Is Adam Gase the biggest scam in football???

"resnor wrote:

I can tell you that that was an aberration then. When I first looked at this, I believe the dolphins were around .300 when Tannehill threw for an 85 or less. Brady, for comparison, was around .600. Actually there were a few highly touted QBs that had had comparable win % even when throwing at an 85 or less.

Given the strong correlation between passer rating differential and winning, the bulk of the effect in that comparison comes from pass defense, and defending against the opposing quarterback and minimizing his passer rating. Over the years, when Brady plays poorly compared to his norm, his team's defense has been able to stifle the opposing QB better than have the defenses of other teams.

During the Tannehill era (2012-2018), the Dolphins' opponents' passer rating was 89, which was 16th-best in the league during that period. During the Brady era (2001-2018), the Patriots' opponents' passer rating has been 80.4, which has been 3rd-best in the league.

Hell, when Brady has a game with a passer rating of just 81 to 85, the Patriots' pass defense has, on average, still been able to help the team win the passer rating battle between him and the opposing QB! It's little wonder the team performs well under those conditions.

All of this says nothing about the individual ability of these QBs, however. It merely highlights the importance of pass defense in the NFL.

"The Guy wrote:

Given the strong correlation between passer rating differential and winning, the bulk of the effect in that comparison comes from pass defense, and defending against the opposing quarterback and minimizing his passer rating. Over the years, when Brady plays poorly compared to his norm, his team's defense has been able to stifle the opposing QB better than have the defenses of other teams.

During the Tannehill era (2012-2018), the Dolphins' opponents' passer rating was 89, which was 16th-best in the league during that period. During the Brady era (2001-2018), the Patriots' opponents' passer rating has been 80.4, which has been 3rd-best in the league.

Hell, when Brady has a game with a passer rating of just 81 to 85, the Patriots' pass defense has, on average, still been able to help the team win the passer rating battle between him and the opposing QB! It's little wonder the team performs well under those conditions.

Right. All that to say what I said: when Brady throws for 85 or less, they still win far more than expected. It's obvious that the defense plays a huge part in those wins. Lol

"resnor wrote:

Right. All that to say what I said: when Brady throws for 85 or less, they still win far more than expected. It's obvious that the defense plays a huge part in those wins. Lol

Right, but that's a far cry from "it's the offensive line!"

"The Guy wrote:

Right, but that's a far cry from "it's the offensive line!"

Huh?

"resnor wrote:

Huh?

Some people in the thread have postulated that the Dolphins' team performance (won-loss record) during the Tannehill era was a function of the offensive line, and so there may have been an inclination to look at your finding there and attribute it to the Patriots' offensive lines.

"The Guy wrote:

Some people in the thread have postulated that the Dolphins' team performance (won-loss record) during the Tannehill era was a function of the offensive line, and so there may have been an inclination to look at your finding there and attribute it to the Patriots' offensive lines.

Oh.

Well it's inevitable that poor oline play directly contributed to Tannehill's poor play. So, yeah, the oline is to blame in large part for the terrible offense, and our defense was almost never able to overcome that for entire games. But again, what I'm saying, and I've said all along, GOOD teams are able to pick up the slack for other units when they need to. That is independent of having an elite QB.

"The Guy wrote:

He might’ve been 3-0 in that scenario last season, but even in those three games he had one that was slightly below average, and it was against the one of the three teams that had a winning record on the season and made the playoffs, with the other two teams finishing 4-12.

In other words, he didn’t win that game; the performance he exhibited in that game is associated with more losses than wins across the league.

The point is that even when Tannehill’s offensive lines were better, he still exhibited the pattern of play in which he made his living off of poorer competition. The quality of the competition was a stronger predictor of his performance than the quality of his offensive lines.

The upshot is that you could’ve given him the best offensive line he had with the Dolphins, and he still would’ve been expected to play poorly in the playoffs with that unit. There were no surroundings that could’ve been compiled around him that were going to change his penchant for playing poorly against good competition.

A better team always makes an opponents team look worse.

We've done it to the Pats on more then one occasion, once with Cutler as QB after he retired and was coming off some previous game time injuries. Your premises are badly flawed and as far as I am concerned they are clearly based on your personal presumptions; not any real knowledge. Self-aggrandizing is never a good basis for presumptions.

Take a statistics course and learn something!

"KeyFin wrote:

Umm, I started a "We Want Moore" thread in Tannehill's 1st, 2nd and 3rd season. I saw the flaws then and still see them today. The difference between us is that I realized he was our starting QB for 7 years and there was nothing good to come of just randomly bashing him- either he got better or the team was going to struggle. I root for whoever starts for Miami regardless.

There's a huge difference between rooting for someone to succeed and giving blind, overzealous loyalty.

