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Chargers Free Agents

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Antonio Garay did well to get $1.6 million total in '12. But the $5 mil he's due in 2013 makes it 1-yr deal & means SD still looking for NT

— UTKevinAcee (@UTKevinAcee) April 2, 2012

According to Kevin Acee (and confirmed by rotoworld), here are the terms of Antonio Garay's new two year contract with the San Diego Chargers:

• 2012: $1.6 million
• 2013: $5 million

This is apparently straight salary with no bonus money. That second year will never see the light of day. This two year $6.6 million deal is really a one year, $1.6 million rental. Even if Garay goes ham this season, he'll do it while platooning with Cam Thomas. There's no way anyone would pay a 33 year old NT $5 million to split playing time. Let's dig into the mechanics of what goes into making such a ridiculous deal.

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The NFL has scheduled a Monday morning press conference to announce that the San Diego Chargers will open their regular season hosting a game aboard the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) aircraft carrier on the San Diego Bay. Building upon the success of college basketball's Carrier Classic, the US Navy will now take on a professional event. In addition, the Chargers will borrow from the success of a recent Padres initiative to salute to the military, and replace the powder blue alternate uniforms with a digital camouflage design.

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With his back to the wall, it would be easy for AJ Smith to act in his own short term best interest, and use salary cap gimmicks to go 'all in' this season. Why not obligate the team to future financial burdens to ensure future employment? The best case is that he gets to work through those obligations after keeping his job; the worst case is that those future obligations aren't his problem. I suspected AJ of this kind of thinking while watching the free agency contracts fly by last week. It seemed like there were lots of super 2012-friendly three and four year contracts with big money going to a lot of old guys. Even though NFL contracts are not guaranteed, heavily back-loaded contracts can leave the team having to choose between overpaying, or having a lot of holes. In order to determine if AJ was diverging from his usual disciplined approach and changing his financial style, I compiled all the salary cap numbers (prorated bonus plus salary) on the 2012 free agent signings.

Disclaimer: Not all contract terms have been released. Where only years, total $$ and guaranteed $$ was available, I used the model of guaranteed $$ being the signing bonus, a $1million first year salary, and the rest distributed through the remaining years with slight raises.

2012 Charger FA Contract Salary Cap Numbers in Millions of Dollars

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It's time to kickoff the off-season edition of Playbook Confidential, where we'll take a look back at different aspects of Norv Turner's playcalls and results from 2011 (with an eye on what 2012 might look like, depending on free agency). Dts317- has already gotten the ball rolling with his excellent success rates analysis. As the off-season progresses I'll try to slice the data from last season in some interesting ways. Today I'm going to try to summarize the season as a whole (similar to this bye week post), and look at some themes from wins vs losses. (an explanation of our personnel group numbering is here)

The Chargers ran a total of 1077 meaningful offensive plays in 2011. They had an overall run/pass balance of 38%/62%; which was near identical to the bye week run/pass balance. This is a great example of Norv running his execution based offense as opposed to changing things based on the opponent. If we break the run/pass balance down by down in wins vs losses, we can see that Norv was vastly more deliberate with the run on 1st down in wins. Part of this can be blamed on holding a lead, but even in the first halves of wins, the offense sported a 50/50 split on 1st down. Establishing the run game early, and achieving manageable 2nd and 3rd downs is key to winning for this offense. 2nd down broke down surprisingly identically between wins and losses.

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It's time to visit the final 2011 salary numbers. Just like last year, the UT's Kevin Acee has compiled the final salary cap number for every player to take a check from the Chargers this year. You may want to warm up for this exercise by reviewing last year's BFTB salary analysis. This time around, a total of 95 players took in a total of $119,149,368 from Mr. Spanos. It's important to note that Acee's list is effectively a cap-hit list, more than an actual money-spent-in-2011 list. For example, he lists the $836k cap hit from signing bonus pro-ration when Buster Davis was cut. He also notes the cap value for a few veterans such as Randy McMichael, who made more than their cap number due to a veteran exemption for certain players on one year deals (which I learned from Acee via tweet). I've already covered the salaries of injured players extensively here and here, so I'll be mostly sticking to the healthy aspects of the roster this time.

