JGMcD2

Alright... I am going to need your help with the arithmetic here! Once you do, I’ll accurately be able to predict the Bills game tomorrow night! Dolphins beat the 49ers 43-17. Patriots beat the Dolphins 21-11. 49ers beat the Patriots 33-6. Bills beat the Dolphins 31-28. Bills beat the Patriots 24-21. Seahawks beat the 49ers 37-27. Bills beat the Seahawks 44-34. Who wins between the Bills and 49ers tomorrow?

I think they have a legitimate shot at 10 wins. LAR should beat them, but they've been turnover prone, if that turnover prone LAR team shows up... Tua was struggling to move the ball against CIN. He won't be able to do it against NE. Going to Foxboro is going to be tough for us, we should beat them, but the Pats are going to be hunting. NYJ should be an easy win, they took them to the wire the last time but I don't think that happens again.

Basically you’re telling us that because they’re losing revenue this year due to circumstances out of their control (and circumstances that are once in a lifetime), the NFL is going to decide to manipulate the outcome of games, which if discovered would jeopardize decades of future revenue?

Yeah, you’re right. I should clarify I meant a handful of guys I actually know sit down and watch like that on here. Also a great point, even watching the film you don’t necessarily know. It’s hard to tell unless you know the call and the assignments (I.e. you’re on the coaching staff and have 20+ years coaching defense and were the mastermind behind the 15-1 Panthers defense) I was just about to bring Chappy up... he was so matter of fact with that statement and still hasn’t replied... everyone gets notifications when they’re quoted... weird. Haha I agree with you... I try not to take it too extreme with that. I think there are a few knowledgeable fans that could work in front offices and be more successful than the folks there. At least in baseball, I know that for a fact, believe me I’ve come across some less than inspiring folks in my time! But more often than not, you’re right, fans don’t know all of the circumstances unfortunately and can’t be relied on for great decisions individually... but FanGraphs the baseball website “crowdsources” fans every year to find out what contracts they think FA will get... the large sample of fans are usually pretty close to the true value/value given out. Interesting enough the new Mets owner has been asking fans on Twitter who they want the team to sign. I think it’s an interesting tactic...

There are many issues when it comes to player evaluation on a message board. The first being nobody knows the assignments unless they break down the film. I can count on one hand how many people are sitting down and watching film in it’s entirety from all 16 games. They next is nobody really puts anything in context with the rest of the league. Most people go “I watch every Bills game, every week, all the way through! I know whether a player is good or not.” Which is great, I actually believe that’s important and you just pick up on a lot from seeing the team so much... but are those same people able to watch every other game, every week all the way through in order to pick up on the deficiencies of other teams and recognize their trends? I don’t think so... most folks see 3-4 games of a team and think they know a player and want them over who we have without knowing if they can actually do what we need them to do. It’s dangerous territory.

This is a continuation of my research into the topic. My posts are the beginning and end of Page 1 and beginning of Page 2. Curious to hear some thoughts and what this tells folks based on their feelings on the draft, free agency, the Bills and more!

Eye ball test is useful in some cases, I 100% agree. It is hard to do a full on comparison against the other 31 teams though... at least without it all written down, haha. Thanks for the kind words!

The file size was too big for one post, so here is the information for the NETDrAV in each round for 2017 and 2018 for each team. I will excluded 2019 for now because it's the least stable, but these give you an idea of how Buffalo did in the specific round compared to their peers. Buffalo is highlighted in yellow in each image. Please check out the posts on page 1 for greater detail... thank you!

