SB Nation User Blog: LantermanC

Touch/Tackle football on Sundays?

LantermanC — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:59:00 -0000

Touch/Tackle football on Sundays?

Would anyone be interested in playing flag/touch football at 4pm in Judkins Park (Seattle near I-90) on Sundays? I played a game with an LLer two weeks ago, but we couldn't get enough people last week. Nothing set in stone, just sending out a feeler to see if there is interest.

Locker drafted in the 10th round of MLB draft

LantermanC — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:16:04 -0000

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.

Personally, I think this is bad news. You can't fault a guy for looking toward the future (and his future as a possible NFL QB is murky at best), but the fact that he's thinking about baseball again may mean he will be less dedicated to football-specific workouts in the off season. Again, I'm not blaming him for the situation, just saying that it would be hard to give college football 110% when you think there is a good chance you're going to be a pro baseball player by Christmas 2010.

Poll

Jake Locker playing pro baseball, is it a concern?

Gluten Free Focaccia Bread sandwiches

LantermanC — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:57:39 -0000

Gluten Free Focaccia Bread sandwiches

Just in case John Morgan wanted to make these sandwiches.

Rumor that Rubio doesn't want to play for OKC

LantermanC — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:09:06 -0000

Rumor that Rubio doesn't want to play for OKC

Rubio doesn’t want to go to Memphis, and he especially does not want to pay money out of his own pocket with that huge buyout for the honor of doing so. Fegan [Rubio’s agent] wants him in L.A., and if he can’t have him there, he wants him in Sacramento. Definitely not Oklahoma City.

How GMs value certain positions

LantermanC — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:01:31 -0000

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.

More cap room for next year.

LantermanC — Fri, 15 May 2009 22:28:36 -0000

More cap room for next year.

What recession?

Small and silly reasons to draft Locker over Bradford and McCoy

LantermanC — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:39:16 -0000

Small and silly reasons to draft Locker over Bradford and McCoy

UW no. 4 on the list! Oregon no. 9! UND no. 8 (for that guy who advocated drafting Claussen)! Purdue, WSU, Cal, Stanford, and Oklahoma honorable mention.
I don't know about you, but that's a strong Pac-10 bias in my eyes.

Steroids and marijuana

LantermanC — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:57:41 -0000

Steroids and marijuana

Cushing and Matthews test positive for Steroids.
Harvin and Raji and Vontae test positive for MJ.

Old news, Sooners pro day Mar 11

LantermanC — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:06:16 -0000

Old news, Sooners pro day Mar 11

This is old news, but Oklahoma has three players I really like: Duke Robinson, Juaquin Iglesias, and Phil Loadholt.

Success by Position and Round in the NFL Draft

LantermanC — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:02:22 -0000

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.