The 'D' Stands For ...

... Doesn'tmakeadifference.

As much maligned as Jeff Lurie's "Things were terrible; I'm not changing anything" remarks were a couple weeks ago, this is one time where he's in close alignment with at least a sizable minority of the paying customers.

Ask any Eagles fan if promoting Juan Castillo to DC was the right move last year and it's unlikely you'll hear the word 'yes.'  And yet somehow one-quarter of our brethren still think Castillo deserves a second chance!

I don't really take this number at face value.  Too many of the explanations I've heard for why we should keep Castillo start by blaming Andy Reid for hiring him in the first place, as if what matters here is ensuring Reid pays for his long litany of (supposed) sins and not finding the best possible person to coach the Eagles' defense next year.

This is, of course, moronic, but also the logical next step in the long line of "If we just get rid of him, everything will be better" arguments we've heard for about the last decade.

At any rate, I'm not really here to talk about Juan Castillo (which avoids rendering the last paragaph intolerably ironic), but rather a subject near and dear to my heart:  DVOA, and the misapplications thereof.

Let's start by stipulating that DVOA does all the things a good stat should do.  It's descriptive and predictive, gives us a common metric for measuring teams against each other, and boy does it help resolve a lot of arguments.

To the extent DVOA has problems, it's not because of anything the FO guys do.  Look at last week's FO NFC Championship game preview. There are many words and arguments in that thing, but not once will you find the sentence:

"And of course San Francisco will win because it has a higher DVOA."

Such a statement would be absurd on its face (and would also make people wonder why they're paying for FO's "advanced picks" each week when they could just look up two numbers in a freely available table and get the same answers.

So let's emphatically state that this isn't an FO problem.

But boy, is FO starting to cause some problems. And the biggest, I think, stems from a near universal misunderstanding of what the "D" in DVOA means.  Start with their definition:

Once we have all our adjustments, we can find the difference between this player's success and the expected success of an average running back in the same situation (or between this defense and the average defense in the same situation, etc.). Add up every play by a certain team or player, divide by the total baseline for success in all those situations, and you get VOA, or Value Over Average.Of course, the biggest variable in football is the fact that each team plays a different schedule.

By adjusting each play based on the defense's average success in stopping that type of play over the course of a season, we get DVOA, or Defense-adjusted Value Over Average. Rushing and passing plays are adjusted based on down and location on the field; receiving plays are also adjusted based on how the defense performs against passes to running backs, tight ends, and wide receivers. Defenses are adjusted based on the average success of the offenses they are facing. (Yes, this is still called DVOA, for the sake of simplicity.)

Sounds pretty simple, right?  VOA is a measure of how well a team has played and DVOA corrects for opponents, so you can throw out any concerns about strength of schedule and say things like "DVOA proves the Eagles have the league's twelfth-best defense, even if you claim they didn't play very many teams that were any good."

Except you can't.  DVOA says nothing of the kind, as we can best demonstrate with a couple of charts.  Here's the first one, plotting this season's DVOAs against VOAs:

Yes, that looks pretty much exactly the way two data series with a correlation coefficient of .985 should look when plotted next to each other.  Here's schedule strength (based on DVOA) vs. DVOA:

That one's messier, but there's a clearly identifiable down trend (correlation = -.660).  If the opponent adjustments actually worked the way people thought they did -- and which I thought they did until not that long ago -- the correlation here would be much closer to zero.*  

Again, none of this is meant as a criticism of Football Outsiders.  They're trying to create the most predictively successful stats possible and they appear to have settled on minimal opponent adjustments as the way to do that.

It's easy to see why making bigger adjustments would be tough.  NFL teams play better at different times for a wide variety of reasons (injuries, scheme adjustments, new coaches, etc.).  Given the small sample sizes involved, it's practically impossible to start saying things like, "Well, Trent Cole was out that week, so we should bump the ASR, but oh wait, so was their LG, so we need to factor that in too."

What this means, though, is that it's time to stop hand-waving away posts like this one from Brian Solomon with the explanation "Oh, DVOA takes care of all that stuff."  No, it doesn't, and if you still don't believe that, I've got some Stephen McGee futures contracts to sell you.

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* Note:  The strength of schedule effect is weaker in previous seasons.  The DVOA/VOA correlation stays in the .97-.98 range, however.