For the overall team spending view, the Chargers ranked roughly #13 on the biggest team spender list (from September). They were right under the Super Bowl champion Giants at #12, and well ahead of the Super Bowl loser Patriots at #19. There were losers in the top tier of spending (Vikings #1, Eagles #2, Rams #5), and very successful teams that spent less than San Diego (Packers #21, 49ers #24, Bengals #30!). Every season there is always evidence that opening up the checkbook does not equal winning. (Check out this pretty cool cost-of-wins chart - it takes a moment to really digest)

Here is Acee's list, in spreadsheet form with position and position group added in. I can't stress enough that I'm lifting his fine work and adding in analysis.

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One of the classic self-hating Charger fan moves is to talk about the success players like Rodney Harrison and Junior Seau had with other NFL teams after San Diego declared them washed up. Recently, this has mutated into bringing up Drew Brees and Darren Sproles. In a bout of Super Bowl self-loathing, I came up with the modern all ex-Chargers. I'm not going to get caught up in who cut who or didn't resign for this exercise. We'll just leave it that all of these guys were under San Diego control at one point, then they weren't. Most of the names on this list have pretty good logic behind how they left the team. Laurent Robinson probably stings the most in terms of how easily he could have been retained (over a guy like Brian Walters).


Ex-Chargers that are Flourishing in the NFL

Quarterback - Drew Brees
Running Back - Darren Sproles, Michael Turner
Wide Receiver - Laurent Robinson, Wes Welker
Tight End - Scott Chandler
Offensive Line - None!

Defensive Line - Dave Ball
inebacker - Ben Leber, Kevin Burnett
Defensive Back - Antonio Cromartie, Drayton Florence,

Special Teams - Kassim Osgood, C.J. Spillman (for him, staying on a roster = flourishing)
Coaching - Ron Rivera, Cam Cameron (as a Coordinator), Wade Phillips (as a Coordinator), Rob Chudzinski

After the jump we will present the opposite side of this coin - the "The We're-Glad-They-Are-Ex-Chargers Team". The remarkable thing about both lists is the O-line stability.

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One of my main tickets to the BFTB staff was this piece on Ryan Mathews and the particulars of his Warcraft habit. Unfortunately, his main character is either deleted or renamed, because it doesn't show up on the armory (I hope BFTB didn't actually stalk him!). One might assume that the rigors of being an NFL running back and the ridiculousness of a pokemon style change to WoW might have given Mathews the WoWquit bug, but on Wednesday of this week he paid a visit to the Blizzard offices in Irvine.

@rmathews24: Omw to la #

@rmathews24: Also gonna stop by blizzard and say hello to all the folks there #wowitup #

He also got a couple shout outs from Blizzard employees before and after the fact...

@CJCClarke: @rmathews24 YEAH BOY! Tweet at me when you're here, I'd love to meet you #

@sdlistenin: @rmathews24 Thanks for coming by campus. Hope you enjoyed the tour. For the Horde! #warcraft #chargers #

So we know that he's still playing WoW to some degree, but we've lost track of his character, and maybe he's rerolled a new class. If anyone can track him down (no stalking!), John Gennaro will totally eat his hat. I have tried a couple of times to get him to sample SW:TOR with no response.... QQ!

@orz_bftb: @rmathews24 you gotta try the new star wars mmo... It's the new hotness! WoW was awesome but sw:tor is a whole new level! #

In Week 12 of the NFL season, I conducted an analysis experiment that quantified the impact of players lost due to injury by equating their value to salaries. Now that the season is over, this analysis can be completed using the full results. This time however, I'm going to put emphasis on which side of the ball (offense or defense) took the worst hit. If Norv Turner's players (the offense) had more salary lost to injury than did Manusky's guys (the defense), then maybe Turner deserves the pass he got. However, if Manusky had a bigger 'injury salary' then he may have been unfairly scapegoated.

It turns out that they had a roughly equivalent salary loss, but Manusky had a staggering 98 total games lost. The defense lost a quantity of moving parts while the offense missed some really big hitters. It turns out that Marcus McNeill, Kris Dielman, and Antonio Gates accounted for almost 80% of the offense lost salary, while the defense had a large number of less important players miss almost the entire season (Luis Casillo, Bob Sanders, Larry English, and Jonas Mouton all lost 11 or more games). There have been plenty of points (mostly by Kevin Acee) made about Manusky being out coached or un-liked by the players, but this (admittedly limited) perspective shows he was just as hamstrung by talent and injuries as Norv Turner's offense. The full list of players and salaries that missed games is included after the jump.