The difference between us is there were things we could of done instead of blindly supporting the flawed Qb for 7 years, or better yet not selected him in the first place..

The front office has made many mistakes since that point of selection and beyond.

But yes once he’s a dolphins we should support, doesn’t mean we can’t give our opinion on his game and moves that could be made.

"Irishman wrote:

A better team always makes an opponents team look worse.

There is variation in that, however.

About that statistics course....

What about QBs who play across several eras? Guess their career stats are meaningless because they aren't all adjusted to their most current era.

"resnor wrote:

Nor did I say that his surroundings made him play better. I'm saying that Tannehill got next to no help hiding his deficiencies. Meaning, if Tannehill played poorly, we were going to usually lose. It's a team game, which is all I've ever argued. Tannehill had/has his flaws, and no one denied he had flaws. However, acting like he's the worst in the league or something, while ignoring the fact that record often has more to do with the team than simply the QB, is to to miss the forest for the trees.

By most measures he was a below average qb, by some statistical measures he was even worse..he got more chances then he deserved.. put our team on hold for 7 years man..that’s a tough pill to swallow when you feel very strongly he couldn’t fix his issues.

"resnor wrote:

What about QBs who play across several eras? Guess their career stats are meaningless because they aren't all adjusted to their most current era.

You have to adjust each year's rating separately to a common year, whichever year that is, and then take the weighted average of the adjusted ratings for each year where the weights are the number of passing attempts. That gives you a career adjusted passer rating that allows you to compare QB's regardless of the eras that QB played in, and that's how I've done it in the past.

"djphinfan wrote:

By most measures he was a below average qb, by some statistical measures he was even worse..he got more chances then he deserved.. put our team on hold for 7 years man..that’s a tough pill to swallow when you feel very strongly he couldn’t fix his issues.

The real difficulty occurred when Tannehill completed his rookie contract and had to get paid at the roughly average level at which (the team thought) he was playing. At that point there was no way the team could've assembled the necessary talent around him, under the salary cap, to compensate for him.

Never pay an average QB an average QB's salary. At that point you're stuck as a team. You have neither the QB who can win you a Super Bowl, nor the surrounding cast that can. You're better off drafting a QB, paying him a rookie's salary, and being either bad and being able to replace him with another highly-drafted one, or having him pan out and eventually paying him accordingly.

"We are thrilled that we were able to sign Ryan to an extension," Dolphins vice president Mike Tannenbaum said in a statement. "He is an ascending talent, a team leader and checks all of the boxes you are looking for at the position."

The Dolphins view Tannehill as a player with upside; his passer rating, completion percentage and yards have increased in all three seasons.

"Signing Ryan to this deal is important to our franchise," Dolphins general manager Dennis Hickey said. "He is a proven quarterback in this league that combines a talented skill set with work ethic, passion, toughness and a team-first mentality.

"We are committed and believe in Ryan as our quarterback for the long term and we are excited to be able to sign him to this extension."

http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/12909265/ryan-tannehill-miami-dolphins-signs-contract-extension-2020-season

"KeyFin wrote:

To be fair, how many times did Landry (a) drop the ball and (b) get tackled for no gain after the catch? While he rarely broke off a catch for massive yards, throwing him a 2 yard pass on 3rd and 5 was a fairly safe play. There were a lot of things to criticize Landry for (temperament, attitude, lack of speed, etc.) but his ball handling skills in short yardage definitely wasn't one of them.

Considering Tannehill had very little time to throw to begin with, combined with the defense playing off to encourage short passes to Landry, it's hard to fault Gase for throwing short of the sticks in 2016. After all, we were 10-6 that season and went to the playoffs with a backup QB...I'm not sure why some people's selective memory is seeing that as a criticism.

2016 was all about Jay Ajayi, people keep trying to point to 2016 as a sign that gase actually wasnt that bad, but the main reason we made the playoffs thay year was Jay Ajayi breaking out and making people fear our running game, not gase's short passing game.

"The Guy wrote:

The real difficulty occurred when Tannehill completed his rookie contract and had to get paid at the roughly average level at which (the team thought) he was playing. At that point there was no way the team could've assembled the necessary talent around him, under the salary cap, to compensate for him.

Never pay an average QB an average QB's salary. At that point you're stuck as a team. You have neither the QB who can win you a Super Bowl, nor the surrounding cast that can. You're better off drafting a QB, paying him a rookie's salary, and being either bad and being able to replace him with another highly-drafted one, or having him pan out and eventually paying him accordingly.

http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/12909265/ryan-tannehill-miami-dolphins-signs-contract-extension-2020-season

Hickey and Tannenbaum deciding our future..

Geez Louise, talk about being fooked

"The Guy wrote:

There is variation in that, however.

About that statistics course....

