Redskins trade for Jason Taylor (updated)

[GTripp0012]

Originally Posted by Schneed10

I'd be interested to hear what kind of analysis you're doing to strip out the covariances involved with the multiple variables driving team performance. That's the big reason sabermetrics has not caught on in football. With baseball, you can normalize your data set rather easily because in the end, it largely boils down to a pitcher vs hitter matchup, with a few variables like day vs night, score, and situation to adjust for. But in football, the QB's performance depend's upon the line's ability to block the defense, the WRs' ability to get open, the effectiveness of the running game, the score, the quarter, etcetera. It's hard enough to quantify some of these variables, and even harder to mathematically formulate the covariance quotients to effectively tease them out and normalize your data. Have you done anything on this front?

The other big issue is sample size: one football game provides about two weeks of equivalent data in baseball.

To an extent, you have to leave the team oriented variables in there often. One of the biggest allies of statistical analysis in football is roster turnover: parts come and go, and production changes accordingly, so over multiple years, you can see which positions and players are more valuable, and exactly what the numbers are showing.

As far as the normalizing of the data, I'm not really working on the frontlines there. There are people out there who are much better than I am working with correlations and statistical significance, and that type of work (such as FO's DVOA metric or Doug Drinen's Approximate Value metric).

A lot of the work I do is simply taking the results that other systems churn out, and trying to work through team and coaching variables to better translate those numbers into wins and losses. Basically, I'm best when working with the statistical defenses of roster moves (or lack thereof).

Like I said earlier, my current project is trying to find out how many wins Jason Taylor adds over Phillip Daniels. Once I figure this out, I'll know just how long Jason Taylor has to play at a high level to be worth a second round draft pick.