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Despite the nothing-to-lose scenario this week, Norv Turner's offense went about its usual routine and produced a tempo and output very similar to the Ravens game. Norv was content to plow Curtis Brinkley into the pile for 1 or 2 yards on first down, and then let Malcom Floyd and Antonio Gates bail them out on the subsequent downs. Norv was as predicable as ever this week. Immediately following the pass interference in the end zone, while the refs were spotting the ball and before the Chargers broke the huddle, I wrote Fullback/Tolbert/"23"/Up the middle into my play log. As with most of the Chargers offensive snaps, it just didn't matter that it was predicable as Tolbert powered right between Nick Hardwick and Louis Vasquez for the score. I also noticed this week that "21" with Gates as the TE is almost always a pass, while "21" with McMichael as the TE is almost always a run; and it simply didn't matter. It wasn't until the outcome was determined that Norv unwound a little bit and gave Vincent Jackson a reverse followed by three straight fullback-dive bones to Hester. At the time I was pretty annoyed that Norv couldn't break out the bag of tricks earlier in a meaningless game, but with the developments of Norv's retention on Tuesday, it turns out his entire 2012 employment was hanging on the win.

Here's the complete play call log for the complete 2011 season. I'm somewhat proud of myself for sticking to it. Sometime in the next few weeks I'll revisit the kind of story I wrote during the bye week and roll up some season long tendencies and results. Since Norv is going to be back, it's all the more worthwhile to write a definitive summary of Norv's offense.

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It's time to once again review the top 5 defensive plays of the week for the Chargers (for serious this time!). The defense was kind of nu-spectacularly solid this week. There were not a lot of game-changing highlight reel plays like there were against the Ravens, but simply a lot of waiting for the Raiders to goof up (which they did do just enough).

Top Defensive Play #5 was the attempted Denarius Moore reverse that was then cutback. I think Antonio Garay is going to spend the entire off season on change of direction agility after this one.

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The Ravens present a 'show me' opportunity for this new era of Gates + Jackson + Floyd + competent Oline. Now that Turner's offense is healthy, we'll really find out what proper execution can do against an extremely good statistical defense.

The Chargers offense sure did "Show Us" this week. The team executed six out of seven possessions to near perfection and kept Mike Scifres from having to punt the entire game. This was only the second game all season that the Chargers ran the ball more often then they passed, with a 60/40 split favoring the run. Even if you take away their last drive (12 runs and only 1 pass), they still had about a 50/50 balance. One stat that jumped out as a sign of a well oiled offense, was that the Chargers ran only nine 3rd down plays (out of 57 snaps!) the entire night, converting on six of them (five 1st downs and one touchdown). When you find yourself in 3rd down that little, and succeed when you do, things are going well, Pull off the offense log here and hit the jump to read about Norv Turner's tactical wrinkle for the week.

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This week's offense was Norv Turner's perfect template of how he would like to call his execution based offense every week. They maintained an ideal 40% / 60% run to pass balance. The passing game featured heavy checkdowns to running backs (32 completions to Ryan Mathews and Mike Tolbert), a sprinkling of TE hits (8 completions to Antonio Gates and Randy McMichael), and just enough deep balls to the wide receivers to make space for the running game (10 completions to Vincent Jackson, Malcom Floyd, and Patrick Crayton). The run/pass balance by down perfectly matches the season long stats, with a slight edge to running on 1st, an ambiguous edge for passing on 2nd, and pretty much always passing on 3rd. Everything about this offensive game plan screams simple execution with the proper set of pass catchers and a healthy, intact offensive line. (Link to play log is here).