The only variation is :
1) How bad it makes that other team
2) All that counts about the teams is who wins that day. If a team is 1 and 15 and the team they beat goes to the super bowl, the team with only one win was the best team on the day they played and won. Any attempt to average that out with math or statistical inference doesn't change the events that occurred that day.

"resnor wrote:

What about QBs who play across several eras? Guess their career stats are meaningless because they aren't all adjusted to their most current era.

I think you are right.

A player can only be meaningfully evaluated against other players over a common period of play which is usually only a common season and even that should allow for exceptions such as games missed due to injury (the players or possibly another critical teammate).

At the end of the day, I think that most of us can agree that Tannehill never played on a team with a good offensive line. Most of the time, the Dolphins had a poor one while he was the QB.

I think that most of us would also agree that for much of his time at QB, the running game was inconsistent at best. That was partly also due to the bad line, partly due to inconsistency in the backs, and partly due to poor coaching a play calling.

Given those two factors, I think that its silly to look at other non-elite passers who have had the benefit of a strong offensive line and run game (and defense, in some cases), and say that they are absolutely better than Tannehill. Most quarterbacks are going to perform better when put in an advantageous position. And its pretty clear that on the times RT was put into those advantageous positions, he stepped up and did his job.

From 2013-2016, when the Fins ran for at least 100 yards in a game, the team was 21-9, and was actually 20-6 from the mid point of 2013 onward. They scored 26.5 ppg in those games. In games where the team allowed one or fewer sacks, the Fins were 15-6 in that same span.

And in games where they ran for at least 100 yards and also allowed one or fewer sacks, they were 11-2, with one of the losses the last second loss to Green Bay in 2014, and the other the MNF game vs the Giants where the defense allowed Eli to throw for four TDs. They scored an average of 29.4 per game. So to me, its plainly clear that when RT had the support and was healthy, he was a very solid QB for the Fins. He went out and got the job done almost every time. The problem is that the team only had 13 of those good games in his 44 starts during the period. He needs a solid OL to succeed, and when he gets it, the results are there.

"Unlucky 13 wrote:

From 2013-2016, when the Fins ran for at least 100 yards in a game, the team was 21-9, and was actually 20-6 from the mid point of 2013 onward. They scored 26.5 ppg in those games.

Rushing yards per game is more of an effect than a cause of winning, specifically due to the winning team running out the clock. You can see that in the following graph where almost the entire difference in rushing attempts between a winning and losing team is due to the 4th quarter (graph shows this by point differential, which directly maps to expected win%):

So while it's obvious a QB will do better with better surrounding cast, you can't use rushing yards to demonstrate that. Have to use an efficiency stat such as rushing yards per carry instead. The problem is that rushing Y/C has an average correlation with win% over NFL history of only 0.1613, meaning that 0.1613^2 = 0.026, or only 2.6% of win% can be explained by that stat.

It's just in general difficult to use readily available stats to estimate the effect of OL and the rushing game because of this. There's much less difficulty with passing stats because the correlations are so high, especially with efficiency stats such as passer rating.

"cbrad wrote:

Rushing yards per game is more of an effect than a cause of winning, specifically due to the winning team running out the clock. You can see that in the following graph where almost the entire difference in rushing attempts between a winning and losing team is due to the 4th quarter (graph shows this by point differential, which directly maps to expected win%):

So while it's obvious a QB will do better with better surrounding cast, you can't use rushing yards to demonstrate that. Have to use an efficiency stat such as rushing yards per carry instead. The problem is that rushing Y/C has an average correlation with win% over NFL history of only 0.1613, meaning that 0.1613^2 = 0.026, or only 2.6% of win% can be explained by that stat.

It's just in general difficult to use readily available stats to estimate the effect of OL and the rushing game because of this. There's much less difficulty with passing stats because the correlations are so high, especially with efficiency stats such as passer rating.

Well, then I guess you have to rely on the good old subjective eyeball test then.

"cbrad wrote:

You have to adjust each year's rating separately to a common year, whichever year that is, and then take the weighted average of the adjusted ratings for each year where the weights are the number of passing attempts. That gives you a career adjusted passer rating that allows you to compare QB's regardless of the eras that QB played in, and that's how I've done it in the past.

Sure. But most analysis out there isn't doing that. Of course, there are inherent assumptions, such as assuming that particular rule changes were totally responsible for increases. Particularly troublesome I think post 2007. I don't mind there being adjusting for big blocks of time, but I think that adjusting each year is not really accurate.

"Unlucky 13 wrote:

At the end of the day, I think that most of us can agree that Tannehill never played on a team with a good offensive line. Most of the time, the Dolphins had a poor one while he was the QB.

