare them for seasons where the running game was successful and where it wasn't. If any of those QBs were truly dependent on their running game why isn't there a strong correlation every year?
You don't know that at all. Plenty of QBs are given far less responsibility. Plenty of QBs are one read QBs. Plenty of QBs are asked to make far easier throws. You are conflating pass % with responsibility.
I disagree. Tannehill displayed the ability to play at a high level. Correct? We are talking about his ability to play at the top of his ability, CONSISTENTLY. We are no longer trying to figure out if he even has the ability to play at that level. So we aren't talking about whether he possesses the ability to do it. I don't understand why this is something we even arguing about. Either he possesses the ability, or he doesn't. He has shown he has the ability. The only question is, can he consistently play to the best of his ability, or will he drop down and not play to the best of his ability. Whether or not he maintains playing at the top of his ability will not change how he played in 2019, and the ability he showed he had.