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So maybe the title is kind of harsh. The positive option was "Playbook Confidential: Gates + Jackson + Floyd = Win!" but I won't believe it until I see this kind of offensive output against the Ravens in two weeks. Take away any opponent's top three pass rushers, their top 17 defensive backs, then add in a dash of Tyronne Green and Louis Vasquez back from injury, and Norv's same deliberate philosophy will yield a 38 point outburst by Philip Rivers and the Chargers offense. Despite Jon Gruden's gushing on Norv Turner's play diagramming, the offensive output came down to simple execution of the same thing that hasn't been working against intact defenses and franchises that aren't reeling. I will give the Turner/Rivers credit for vastly increased and improved play faking this week. Through 11 games this season, Philip Rivers had only perfunctorily play faked on 12% of passing plays, but against the Jaguars he gave a slightly convincing fake on 32% of pass plays. The results were basically an equivalent yard-per-attempt between play fake downs and non play fake pass plays (roughly 10 YPA), but the yards-per-completion was vastly improved with play action (18 YPC vs 12 YPC without play fakes) and resulted in the Malcom Floyd long bomb touchdown (clip here) that all but sealed the game at the start of the 3rd quarter. Let's hope this is one feature the offense keeps for the last quarter season to come. This week's play call log is at this link.

Owing to the blowout, there were only nine Rivers' led drives, with six scores and three punts. Two of the dud drives came early in the third while presumably trying to run and burn clock.

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With the recent loss of Marcus McNeill and Kris Dielman for the season, it struck me that the Chargers had a ton of money tied up in those two guys alone. Then it hit me that the value of a player lost to injury to the team is probably pretty closely related to their salary; which could be used quantify the impact of their loss on the team. So I added up all the pro-rated salaries lost due to injury-related inactive weeks and time on injured reserve. This then leads to a calculated percentage of the roughly $120 million payroll (yes, this is a flawed assumption owing to signing bonus variables) lost to injury. If the result came to be a really large number, there might be a valid argument that Norv Turner isn't as much to blame as we all may think. If it came out to be a really low, then it would mean that the training staff is getting its name unfairly dragged through the mud (or maybe only high value players are getting hurt). AJ Smith is screwed because he either hired injury prone players without enough depth, or hired healthy players that aren't performing.

So before you hit the jump, please pause and take a guess. What percent of the (roughly) $120 million Chargers payroll do you think has been lost due to injury so far this year? Keep in mind, we can count injured reserve salaries through the end of the season, but long term inactive guys like Luis Castillo can't be projected in that way.

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Two cliches apply big time this week. First, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. Second, is that playing not to lose usually results in losing. Norv Turner continued his post Dielman/McNeill/Vasquez trend of super simple and conservative offense this week against the Broncos. As the game progressed and the pass protection broke down, he got more and more conservative and protection minded. This culminated in the two overtime possessions where the Chargers used "12" personnel on all but one play, and then meekly settled for a long field goal attempt after a nice 14 yard breakout run by Ryan Mathews. Kevin Acee argues that Turner simply had no choice but to go ultra conservative and quotes Norv legitimately placing limits on his makeshift offensive line.

"What we’re trying to do is put our players in a position where they can have success, where they can win, not try to ask them to do things they’re not capable of doing," Turner said. "… I know there are some questions about particular situations and calls, those are things that certainly go into every one of those decisions and sometimes it doesn’t look the best but certainly it’s with the intent of doing what’s best to give our players a chance to be successful."

"In a perfect world, yeah, you’d like to get closer," Turner said of the scoring chance in overtime. "We’re not playing in a perfect world right now. As I said, there were some matchups up front that were not in our favor and to have a negative play in the passing game and take us out of field goal range would not have been good ... You’ve just got to do what people are capable of doing, and you’ve got to do everything you can to keep from putting them in a bad position. We’ve had some real challenges in terms of the matchups we faced the last couple weeks, and at times we’ve been able to handle them and at times we haven’t."

I would propose that the offense could have done some things to counter the pass rush that was overwhelming the max protect plan. They could have run some screen plays to Mathews, or gone to much quicker three step drop passing. Remember that Norv's counter intuitive solution to a furious pass rush against the Raiders was less protection and a more spread out formation. Our own pass rush, working against Tebow, was sabsolutely petrified because of all the various actions and play fakes of the Denver offense. You can actually watch our OLBs slowing to a crawl while they looked into the backfield to make sure Tebow was still dropping back and hadn't already done something with the ball. Why can't we do that (other than Philip Rivers' sub par play faking)? Nick Canepa labeled Norv Turner as confused and playing scared while focusing on the last possession and last play of overtime:

And yet, in the overtime, after Mathews put them down near field goal range at the Denver 32, he mysteriously was relieved in favor of Mike Tolbert, who lost 4 yards trying to go wide. It might have been just enough for Nick Novak to barely miss what would have been a game-winning field goal.

