Hey Cardinals fans, I'm making a fanpost for you guys to ask any questions you may have of us Hawks fans about this Sunday's game. This game should be a pivotal game for the division (especially if those pesky 49ers don't go away) and it looks like we have the early makings of a great 3 way division race (sorry STL fans). So go ahead and ask any questions you have about the Seahawks, and I (along with other FG posters) will do our best to give you good answers.

Interesting article in The Daily Nation about the athletic feats of ancient man.

Notably

- Most Australian aboriginal men could sprint as fast as Usain Bolt.

- Many Greek rowers before would be better than the world's elite now

- Men of a certain Rwandan tribe could all high jump 7 feet, as it was a required feat to become a man.

Anyways, I thought in was an interesting look at the muscular progression of mankind.  Interesting as to how we are the way we are now.  I wonder if it's due to general lack of physical emphasis (compared to before), or less emphasis on survival of the fittest.

I'm surprised this isn't up yet, but the Angels just drafted Jake Locker.
He might not sign with them, but there is speculation that he might, and they will pay his last two years because a professional athlete cannot have a college athletics scholarship.

Poll

Jake Locker playing pro baseball, is it a concern?

77%

Doesn't change a thing.

177 votes

19%

I'm slightly worried.

44 votes

3%

This is really bad news.

8 votes

229 votes | Poll has closed

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I've been wondering ever since the Seahawks drafted Aaron Curry, as I'm sure many other FG readers have, just how valuable certain positions are compared to other ones.  Are LBs easily replaceable, and are they like halfbacks of the defense, dependant upon the line in front of them to a great, but varying degree?  I'm not sure how to accurately measure an individual position's value (not sure anyone one will ever be considering football is so team-oriented), so I instead decided to look at how GMs value different positions by three things: draft value, monetary value, and cap value.  GMs can say one thing about how valuable a certain position is, but when it comes down to it, actions speak louder than words.  Put your money where mouth is. <insert another overused cliche> etc.

 

First thing's first.  I looked at the 2008 rosters and the cap number and the salary amount associated with each player for the year.  In some cases, I looked at the numbers for every player, and in some, I looked at the numbers just for the top at each position kind of like franchise players except instead of the top 5 players, I looked at the top 10, or what I thought was the top 10 equivalent.  So I looked at 10 QBs, but only 5 FBs (because they only play on 50% of snaps roughly), 25 WRs ( to account for 3 and 4 WR sets) 10 TEs (for 2 TE sets as well as 3 and 4 WR sets), 17 DT (because of 3-4 defenses), 23 CBs (for nickel and dime packages) etc.

 

Sometimes the positions are broken up as LB and soemtimes they are OLB and MLB or OL instead of C, OG, and OT, don't ask me why.  It just has to do with the data I had, and the amount of searching I was willing to do, since It's really hard to find info on whether or not a backup RT that never played more than a few snaps is a RT, or a LG, or just a utility OL with no specific position.

 

Here is the chart and data of how much money an average team spends on a player on the field at each position as a percentage of the total salary or cap value of the team.  So even though there is only 1 QB on the field, I have all 3 QBs on the roster as the dollars spent on the 1 spot.  and even though there are 5 CBs on a team, I have 5 / 2.3 (average number of CBs on the field on any given defensive down).  Note that this pretty much disregards special teams.  This data has every player from 2008.

One player as a percentage of dollars team spends

Percentage Data summarized.

 

Here I looked at just the top players, rough the top 30% of starters.

Top 30% by Salary

Top 30% by Cap Value

 

Next I looked at draft value, since this applies more directly to the Aaron Curry question.  I used the Draft Countdown trade value chart

for the draft value numbers, and looked at all the drafts from 1970 to 2008.

 

Average draft value of the first two rounds

Average draft value of the first five rounds

Data in Summary form

 

Again, I didn't do any interpretation.  I just thought it would be a fun project to do.

 

 

Wild Success = 2 Pro Bowls, 7 years as a starter, or 125 games played. Data is from 1988 onward (7 round format), BUT data is obviously skewed because I classified undrafted as 7th rounders and obviously if a player is undrafted and is not successful at all, but played a bit, he won’t be on the list, so 7th rounders are sometimes 2x as successful as 6th rounder because of this. It looks as though BOTH O-Line and D-Line have a significant amount of undrafted successes. Running backs as well. I classified DT and DE both as D-Line since many guys (Cory Redding) were drafted as one and ended up at another. Same goes for D-back because of guys like Nnamdi, Antrel Rolle, maybe Malcolm Jenkins, etc.

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