What a surprise then that the Skins gave up great average starting field position to their opponents and were average in points allowed, but managed to not give up a lot of yards. This is not at all shocking.
Allowing the opponent to consistently have good starting field position will also, surprise!, drive DOWN the yards you allow on defense, simply by reason that there isn’t a lot of real estate left to give up. If your opponent starts every drive on your 45, you can only “give up” 45 yards. If that were team A, and team B gave up 50 yards but their opponent started on the 20, are you really sure that team A was better on defense? I think it’s foolish and naive to try to boil defense down to “yards allowed” when there are so many other components of defense that matter, like takeaways, as one example.
I think you’re oversimplifying. Many drives go the exact same distance regardless of starting field position, but if they happened to start with good field position they end in a field goal instead of a punt.
And it’s worth repeating that measuring defense by yards puts the Redskins at 10th, exactly the same as using DVOA. Going by points puts them at 18th.
Also, takeaways are a terrible predictor of defensive quality because they are so unpredictable. Good defenses are generally good for years at a stretch. But IIRC from previous debates, no teams are good at takeaways for years at a stretch.
I certainly don’t think it’s irrelevant; I just don’t see that you’ve provided any evidence of the size of its effect, when we’re talking about an entire season, rather than a particular drive.
Hey, this is the sort of evidence I’ve been asking Ellis to come up with!
Forget about the rankings - per your link, the difference between the Redskins’ defense’s average starting position was about 1.7 yards worse than the NFL median. That’s the important thing. What we’d then have to have some way of figuring out is what’s the average value to an NFL team, in points, to starting 1.7 yards further up the field. Multiply that by the number of possessions, and you’ve got the effect of field position on the Redskins’ points-allowed numbers.
Thanks for contributing evidence rather than handwaving. We’re not there yet, but at least we know how to get there from here.
Football Outsiders has this type of info (it’s how they come up with their special teams rankings, for instance). They did a piece on the value of field position at different points on the field in either their first or second book, but, frustratingly, I don’t seem to have it here. I’ll see if I can find something, but keep in mind that the average value of 1.7 yards is going to be somewhat imprecise, since the value of a yard changes depending on its location. When FO does these expected value calculations, they’re adding up each specific data point, not taking the average of typical data points.
While at the end of the day I tend to agree more with **Ellis **about the quality of the Redskins defense, my honest advice here would be for everyone to admit to a degree of necessary ignorance. The stats can only tell you so much, and with only a particular degree of confidence. I think the only definitely *right *answer is that Washington’s defense last year was anywhere from somewhat above average to a bit below, and the evidence is ambiguous.
(And if we want to know how the defense will perform *next *year, the stats we’re looking at here tell us a lot less. Performance on defense is considerably less consistent from one year to the next than performance on offense. You want to look at a lot of other factors to get an idea of whether the Redskins D will be better, worse, or about the same in 2010: Significant additions/subtractions in personnel? Have they had a lot of highly drafted defensive players in recent years (who would be likely to improve or come into their own next season)? Are there a lot of players in their early 30s, susceptible to falling off a performance cliff? Will their offensive opponents be significantly better or worse next year than they were last year? Did they suffer an unusually large number of injuries last year, which is unlikely to repeat itself? Or an unusually *small *number? Were they a lot better on 3rd down than on 1st and 2nd downs, which (again) is unlikely to repeat itself and would make them look better than they really were? Were they *worse on 3rd down, suggesting that they’re actually better than they looked last year? Did they *recover *more or less fumbles than one would expect? Yet again, that’s not likely to repeat itself. The list goes on and on, though these are the biggest factors I can think of.)
–> I don’t know their exact numbers here, but apparently they weren’t an extreme example of being either better or worse on 3rd down last year; link.
Appeal to authority is only a fallacy if there are conflicting authorities. In this case there are none, thus no fallacy. The NFL says defenses are ranked by yards, end of story. Defenses are ranked by yards.
Link to what? The official NFL defensive rankings? Surely a smart guy like you is capable of finding them on your own.
You seem really confused, so I’ll restate my position: The 2009 Redskins were a top 10 defense, by definition, because they were officially ranked by the only authority on the subject as the 10th best defense in the league. (The only other authority you could possibly point to is FO, which also ranks them 10th.)
You brought up a moronic objection about how no, they weren’t really 10th despite all eveidence to the contrary. So it’s your responsibility to put up or shut up. You’ve offered a few weak ideas as to why everyone but you is wrong, which I have graciously taken the time to debunk.
Got anything else other than your blatant and kinda sad handwaving to advance your ridiculous and unsupported by anyone position?
There are no conflicting authorities? The NFL is THE authority on how to rank the quality of an offense or defense?
Why am I wasting my time talking to you?
And the baseball stats used to rank team offense by batting average. So the team with the best offense was the team that had the highest batting average, and not the team that scored the most runs. “End of story.” LOL!
The Redskins are the 10th-best defense, this I know,
for the NFL tells me so…"
You spelled ‘definition’ wrong.
I’m discussing quality; you’re talking about definition. I hadn’t realized that, but now that I do, we’re not talking about the same thing. So we have no debate.