If Rocky Had Been The Favorite

It's been 13 years since I lived anywhere close to Philadelphia, and yet I still speak fluently the language of booing.

This sets me apart from the tens of millions of sports fans who don't have Philadelphia in their blood and so hear booing as an undifferentiated cacophony of sound, similar to the way a monolingual English speaker would experience market morning in a remote Tibetan village.

The locals sure seem angry about something, but it's not clear what it is.

The most puzzling thing about yesterday's game wasn't the result.  We lost this game the day Andy Reid hired Juan Castillo.  Being down a quarterback, wide receiver, and two of our top three cornerbacks against a team that requires you to a) score a lot and b) play a flag football defense just made the final result worse.

No, what was strange about yesterday was how conflicted the crowd seemed about booing a series of decisions, mistakes and displays of cowardice that should have whipped those attending into a frothing rage. The relative quiescence was strange and surprising.

This matters because if you want to gauge the feelings of the team's most important fans -- the ones who plunk down their hard-earned cash each season for tickets and then optimistically gear up for an impending bloodletting on a holiday weekend -- then you can blow off the commenting cesspool at philly.com, the can-you-top-this snarkiness of Twitter*, and most of the straining-for-cleverness blogs⁺.  Start instead with what you hear in the stadium.

I've been chewing on this issue all morning and I think there are three possible explanations:

1) The Linc <> The Vet -- The 700 Level is dead, the crowd now slants more towards "people who can afford the tickets," and years of success (across a couple sports) have taken the edge off the fanbase.  

All these things are true, but all these things have also been true for awhile. They didn't help McNabb very much.

This feels more like a contributing factor then a root cause.  

2) The fans have given up -- This is the bad one for Andy Reid.  Fans aren't just angry, they're despondent.  It's hard to get too far up or down when you know the defense can't hold any lead and, well, the defense can't hold any lead.

I know a couple people who go to games regularly and I think they might lean in this direction.  They're not sure it's even worth going to watch them lose and then when their worst fears play out on the field, there's really not much to do beyond getting another beer and watching the cheerleaders and/or drunken brawls.  But I prefer the last theory, no doubt because it's the most interesting.

3) The fans are really, really conflicted -- Consider what's happened in the past two years.  McNabb, the target of so much fan vitriol over the years, was booted out of town.  This, surprisingly, did not solve all our problems.

The heir apparent, wasn't.  The reclamation project, for a short while, was, beyond on our wildest dreams.  Then he sort of was, then he kind of wasn't.

The biggest kick in the teeth, though, came on the other side of the football, where a once proud defense coached by a legend still uses the master's terminology, but otherwise bears no resemblance to its past self as it whipsaws between schemes that ranged from overly complicated to frustratingly basic (and yet seemingly no easier to get the hang of).

I'm not sure fans know what to think anymore.  The easy explanations are out the window (other than firing Castillo).  Reid made by far the biggest mistake of the (off)season, but on the other hand he's a proven coach whose average annual output easily crushes most retreads (Shanahan) or flavors-of-the-month (Spagnuolo).  

Has Reid done enough to be fired?  Certainly.  Does it feel like throwing Roseman out after him might help, too?  Yep, sure does.

But do you really believe, deep down in your heart of hearts, that we're likely to be better off in two years if we go down that road?  That's a much tougher question. 

And so we boo, because the effort stinks and the execution is embarrassing, but it's missing the hard edge that only comes when a critical mass of the fans really, truly want to see change.

So now we get to DeSean Jackson.  

The meager boos DeSean received yesterday were a woefully inadequate response to what he did on the field.  That was the modern era's "for who, for what" game and for as much as he avoided the galvanizing post-game soundbite, he might as well get those words tattooed on his arms, since he's not doing much else with them other than bracing his falls as he crumples helplessly to the ground any time a DB comes within 10 yards of him. 

So what happened?  Why isn't he getting the McNabb / Schmidt / Lindros treatment?  What's different about DeSean?

I think it's this:  DeSean is the evolutionary Allen Iverson.  Fans know he's flawed.  They know he doesn't do all the things he should.  They know that for all his amazing talent, for as much as he's a threat to score any time the ball touches his hands, he will always be a limited player who requires his coaches to spend as much time scheming around his weaknesses as opponents spend scheming around his strengths.

