Sabermetrics is the art of using advanced, infrequently used statistics to evaluate players. They first became popular in baseball, but have gradually shifted to use in all of the Big 4 sports. Baseball has WAR, hockey has Corsi, and basketball has Effective Field Goal %. But what about football? Christopher Harris over at ESPN recently wrote an article advocating for the usage of advanced statistics for football. He does a good analysis of the top guys, but I wanted to get a deeper look into our RB situation. So jump down to check out whether or not our aging group of running backs can carry the load.

A quick primer. The stats I am going to use are YCo, YCo/Att, YCo%, MT and Att/MT. YCo is how many yards the player gains after first contact. YCo%, arguable the more important statistic, is the percentage of a players total yards that he gained after first contact. MT is how many tackles the player "missed", which means either broken or avoided tackles.

 
So what does this all mean? A few things, actually. Lets go player by player...

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Whenever people talk about moving Brian Orakpo to the line, a major argument is that we dont have a linebacker to replace him. Well I think that HB Blades is the kind of player who is ready to step up to the big time. His stats dont say much this season: 9 solo tackles and 5 assists this season. But the heart that he puts into every game is incredible. He makes good plays on Special Teams, and is a good cover back on D. So, to my untrained eye, he seems to be ready to go. A linebacker corps of McIntosh, Fletcher and Blades is one I could get excited about.... Thoughts?

The inaugural Caps Convention was really great. I had a great time with my family and all 5000 Caps fans that showed up. Here are my thoughts:

·     The autograph sessions were organized extremely well, and were very lenient. I didn’t have a ticket for the Ovechkin/Sugden line, but was able to get in along with a lot of other ticket-less people. I also ended up getting a ticket for the final Alzner/Backstrom session right before it started, even though I had already used my "guaranteed" autographs.

·     The panel sessions were awesome. My favorite (and not to be a suck-up at all) was the media panel that JP sat on. Lindsay Czarniak was really long winded and took a lot of time from the other panelists, but Joe B and Locker were very funny, and everybody made me realize how hard the media business is. JP, I wish you had had more time to talk about the blog and why you got into blogging, but it is what it is.

·     The players were unbelievably nice and very accessible. I was guaranteed 8 autographs (4 tickets) and ended up with almost 20. Whenever they were walking to their next sessions or whatnot, the staff members that were supervising them kept saying that they couldn’t give autographs, but the players all stopped and took the time to give autographs to whoever wanted.

·     Gary Betman lost a lot of fans (did he have any to start?) during his panel. "Q: Can we finally put to rest the rumors that you sit in the office and rig the league to let the Penguins win? A: Haha, well I wasn’t the one who played Game 7." Just wow.

·     Every single player that I met was really really warm, except for The Great 8. He just seemed really disinterested in the whole process and couldn’t care less about the fans. I was kind of disappointed.

·     My favorite moment of the whole Convention was during the Alzner autograph session. I went up to him and asked him to sign my #27 jersey, and his face just absolutely lit up. I think that was probably one of his "I made it" moments, and the fact that it made him so happy just made me realize that they are all still human, and some of them are really still just kids.

·     Overall, everything seemed to just go according to plan. At big conventions and events like these, things normally go really wrong and everybody ends up upset (see Concert, U2 at FedEx). But as far as I could tell by the reactions of people, everybody was happy.

·     My gut feeling is that they are going to do this Convention every other year. There was a ton of planning and set up involved, and I’m pretty sure (and correct me if I’m wrong) Ted and the Caps lost money on this. If they do this every year the appeal will possibly go down. Doing it every other year, or maybe even less frequently, will keep interest high for each individual convention.

Anybody else who went, do you guys have any other thoughts? Post here!

I know that GMGM said that he would be more involved in trades than with Free Agency, but I was looking at some Free Agent centers and one name kind of caught my eye. Jason Williams started the year off in 08-09 in Atlanta, where he played 41 games, scoring 7 goals and 11 assists. However, when he played with some talent on a line with Ilya Kovalchuk and Erik Christensen, he had 6 points in 4 games. More importantly, Kovalchuk had 8 points during that stretch. He was traded to Columbus at the trade deadline, where in 39 games he had 12 goals and 17 assists. He played a lot alongside Rick Nash and Kristian Huselius, powering the Blue Jackets to a playoff spot. Williams is only 28 years old, and last year made 2.2 million dollars. I assume that he will want a pay raise, but even if we pay him 2.5 million I think it would be worth it. He only had 24 PIMs in his 80 total games, proving his discipline. I would imagine him lining up Semin and Fleischmann, giving them each the chance to score, while also racking up the goals himself. Just my 2 cents considering there has been so much speculation.