As we hit a lull in the action this offseason, I thought I would revisit a topic we had a great amount of debate on earlier this year; whether Hines Ward should be in the hall of fame. This should be a series, and hopefully it will be done before the preseason starts.

I'm going to approach it a little bit differently though. As we all know Hines didn't play the majority of his career on a passing team, and his stats look smaller than other WR's because of it. So how should we compare Hines Ward playing for Kordel Stewart vs. C. Carter in his years with Moss in Minnesotta, or M. Harrison in Indy?

For this post I am going to look at receiver stats as a percentage of their teams passing offense. I wanted to place Hines next to his main competition from his era, and some HoF to see where Hines stands in a "Most valuable to his offense" receiver competition. The basic idea is that on the surface 1250 yrd, 13 TD season on a 5000 yd 50 TD offense looks better than an 1000 yrd, 10 TD season on a 2500 yrd 25 TD offense, because we don't look at the team numbers normally. Using my above hypothetical, the first is 25% of the teams passing offense, the second is 40%.

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It may be time to change our dogma.

I understand how that knock on Colbert exists. From 2000 when he took the job to 2006 his drafts were horrible late. Keisel was a great find, Haggans in the fifth was pretty good as well. After that you have Kemoatu, Chuki Okobi and Verron Haynes. That's about the extent of our drafting success after round 4.

Fortunately for us his first round picks were very good, and overall he found a lot of players in the first four rounds.

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This is your chance to tell us why your draft picks are better than they appear, that they fit your system or we don't know the full story or whatever. It's also your opportunity to vent on your FO just not getting it and not seeing what needed to be done.

Have fun, do your best.

Please don't just give a letter grade with no explanation, and please put the team you are grading in the subject line.

1. Toney Clemons 7th round WR. I know everybody else is getting on the Tony Clemons bandwagon, but count me in as well. Watching a lot of the you tube film on him and listening to Scotty Montgomery talk about him gives me hope for this kid. Scotty raved on A. Brown and that went well.

This time he's not as glowing about Toney, but what he did say bodes well. He's got the right attitude to make it in our locker room which I would take to mean he isn't timid, self-doubting or too self absorbed. He wins contested balls, which is usually a product of the receiver adjusting to the ball and using his body well to gain an advantage vs. the defender.

What you see on the little tape I watched is a player adjusting to the ball in flight really well. He gets himself in position fluidly and isn't reaching out to grab balls over the defender. This is big because while Ben is great, he's not Joe Montana with accuracy.

I think Toney will impress in camp with his running and adjusting to balls, we'll see about his route running and ability to play against NFL corners. If he performs well in preseason expect to see him get his share of throws.

Potential: A 6'2" Marques Colston. That's a pretty solid player if it works out.

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Just want to throw some stats at you. Namely yards per pass attempt. Let's look at Ben's full career, yards per attempt for Steeler QB's.

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I had certain expectations for Sidney Crosby's return:

1: Sid would dominate like he always does.

2: Malkin would disappear again.

3: The Pens would not be as dominant as people expected.

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1.  First and foremost hats off to our DBs.  Ike Taylor did a phenomenal job on Welker, Lewis and Allen and Mundy all played incredibly well and Troy did just about everything out there.

As for the whole "Dick LeBeau finally runs man and bumps receivers" crap you hear, does anyone remember 1992-1996?  I don't recall Rod Woodson giving big cushions or playing a lot of zone.  Dick LeBeau runs the best defense he can with the personnel he has.  We have tried moving up and man covering with this team, even last year it resulted in big pass plays.  So again, hats off to the DB's.  It's easy to say run man and bump receivers, it's another to have all your CB's execute that.  Carnell Lake, welcome back home.

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Obviously it was great to get a win after last week, everyone should feel a little better with how convincing a win it was.  

That said there were some issues and we're going to talk about them.  

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Anyone remember 1980?  A bunch of guys got old at once and the greatest team in NFL history was done capturing titles.  It was a big change, and a sudden one, It would be a quick descent and a long wait till the Steelers would be a dominant force again.

Anyone remember 2006?  An not young team, a QB who was doubted and acting pretty dumb, a season that stunk pretty bad.  Fortunately that year was an aberration and the Steelers would come back to win another Super Bowl two years later.

Anyone remember 1989?  Week 1, 51-0 stomping at the hands of the Cleveland Browns.  I'd say today was the worst game since that day.  That year we made the playoffs, beat the Oilers and lost to the Broncos by one point (we would have faced the Browns again in the AFCCG if we had won).  