There are, to be sure, differences between the two players.  Iverson would have died before he'd let the threat of contact stop him from getting to the basket.  DeSean is, comparatively speaking, a giant wuss.  On the other hand, DeSean's never thrown his wife out of the house naked before, either, so it's definitely good news / bad news.

I'm not sure I'll ever understand the selective Rocky-ism of Philadelphia fans that lionizes immensely talented, but fundamentally flawed, players like Iverson and DeSean while absolutely destroying fundamentally limited, but immensely high effort guys like Chad Hall and Reno Mahe, but it's a real thing, and it remains the key to understanding why, on a horrible day like yesterday, fans booed more loudly for Chad Hall's lone carry than they did for DeSean's two killer drops.

With that said, there are five games left.  Your move, Jackson.

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* Guilty!
⁺ Guilty again! 

Did Not Expect This

Because I know at least a few folks aren't on Twitter but still keep this feed in their readers, here you go:

(I tried to remove special teams tackles by using these numbers.  Tackle stats vary by source, but that should get us in the ballpark.)

This really surprised me.  Doesn't it feel like our linebackers aren't doing anything this year?  And that our front four and secondary are making all the stops?

Not so much.  And it's not about a run/pass difference:

Weird.  And totally deflating for the cool graphic I had planned.  Oh well.

Well Now I've Seen Everything

I'm finally getting around to re-watching the Bills game tonight.  NFL.com has seriously jacked up its video functionality, but it's worth going to the play-by-play page and then clicking on "watch highlight" for the first Vick interception. (You may have to click on a different one, then click that one. Like I said, they've broken it.)

It's an RB screen to the left, so why are Celek, Herremans and Watkins all jetting out to the right?  At first I thought maybe they'd just had a mix-up on direction, but no, the wide receiver on the right also steps back off the line.  

That's right.  The Eagles ran fake WR screen right, RB screen left.

So not only were Kelce and Dunlap the only ones hanging around to block for Vick, he also had to fake right, spin around and then get the ball to Shady, who only had one linemen left to block in front of him, since everyone else was busy doing other things.

I don't think we'll see this one again any time soon.

If You're Going to Blame the Wide Nine ...

At least make sure it's the wide nine.

Fred Jackson's comments after the game, as reported by Rich Hofmann and then cited as compelling evidence by everyone and his or her mother:

"[The shovel pass] was something we wanted to take advantage of with them bringing that wide nine," said Bills running back Fred Jackson, who ran 26 times for 111 yards and a touchdown and caught six passes for 85 yards in Buffalo's 31-24 win over the Eagles.

"Again, hats off to our coaches' scouting. They see things like that. We haven't run the shovel pass all year and we put it in there so we really worked on it. It was something that we thought we could take advantage of."

And the screens?

"Again, wide nines," Jackson said. "They like to get upfield and we knew as long as we could get that nine [the widest defensive end] upfield, we could get under him and be able to spring off it."

So let's start with the shovel passes.  The Bills ran three of them.  They gained 7, -2 and 9 yards (plus a 15-yard facemask on Nnamdi, but if you want to blame that on Washburn...).  That's an average of 4.7 yards per play.

And the running back screens?  Those went for 49, 5, 3 and -3 yards. That's one big play and three that went nowhere.

But wait, you say, what about the one big play?  Doesn't that prove the wide nine is terrible, because like Jackson said, all you need to do is run it to the side with the DE standing waaaaaay out there and it will work every time?

Uh-huh.  Only problem is, here's the pre-snap alignment on that one (click for larger):

Well, that's strange.  Because that screen pass went to the right and yet the wide nine DE in this case seems to be on the other side.  It's almost like Jason Babin was lined up in a perfectly conventional position over there. Do we have another angle on that?

What if you got totally crazy, dumped the screen captures into Photoshop and then adjusted these two pictures so that you were getting a straight-on perspective:

Yep.  It's like Hofmann (almost) said:

Out of the mouths of opponents full of themselves, and full of victory, oft times come gems complete and utter BS. 