I think that most of us would also agree that for much of his time at QB, the running game was inconsistent at best. That was partly also due to the bad line, partly due to inconsistency in the backs, and partly due to poor coaching a play calling.

Given those two factors, I think that its silly to look at other non-elite passers who have had the benefit of a strong offensive line and run game (and defense, in some cases), and say that they are absolutely better than Tannehill. Most quarterbacks are going to perform better when put in an advantageous position. And its pretty clear that on the times RT was put into those advantageous positions, he stepped up and did his job.

From 2013-2016, when the Fins ran for at least 100 yards in a game, the team was 21-9, and was actually 20-6 from the mid point of 2013 onward. They scored 26.5 ppg in those games. In games where the team allowed one or fewer sacks, the Fins were 15-6 in that same span.

And in games where they ran for at least 100 yards and also allowed one or fewer sacks, they were 11-2, with one of the losses the last second loss to Green Bay in 2014, and the other the MNF game vs the Giants where the defense allowed Eli to throw for four TDs. They scored an average of 29.4 per game. So to me, its plainly clear that when RT had the support and was healthy, he was a very solid QB for the Fins. He went out and got the job done almost every time. The problem is that the team only had 13 of those good games in his 44 starts during the period. He needs a solid OL to succeed, and when he gets it, the results are there.

Ding ding ding.

I've always thought this, but we've always been arguing different things. Some of us accepted that Tannehill had deficiencies, but believed that his strengths were good enough that with a decent team, we could be successful. Others believed that his weaknesses would trump his strengths, or the strengths of the team, regardless.

"Unlucky 13 wrote:

At the end of the day, I think that most of us can agree that Tannehill never played on a team with a good offensive line. Most of the time, the Dolphins had a poor one while he was the QB.

I think that most of us would also agree that for much of his time at QB, the running game was inconsistent at best. That was partly also due to the bad line, partly due to inconsistency in the backs, and partly due to poor coaching a play calling.

Given those two factors, I think that its silly to look at other non-elite passers who have had the benefit of a strong offensive line and run game (and defense, in some cases), and say that they are absolutely better than Tannehill. Most quarterbacks are going to perform better when put in an advantageous position. And its pretty clear that on the times RT was put into those advantageous positions, he stepped up and did his job.

But at what level?

Consider the following hypothetical. Give Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, and Drew Brees the "advantageous positions" you mentioned, and their passer rating is 120 (again this is a hypothetical). Give Ryan Tannehill those advantageous positions, and his passer rating is 105.

Now you're in a position where you not only have to give Tannehill an unlikely surrounding cast (given his salary cap hit), but you also have to root for some other teams not to have one, if you're going to win a Super Bowl. If you had one of the QBs mentioned above (again if the hypothetical is accurate), you wouldn't have to do the latter.

What I think people assume on some tacit level is that the performance of players like Rodgers, Brady and Brees is explained by their being routine recipients of these "advantageous positions," rather than their simply being better players individually. If it's true that their performance would vault into the stratosphere if they were the recipients of these advantageous situations, then you have a real problem on your hands if Ryan Tannehill is your quarterback. You need the stars to align for your team and other teams to win a Super Bowl.

And in games where they ran for at least 100 yards and also allowed one or fewer sacks, they were 11-2, with one of the losses the last second loss to Green Bay in 2014, and the other the MNF game vs the Giants where the defense allowed Eli to throw for four TDs. They scored an average of 29.4 per game. So to me, its plainly clear that when RT had the support and was healthy, he was a very solid QB for the Fins. He went out and got the job done almost every time. The problem is that the team only had 13 of those good games in his 44 starts during the period. He needs a solid OL to succeed, and when he gets it, the results are there.

Again, what do the best QBs in the league do when they are the recipients of such "good games," and how does that compare to what Tannehill did in those situations?

That might give us an idea of what Tannehill would've done in the playoffs, had he ever reached them. And of course nobody is winning a Super Bowl without beating teams in the playoffs.

"Irishman wrote:

The only variation is :
1) How bad it makes that other team
2) All that counts about the teams is who wins that day. If a team is 1 and 15 and the team they beat goes to the super bowl, the team with only one win was the best team on the day they played and won. Any attempt to average that out with math or statistical inference doesn't change the events that occurred that day.

What we're talking about is the variation in the individual performance of players as a function of the quality of the competition. If great team X makes QBs play Y amount more poorly than usual on average, and Ryan Tannehill plays Y minus 10 against them, whereas Drew Brees plays Y plus 10 against them, then there's the variation I'm speaking of.

Orrr...better QBs are on better teams...at least when talking about Super Bowls...and that's the point, right? Rivers, imo, is an elite QB, but he's not won a Super Bowl (has he even been??) and that to me is a function of being on overall average or bad teams. So if you have a QB in a good team, he'll be more successful than that same QB on a bad team.