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Buried at the end of Jason Cole's article about how the lockout may be the reason Manning ends his games started streak is the following statement:

Want to know why so many teams with good quarterbacks now challenge the Pittsburgh Steelers with three- and four-receiver attacks? It’s because of the success Manning started to have against them after years spent figuring out Pittsburgh’s version of the 3-4.

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First the cuts.

Tony Hills:  He had his chance, and while he nearly won the RG spot, he showed he wasn't going to be a good tackle, and when Legursky beat him for the RG job he no longer held value.  He's a fourth year player and he's at best a sub-par RG.  I always held out he would turn his athleticism and strength into being a solid starter, but it wasn't to be.

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I'm going to cover the basic positions, and then discuss left over positions at the end.  There are some big decisions to make deep on the chart this year.  So dont' freak out that I'm taking 8 LB's or something, there will be spots left over to discuss at the end.

QB: 3(3) Ben, Charlie, Dennis.  This was tough till Lefty went down, if they waive him instead of IR him, look for Dennis to be gone and Lefty back later.

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It's been a while since my last two parts of this series, chaotic summer here.  The first two parts are linked below:

Part one: Defensive backs, Basically we like good sized, less polished athletes we can groom for outside starters; and smaller more polished ones for nickel/dime backs.

Part two: Linebackers, where I discussed some interesting correlations between our picks weight and forty time and their future contribution to the team.  

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I was enjoying the discussion on whether Woodley or Ike were more valuable to our team defense, and when I started looking up some stats to make an argument, I ended up making this post, as it became too much to fit into a comment.

First off, the value of a second pass rushing LB in our system.

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The off-season keeps getting shorter as the lockout drags on.  Practice and camp time is being cut, but the biggest issue is the rookies and younger players are having their interaction with coaches seriously cut.  Think about the Ohio State issue; most rookies out of OSU get a late start due to their graduation system and miss OTA's.  It consistently sets back those that don't graduate early.

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Bumped. Was tied up writing elsewhere, so many thanks to PhantaSkippy for this update about the expected but nevertheless discouraging news on the NFL Lockout front. More soon. - Michael B. -

NFL owners have been granted a stay on the injunction that would have ended the lockout that's shut down the NFL for the past two months. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling is a big momentum swing in the owners' favor, as the league remains closed for business while their full appeal is heard in early June. With the lockout in place, the players won't get paid or be able to have interaction with their teams and rookies will not get anything at all.

That last bit is big.  A bunch of new union members get squat, normally they'd be getting money during camp and their contract bonus.

We always think of the big picks, and the big contract players, but the low guys on the pole outnumber the top dogs by a large margin, even in the draft.  Lower picks get a little bit of a signing bonus, but that is usually spent just getting into their new city and setting up their new life.  The Union faces a bad situation where they could start to lose support of younger and lower paid veterans.  While the owners have the ball in their court and can better dictate terms, they also carry the burden of getting the deal done.  If they drag this situation out and crush the union, or even sign a heavily owner favoring agreement we will get to see this mess again with players striking for a fair share of profits when all the new TV deals come in.

I still can't help feeling this labor issue is just a forerunner of a big mess that new TV contracts and a huge increase in revenue that is expected with those contracts makes the pile of money huge and both sides more certain they deserve a bigger slice.  I really hope there is an agreement coming soon, and that it will afford us more than just "peace in our time," that it will create a balance fair enough that neither side will risk upsetting the balance to try to get a bigger cut. 

As for the actual legal decision, the court decided that it is likely that the NFL will win its argument that the district court did not have the jurisdiction to enjoin the lockout, and since lifting the lockout in that climate would cause great harm to the league's business rights the stay was granted.  June 3 is the actual hearing on whether the lockout is legal, and while there are negotiations going on, our own Art Rooney II stated that progress will be difficult until the June 3rd hearing is over.

Bumped. Good stuff here. I hope this series continues. Thanks to all of you for keeping the conversation going all week while I've been largely MIA. Tough week in other aspects of life for me, but despite there not being a lick of news really, you all have kept things fresh. Cheers to y'all. No surprise though really. Anyway, here's a nice compliment to the solid thoughts and conversation-starter published about the Steelers' current situation at linebacker. Nice job here by PhantaSkippy. I'll be back a bit later on Friday late morning/early afternoon.

Happy Friday y'all. Be blessed as always.

-Michael B. -

The first installment of this series discussed some trends in  Drafting Defensive Backs.  The Steelers approach to Linebackers is a little tougher to follow.  The Linebackers we target don't look as similar as the defensive backs, where we consistently seek athletic undeveloped Corners with good size, but there are some trends we can follow to see why we target the players we target.