In Which We Take A (Short) Break From Our Previously Scheduled Castillo Bashing

There's no element of fandom I dislike more than the "burn this village to save it" crowd.  Five minutes after the loss, when the rest of us are just angry about that, they're already off on their tiresome crusades about how the result proves so-and-so needs to go, even if such discussions are awkward now that he's playing in Minnesota.

You won't get that here.  If the defense improves enough to at least get out of the offense's way, I'll be happy, even if that potentially sets up a dumb decision next January after an early-round playoff loss.  So be it.

At this point, I think I've pretty much spoken my piece regarding Castillo.  If you've stopped by during the last few days, you know I thought it was a dumb decision at the time, that the past four weeks have gone a long way towards proving how dumb the decision was, and -- this is the most important part -- that even if Castillo can somehow figure out how to cobble all this talent together into a decent unit, there's little to no chance he's the best long-term answer.

So while it was fun to get back up on the horse for a week, that pretty much wraps things up around here for awhile.  I'll obviously still be on Twitter and who knows, maybe we'll again see a double coincidence of a quiet work week and a soapbox-worthy development.

Thanks all.

Why Coaching Matters

In fairness, he inherited a unit that had issues.  Maybe half the guys were plus performers, but the rest were sub-replacement level.  The middle was especially bad.

The front office didn't do much to help either.  Oh sure, there was the one high-profile summer addition, but it's not like he's panned out all that well. The other options were roster leftovers from last year, late round picks and, literally, street free agents.

Throw in a completely new system -- for which a lot of the current personnel weren't a great match -- and it's probably not too surprising that we've seen them take such a giant step backwards, statistically:

Oh wait, that's not what we've seen at all.

Two Blitzes

A reader, to whom I may or may not be related, asked a question earlier about our blitzing.  Here are two representative plays.

This first one starts with a bad guess.  Castillo calls Brian Rolle's number on an outside blitz on a play where the 49ers decided to run up the middle.  

Things to notice (after you get through the previous play that I also accidentally recorded):

• Rolle lines up outside the DE.  There's literally no reason for him to be out there unless he's blitzing.  No back on that side, no tight end, no nothin'.
• The play itself is not a draw, even though that's sort of what you'd expect in that situation.
• It does involve one of those ****ing trap blocks we're seeing over and over and over again this year (watch the LT).
• Nnamdi and Allen are in tight, but both are primarily concerned about the pass.  The receiver "blocks" Nnamdi by just running away from the play.
• Babin, headed for the quarterback, takes himself out of the play. [Which is a) his job but b) the difference between Babin and Cole.]
• Chaney gets blocked.  Again.
• Allen is very slow to recognize the play, then gets blown out of the hole once he does see what's going on.
• Page takes one of his typically great angles towards the ball carrier.

Next blitz was one of the touchdowns.  Try to pause the video right at the moment Alex Smith is ready to throw.  There are four receivers on the play. By my count, all four are open and three of the four offer pitch-and-catch first downs:

This is one of those plays that's so bad it's hard to tell who exactly screwed up.  It's like the three guys in the back are playing a completely different defense than the seven guys rushing the quarterback, and it's not at all clear what Rolle was (or was supposed to be) doing.  And I don't mean that as a knock.  I literally have no idea.

If You're a Game Re-Watcher

Check out the difference between our first and second half defensive philosophies.

In the first half, we played a very run-focused defense. Lots of base personnel and then both safeties really close to the line of scrimmage. (They may have been just deep enough that you could say they weren't truly in the box, but they were close.)  One CB usually played deep middle.

This worked.  Not every play (stop me if you've heard this before), but "if you take away the one big run" in the first half, our guys were actually pretty good.

In the second half, once we got the big lead, we changed what we were doing.  Our safeties started playing back, we took linebackers off the field, and we tried to play coverages inside with (primarily) our $10 million slot corner.  This gutted a run defense that really needs all the help it can get. You saw the result.

This gets to a larger problem.  Lots of people -- me included -- have been trying to figure out why we don't just solve the opposing tight end problem by letting Nnamdi shut the guy down.  The issue is that while that works great when the other guys try to pass, it's not so awesome when they try to run.  

I know this will come as a shock, but it turns out our megabucks shutdown boundary cornerback isn't really all that comfortable mixing it up inside as a quasi-linebacker.  Nor are DRC, Joselio or even, frankly, Nate Allen.