I did some further digging and made some adjustments based on some feedback. I wanted to find a way to compare things based on round, but I think using historical pick values is tricky because each draft is so much different in terms of positional value and player talent. I decided it was best to compare each draft to itself, because each GM was selecting from the same pool of talent. What I did was found the average value for a player drafted in each round (1-7) in each year (2017-2019) and the calculated what I am calling the Net Drafted Accumulated Value (NETDrAV) for each pick in each round. I only compared each draft to itself. I then found the Total Net Drafted Accumulated Value (TOT_NETDrAV) for each team in each draft and ranked them against each other. Rather than just looking at how much raw value the Bills brought in as compared to the 31 other teams, this gives an idea of how much extra value they extracted in each round as compared to the 31 other teams in the league. The results are attached here below. I feel most comfortable with the 2017 draft class because we've had 3 years to see every player perform. The Bills are highlighted in yellow in each graph. As you can see in 2017 the Saints absolutely crushed it. This is the Lattimore, Ramczyk, Williams, Kamara, Anazalone, Hendrickson draft that many pundits have been touting as one of the best draft classes of the modern era. Obviously that shows up in the results here, as they nearly double the next best draft in terms of AV. Highlighted in yellow there are the Buffalo Bills. They're currently #3 by a slim margin, but can be expected to continue to remain towards the top of the draft class. Overall, it tells us exactly what we knew already, it's a strong draft class. Now we know exactly how it compares to the rest of the league in terms of the value they extracted from the draft. I will go into further detail later in this post as I've broken down the value by each round for each team as well. Moving over to 2018, which is lead by the Indianapolis Colts who brought in guys like Quentin Nelson, Darius Leonard, Braden Smith and Nyheim Hines. The Ravens also did very well for themselves in this draft with Lamar, Orlando Brown and Mark Andrews amongst others. You can see the Bills highlighted in yellow again. They rank just outside the top 5 at 6 this time. This draft for Buffalo is boosted by getting both Josh Allen and Tremaine Edmunds in RD1, but they also get some value from Taron Johnson in the 5th round as well. Again, compared to their peers the Bills extracted some of the best value out of this draft. In 2019 the Bills move back into the top 5. This is the hardest year to judge and will fluctuate the most in the coming years, but after 1 season the Bills seems to have done a solid job here when compared to the rest of the league. Oliver was positive in NETDrAV as was Ford, Singletary, Knox and Daryl Johnson. Again, this is all just in comparison to the average player in the round that year. The Bills are extracting more value in each round than 27 other teams in the league, which is pretty impressive. This image below shows the NETDrAV ranking for each team in each draft. Buffalo is highlighted in yellow there for you to see. They are the ONLY team to finish in the top 10 in NETDrAV between 2017-2019, and very nearly finish in the top 5 in all three drafts, just missing in 2018 at #6. This obviously WILL change over time as seasons progress. 2017 will be the most stable, the Bills may jump or fall a place or two but will likely remain in the top 5. 2018 has the potential for major growth because of Josh, they could leap into the top 3 there if he continue the path he is on. 2019 is going to fluctuate the most because some players may pop more than other moving forward, rookie seasons come with a learning curve, but early returns look good in comparison to the rest of the league.

That’s actually one of the first things Klein talked about in his press conference. I believe they asked him how he felt about being the “attack man” on defense running around and blitzing and everything. He gave kudos to the staff for putting him in the right position and then talked about how he made some plays but there are some he wants back and needs to continue to work out... specifically mentioned this play as one he was blitzing on, but has a responsibility to grab the back and he got caught attacking too much. He seems extremely intelligent... teammates have been expressing the same thoughts. He’s playing an entirely different position that he’s never played before, he said he’s played MIKE and SAM during his career but never the WILL position they’re having him play. No camp or anything is going to have an impact on this, not an excuse, just one of the reasons why things have taken so long to get right. For Klein, he said several things played into his subpar play at the beginning of the season. He added he isn’t one to make excuses but a move from ‘mike’ to ‘will’ linebacker, a position he’s never played before, was a big part of it. There was a learning curve and now he said he seems to be playing looser. “I feel like I’m playing more free, faster, not thinking as much,” Klein said. “I’m playing will linebacker now, and the rest of my career I’ve always played mike. So that adjustment, and I’m not making any excuses for early in the season and my play, but I just feel like I’m playing fast and I’m trying to run around and make plays, and the less I think the more I’m reacting.”

Great post, and really insightful. Love the visuals. It’s all super relevant and real. You covered everything very well and I agree with almost all of it. The hardest thing on our end is knowing how the play is designed and what Josh’s queues are on each play. I think the first play was a designed run all the way and when Josh saw it wasn’t going to work, he tried to make something happen. The issue is he’s looking RUN before the snap and then as he’s going down he sees Gabe and tries to make a play. He was never thinking PASS from the jump. Even if it was designed to have a pass option, Josh’s first read so to speak was run. It got blown up pretty quick and he tried to make something happen when he should have just “ate it.” As for the entire post, I’ll try and address my thoughts from a development perspective. Overall what I’ve learned in my time in player development is that there are macro and micro developments. I’m applying this to a different sport than I work in, but I’ll give it a shot. Macro would be getting acclimated to the speed of the game, your assignments, playing a new position. These are overarching concepts, that may change week to week and can easily be coached up at the same time as trying to win during a season. It doesn’t necessarily require adjusting movement patterns, at least immensely. Micro would be something like throwing mechanics, route running, or footwork. This stuff is really hard to correct during the season. You can definitely do it and have small improvements, but these things are often habits for players and need to be broken. Unfortunately when you have a game once ever 7 days, it doesn’t matter what you do in practice because in a game you’re often going to revert to what is most comfortable AKA muscle memory (it’s harder over a 162 game schedule in baseball, but the same principle applies). Players almost never mess with these things in season because the movement patterns won’t stick. This type of development is going to take place in the off-season... I think they know it needs to be reinforced, I know it’s been a point of emphasis in the past and Josh HAS improved, but that needs to continue.