Let's take a look...

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Just thought I'd take a look at our drafting trends for Defensive players.  What rounds we draft them in, what type of players we draft, etc.

First off, let's look at DB's.

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Returning from last year, your opportunity to tell why you think a player will or won't work for your team, or if you like or dislike what your team did.

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As I was looking at our second and third round options today I kept thinking of how long these players would take to be impact players.

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There are some good things in our first 20 games this year.  Tabata and Correia are the obvious ones.  What's your favorite story?

Mine is Overbay.  Not what I wanted to start the season, but he's been performing when only one or two other guys have.  His batting with 2 outs and with RISP has been crucial to keeping this team in the fight these first 20.

 This sentence makes seventy five words.

Yeah I finished it.  Have fun.

Rational:

This list does not include the Wow factor of how great a player is, or my personal assessment of their talent level. It doesn't matter if I think Kordell Stewart was the greatest QB of all time, and would have shown it if not for playing with horrible receivers and against a massive anti-Kordell Conspiracy, I looked at stats only. No points are granted for playing with crappy receivers or a terrible O-Line. I looked at game scores to see what kind of help they got defensively and from the running game, but only weighted that data when the players were really close in everything else, or if the stats showed a glaring trend. There will be one list I made myself at the end of the page, and links to various searches from PFR that I found insightful. My main sources of evaluation were: (not in order of weight mind you)

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I'm working on a best playoff QB ranking that is taking a lot more time than I originally thought.  Mainly because I want to really look at the stats and delve into them more than just throw together a list based on what games I watched and a quick look at stats.

I ran into a lot of trouble when I started looking at 4th qtr. comebacks and game winning drive stats.  (I find most of the stats here) I will call getting credit for both in the same game a winner, to save my wrists and your time.

Let me give you an example.  Jeff Hostetler gets a winner for Super Bowl 25.  He drove his team down the field to get the winning FG in the fourth quarter, taking the lead 20-19.  However there were 3 drives and over 7 minutes of football after that score.  The infamous missed FG by Buffalo being much bigger than the drive to take the lead in the memories of most people.

How about another even better example?  Terry Bradshaw gets a winner for Super Bowl 10.  That comeback/game winning drive made the score 12-10.  Terry had 8 rushing yards on that drive and 0 pass attempts.  Dallas would never regain the lead.  The final score would be 21-17.  In the seven drives following the comeback drive Bradshaw would run the ball once and throw the ball once.  That throw was a TD Bomb to Swann that I hope everyone can remember, but even that pass made it 21-10.  Should Bradshaw get the same credit for this as Ben does for the final TD of SB 43?

I decided it might help if I looked at QB's who threw a TD pass in the 4th quarter that gave their team the lead.  That was equally interesting.  While this stat gives credit to Kurt Warner for his bringing his team back to take the lead in SB 43, which is worth something, it also gives you Todd Collins, who threw two 4th quarter TD's to give the redskins a 14-13 lead over the Seahawks in 2008, but then also threw two pick sixes to help the Seahawks win 35-14.  (Also note Matt Hasselbeck gets a winner for this game as he got the go ahead score before the 2 defensive TD's.

Currently swimming in a bit too much data, I just wanted to post this to show not only why it's taking me so long to finish this list, but also the general difficulty in making a list that is better than the lists you see on ESPN that incorporate more biased opinions than stats.

If you are actually looking forward to my results, they should be finished within a month.

Time is running out on getting a new CBA done with the full season intact.  That doesn't seem like it will happen, the union, the players, the reporters all saying it while the owners keep quiet.

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Big Ben; your a throwback to days gone by, you throw two big picks to kill your team then put them right back in the hunt, you get hurt and play big, throw yourself around and generally do anything you can to win.  You may not be the cerebral QB the modern NFL loves, and we sometimes wish you were, but you are a fierce competitor and you leave it all on the field, I'd take you in that huddle over anyone.

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Hines Ward:  So glad to see him get a TD, if you read my post from earlier this week you remember Hines hadn't caught a TD vs. the Ravens since 2004.  That TD was worth waiting for, a tough catch to tie the game.  Also a great bounce back from the first half.  Anyone notice Hines with his head down and worried look on his face in the first half?  That's as bad a sign as you can get for our offense.  When he's smiling and instigating he destroys the ravens, but that worried look said everything about our first half offense.

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Just for fun I started looking at our players and their career numbers against the Ravens.  Something stood out.  Then I looked at the Ravens stats, and something stood out there too.  Not that it's too shocking, but I was a little surprised by some of the numbers here.

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