Unfrotunately, these were all guys we stuffed into the box at the end of the game when we went into "play with the lead" mode. 

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A number of people have asked me to make some more constructive suggestions about what we should do with the defense.  Honestly, I think it's pretty clear at this point.  Three steps:

1)  You're not stopping the run with just the front seven or especially a front six.  Unless we're just getting absolutely strafed, we need a perma-box safety.

Nate Allen can't fill that role.  Jarrad Page looks the part, but I've never seen a guy take so many bad angles in run support.  Kurt Coleman is ... something I'm not going to repeat in a public forum.  That leaves one other guy:

Jarrett can play FS or SS. I think he’s okay in space. I think he really shines when he plays in the box. He is a good hitter, but I’m real impressed with him as a tackler ... Jarrett goes low when he tackles and pretty consistently is able to wrap up his targets ... 

I happened to re-listen to Greg Cosell of NFL Films talking about him to Dave Spadaro.  Greg loved Jarrett.  I think he said Jaiquawn was his highest rated Safety in the whole draft ... 

Jarrett played in the Senior Bowl.  A dedicated Temple fan put together a video of Jarrett’s snaps from the game.  He played both SS and FS. He looks so much more natural in the box.  The thing to watch for in this video is just how physical he is with guys who try to block him. You’ll also see him in man coverage in some sets.  That isn’t his strength, but he’s also not completely lost.

At some point, you have to try him.*

2)  Wish the guys on the outside luck.  Tell them this is why they make eight figure salaries.

3)  There is no step 3.

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* Speaking of guys you have to try ... we watched Danny Watkins in the preseason, so we know just how, er, unpolished he is as a player, but every day he can't beat out Kyle DeVan at the top of the depth chart is a day Howie Roseman should be forced to run 10 laps.  DeVan struggled mightily last game.

How Was This Supposed to Have Worked?

After the initial Castillo hiring bombshell, I tried to make sense of Andy's thinking.  Clearly he hadn't gone out and looked for the guy who was most likely to succeed while coaching this defense.  If he had, he'd have hired, you know, a guy who knew how to coach defense.

I eventually settled on three possible justifications:

1)  Reid thought Castillo could function as a "head coach of the defense" if they signed enough veteran talent and experienced position coaches.

2)  Reid worried about the impact of the lockout on scheme installations and decided he didn't want to bring someone in who would make too many changes in terminology, etc.  And unfortunately JJ's former assistants all have jobs (or had just been fired by Andy).

3)  Reid wanted to put Castillo on the Harbaugh Plan, where a guy in a dead-end coaching job gets moved somewhere else as a transitional step towards being hired away as a head coach.

As usual, no one outside the inner circle has any idea what Reid was actually thinking, but if you're looking for explanations that go beyond, "What kind of idiot hires an offensive line coach to be his defensive coordinator?" I think these are where you start.

So let's unpack these ideas for a minute.  

Explanation #1 has clearly been wrong.  Turns out, you need a defensive coordinator who can make solid playcalls and adjust on the fly as the other team starts to figure out all the stuff you spent a week planning.

And the worst part isn't what has happened to this point.  The Eagles could easily win their next two games and be sitting, at worst, 2.5 games out of first in the division.  The errors so far have been devastating, but not fatal.

The problem is that now we know that our lack of defensive coaching is going to burn us at the end.  We might have enough talent to muddle through the next 12 weeks, but as we've seen so many times before, everything gets harder once the playoffs start.  Do you really believe -- really, really believe -- that Juan Castillo will be able to hold his own in matchups against, for example, Sean Payton, Mike McCarthy and whoever is nominally in charge of the Patriots' offense?

Yeah, me either.

Moving on to number two, I think we've now learned that taking the JJ defense, stripping out all the complicated stuff that made it so hard to coach against, and then grafting on a front four approach that's completely different than anything Johnson ever ran may have been, in retrospect, even harder to pull off than just installing a completely new defense that at the very least had front, middle and back concepts that evolved together.

Furthermore, if this season turns into one of those train wreck campaigns, we'll have wasted a year.  Because clearly Castillo won't be back and Reid might be one step behind him.  So now we'll have to go through the whole new scheme thing again next summer.

Number three is just sad.