Please direct him to that thread, the responses have been far too positive. I need the glass half empty posters to come join me over there!

Download the Yahoo Sports App on your phone or tablet... you should be able to watch it there.

Yeah I thought it was pretty encouraging to see that the drafts over that 3 year time period looks solid without Josh really being valued as the star he has started to become.

I appreciate the kind words!

Can someone clue me in on the offense that Wentz was running early on in Philadelphia? It seems to me that Daboll has forced Josh to go down a more traditional path and learn all of the really hard stuff from the get go. I think that bodes well for long term development because anyone who potentially comes in after Daboll, likely won’t be running as complex of an offense. Just a thought

The issue wasn’t spinning the ball, it was spinning the ball in the face of the opposing team’s player.

Wellllll technically Austin Ekeler falls in the UDFA bucket... UDFA in 2017. 😉

Hunter Henry and Keenan Allen have played in all 11 games. Mike Williams 10/11 games. Williams averages ~ 6 targets a game. Allen averages ~ 11 targets a game. Henry averages ~ 7 targets per game. Herbert averages 40 attempts per game and 60% of them are in the direction of Williams, Allen, Henry. Where exactly are you getting your information from?

They’re MUCH worse that what Justin Hebert has... Hunter Henry, Mike Williams, Keenan Allen? Wentz has primarily been throwing to Greg Ward, Travis Fulgham and Richard Rodgers this year. Miles Sanders has missed time too. Only one of his offensive lineman have played in over 10 games.

What’s exciting about this is we did it against some really really good offenses. 1 top 5 according to DVOA (SEA) and two top 12 (LAC & ARI) in weeks 7-12. In terms of total offense (which is what you see on the graphic during the broadcast) they’re 3 of the top 5... Arizona at 2, LAC at 3 and Seattle at 5. Interestingly enough we’ve faced 4 of the top 5 and 6 of the top 10 on the season. Hopefully these are permanent positive changes we are seeing!

You got it... just trying to do something a little different. Opinions are great but are often skewed... it’s hard for any one to see all 32 teams and evaluate every player outside of a glance here and there. This isn’t perfect by any means but at least it kind of casts a wide net, and relates it to the entire league.

By no means do I think it’s perfect, I wish there was something better than AV, but it’s hard or else I start comparing apples to oranges... this is at least apples to apples. I was glad some of the findings at least passed the eye test with teams like NE doing pretty well in FA but not the draft recently... or IND doing really well in both, they’re just missing a QB to make them truly elite IMO. Yeah, you’re 100% right. Draft pick trades/trades in general is probably the next step along with smoothing this all around the edges as well. The FA stuff was time consuming and pick trades are pretty intertwined, so it would take a bit... but I’ll probably take a crack at it. I’m also not sure the best way to value that, I’d have to look into it and think on it. I could probably do what you’re suggesting and just find the AV over ~20+ years for rounds 1-7 and calculate the NET for each team from 2017-2019. Maybe? Idk I have to think deeper. Your point you bring up at the end is a really good one... I’m used to discussing it through the lens of baseball. My personal feeling in baseball is in Rounds 1-2 you should be drafting a low variance college player and then supplementing the low variance with high risk in future rounds. Similar concept here, do I take a Josh Allen RD1 and then to safe in later rounds? Do I take a Saquon Barkley (pretty low variance guy) and then go someone high risk in RD2-3? A lot to chew on... thanks for the response! I see what you’re saying, yeah that very well could be the case. Probably best to relate it all to the # of picks like suggested above. Although just off the top of my head I feel like we haven’t made more than 7-8 picks in a given draft, and trades a bunch away to move up for guys like Josh, Tremaine, Ford, Dawkins, etc.