"I’m calling a play based on personnel on the field," Turner said. "He came out and I don’t know why he came out."

If the head coach calling plays doesn’t know, who does? Maybe they didn’t want Mathews to get hurt.

Is it really possible that Canepa has no idea that Tolbert plays 75% of the third down plays and 95% of crucial third down plays because of his superior pass protection? It's very standard for this offense to yank Mathews for third down. It turns out that I learned something new from Jay Paris this week:

"I don't know why he came out,'' said Turner of Mathews, and if Turner doesn't know, who does?

Turner said running backs coach Ollie Wilson handles the substitutions, and well, that's about all the reasoning Turner had.

It's fascinating that an assistant coach controls when Mathews and Tolbert go in and out, and that Norv then makes his call subsequent to the RB decision. I always imagined that personnel, formation, and play call was all inside of Norv's beautiful brain. Obviously they are executing a coordinated philosophy, but it seems like there may have been a disconnect between Wilson using the standard formula of Tolbert on third down without knowing or realizing that Norv was going to call a field goal concession run.

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The Chargers returned to something approaching balance this week against the Bears.  After an alarming trend of abandoning the run during the first four games of the losing streak, the offense returned to losing with a running game shouldering some of the blame.  The makeshift offensive line managed only a 2.9 YPC on 17 running plays (35% of offense play calls), with the left side once again leading the way (high five for Dombro, Mooch, and Moll).  Ryan Mathews was back in the saddle as a feature back, right up until the point that he fumbled.  After the fumble, he was basically benched as a punishment, appearing only for one screen play that Mike Tolbert probably doesn't execute as well.  The log of offense play calls and results is available here.

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Last week, I lead off with a table showing the steady decay of the running game as a percentage of playcalls in recent weeks.  This week, it got so cartoonish in favor of the pass that I simply had to make a graph out of it.  It's quite possible that the Chargers will simply deactivate all running backs for the Chicago game; this would totally save them some money on airfare.

We could certainly have a lively discussion about whether this is a symptom or a root cause of the current four game losing streak.  In the case of the Raiders game, it was absolutely a key root cause in the offensive slowdown.  Abandoning the run against a blood-in-the-water pass rush allowed the defense to completely ignore their containment responsibilities.  This is the same defense that gave up 281 rushing yards to the Broncos the week before.  Ryan Mathews and Mike Tolbert each finished the game with 4.8 YPC on a precious few 14 total carries.  They had 8.4 YPC out of some really effective shotgun running.  I take back everything I said last week about the beginning of Norvember.  Aside from the Jacob Hester touchdown coming from a 1st down play fake pass out of jumbo "22" personnel, there was nothing interesting or different about this week's game plan.  This is pretty much proof that Norv brings out the good china for big time opponents like the Packers, but unloads the paper plates and leftover ketchup packets for teams that he thinks they can take lightly (such as supposedly lowly AFC West rivals). 

As always, the suddenly pedestrian 2011 Chargers Offense is on display in the log I keep.

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The long awaited second half of the Chargers' schedule has finally brought on the annual change from boring and predictable offense to ... slightly less predictable offense!  This marks the week that Norv Turner finally started cashing in his season long track record of very obvious play calling. There were major breaks from September and October, including 5 shotgun runs (although they only had 3.4 YPC), a really nice play fake deep ball on 3rd and 1 (defense had no thought of anything but a dive into the middle), and aggressive passing out of the three TE "13" personnel group.  There was also a 3rd and 13 play in long field goal range that would normally be a concession run to improve the field goal chances, but turned out to be a bold pass play going for the 1st down (too bad it was incomplete).  As BFTB has been hoping to see, "11" became the primary personnel group, unfortunately this was because of the desperation comeback mode.  Ten out of 24 first downs, and four out of five touchdowns came from the "11" group.  You can mitigate some of the positives for "11" this week owing to some prevent defense coming from the Packers, but I still think this game shows "11" is the best group this season.  Another side effect of being on the wrong side of the scoreboard (and to some degree, the absence of Ryan Mathews) for the entire game was the largest percentage of called passes this season, and a continuous trend over the last four weeks of minimizing the running game.

Pull up the log and try to figure out the game plan for the Raiders; at least we can enjoy some offensive output while we're losing.

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