I started to discuss some of this in another thread about what folks consider a successful draft. Nobody really had a great way to measure success in the draft outside of their perception of a player.. I wanted to make an attempt at examining this objectively. Pro Football Reference has their Weighted Approximate Value which assigns a value to a player based on their performance. It's not an all encompassing stat like WAR is in baseball, it definitely has its flaws, but PFR said it's steady to use to measure draft success. I'm going to dive into the results below on the draft, as well as some analysis I have done of the FA signings. Nothing is really over the top, I'm going to take some feedback and try to refine this. I had to do a lot of it by hand in excel and couldn't just scrape everything because different pieces were all over. I chose 2017 specifically because that is when Sean McDermott and Brandon Beane arrived. Some folks want to argue that Beane shouldn't get credit for that draft and FA, which is perfectly fine. I am in the camp that believes McDermott and Beane are in lockstep, they make up the upper management of the football department, therefore the decisions made since 2017 have been made with certain goals in mind. I don't feel the need to omit 2017 because it was scrambled, it's very clear these two are close and the decisions made were made by McBeane in some way, shape or form starting in 2017. "Sometimes, for example if you want to assess a trade or determine the top draft classes of all time, you need a metric that is capable of comparing players across positions and eras. In baseball and basketball, lots of stats have been cooked up to do this, and they can do so with a reasonable degree of precision. In football, no such stat exists. In most cases, people use "starter" or "number of years as a starter" or "number of pro bowls" as the metric when they have to compare across positions. AV is intended to be an improvement over those metrics, and nothing more. It is not Not NOT an ubermetric whose purpose is to decide once and for all who the best players in NFL history were." - Doug from PFR The career AV is computed by summing 100 percent of the AV of his best season, 95 percent of the AV of his next-best season, 90 percent of the AV of his third-best season, and so on You will also see DrAV, which is just the Weighted Career Approximate Value but solely for the team that drafted them, so we won't get credit for Wyatt Teller performing well in CLE because it's not helping the Bills. Using 2019 may be a little premature but that's the case across the board for every team. I omitted 2020 because they don't have those draft values... this will be a fun exercise to conduct even further down the road when we have some more clarity on how McBeane's picks pan out. But to give us an idea of what things look like right now in comparison to the rest of the NFL... Here we go.. If you look at the McBeane drafts (2017-2019) sorted by DrAV you will see that the Bills have been a top 5 drafting team in the NFL since McBeane arrived. The Colts, Ravens, and 49ers are all ranked above us, with New Orleans right below. This lines up fairly well with what a lot of posters have said with those teams being very good drafters, but the Bills are right up there with them. This will obviously fluctuate the longer players play in the NFL, but that also includes them being retained by their drafting team in order to continue to provide value. Based on what I saw we could actually rise because of the great season Josh is having - we're actually top 5 while including Josh's below league average performance in his first two seasons. This could also drop with the inclusion of the 2020 Draft, but as of right now the first 3 McBeane drafts look like they went pretty well when compared to their peers. I should note that 5 teams should probably be removed from the discussion because their GMs came in after 2017. I'm not including BAL and GB in that number because DeCosta and Gutenkunst were the top lieutenants in each city and are an extension of Newsome and Thompson who are both still heavily involved with their organizations. The teams that should probably be removed to fairly recognize the new GMs that came after 2017 are the NYJ, NYG, WSH, OAK and CLE. Regardless, McBeane was been at the top of the league as of the end of the 2019 season. I also dove into free agency, this took a lot longer to put together and could probably use some feedback. My methodology was taking all free agents signed between 2017 and 2019 and applying each player's Weighted Approximate Value to the team once they were signed. I will walk through the chart below to give you a better understanding of what I found. The far left column shows the team. The next column is the total Weighted Approximate Value that each organization has acquired via free agency since 2017. The Bills are highlighted there and they actually have the most AV acquired via free agency in the entire NFL since 2017, they're the only team over 200 AV. If I were to just add up the AV that has been brought to Buffalo since 2017 the Bills would be far and away the best with 380 with only NO (335) and IND (311) clearing the 300 AV mark. I don't necessarily thing that's the best way to break things down though. Each team spent a different amount of money to acquire those players and brought in a different number of players as well. I like to use $/WAR in baseball to see the best player value, so I tried to use something similar here with with $/AV. The Bills are still above average here but they're around 12th in the NFL. The Rams, Seahawks and Patriots pace the NFL in this category, which makes a lot of sense the way the teams have been constructed in recent years. The only team that ranks higher than the Bills in both DrAV and $/AV in FA is Indianapolis. New Orleans is very close as well, as they're one spot behind us in DrAV. Overall it looks like some teams are good at one or the other, or just plain bad at both. Nobody outside of Indianapolis, New Orleans and Buffalo has had substantial success in both the draft and FA since 2017. Teams like SEA, LAC and PIT seem to be in the next tier. It's a little bit of validation for some of the top organizations in the NFL. I think most can agree IND, NO, PIT and SEA are well run. Buffalo is right up there with them, if not better based on this analysis. There are undoubtedly flaws, but this is a little bit closer to being objective then some people just FEELING that certain teams are so much better run than the Bills. I'm open to thoughts and feedback, feel free to rip me apart... as long as you bring some facts and a thoughtful argument 😀

Yes, it will take a little longer because I'll have to go by hand and separate their time with the team after signing, the draft table was laid out pretty nicely where I could just apply some formulas and throw it together pretty quick. But FA is doable for sure... I've gone through the AFC East from 2017-2019 already... the Bills have brought in the most AV at 220, New England is 180, New York is 152 and Miami is 82 over that span. But when broken down by $/AV to basically show the value for that AV the Bills are 3rd in the division behind NE and Miami. It's really not a large margin at all, but we've actually handed our the 3rd most money in the NFL behind NYJ and JAX since 2017... the good news is it looks like we've gotten some good value. I'll keep digging.