From the Wikipedia article on Occam’s Razor.
Occam’s razor, also known as Ockham’s razor, and sometimes expressed in Latin as lex parsimoniae (the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness), is a principle that generally recommends that, from among competing hypotheses, selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions usually provides the correct one, and that the simplest explanation will be the most plausible until evidence is presented to prove it false.
In the draft work I’ve been doing, vertical leap as a variable hasn’t added any additional explanatory power to the model so I’ve taken it out for now. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to boost the model’s accuracy by including VL, but for now I can’t. Here is a graph showing VL on the X axis and Fantasy Points/Game in the Y axis.
I’ve included the R2 for the regression line on the chart. Vertical leap explains less than 1% of the variance in fantasy points per game. I can think of a few explanations for this.
First, all receivers at this level are pretty athletic. A very low vertical leap is 30 inches, which means that the player could probably still pretty easily dunk a basketball.
Then there’s the issue that jumping is only half the equation for catching the ball the ball in the air. Julio Jones has a ridiculous vertical and yet I saw a number of times this year where a ball hit him in the hands (while he was in the air) and it’s not even that he dropped it, it was like the ball just hit his hands and glanced off. As if he lost control of his hands when off the ground. Anyway, that’s just an anecdotal example.
Finally, I think a reasonable question is how many passes that might otherwise not be catchable, are somehow catchable with a greater VL. It seems like a small number.
Here are some examples of where real life goes against intuition as far as VL and fantasy production go.
Good Receivers with Below Average VL (Average is 36 inches):
Anquan Boldin (33.5), Plaxico Burress (33), Dwayne Bowe (33)
Below Average Receivers With Great VL:
Reche Caldwell (41.5), Mark Bradley (39.5), Freddie Mitchell (39.5) – All were picked in first two rounds in draft, and so were considered to be good prospects when taken.
Note also that vertical leap is likely to at least influence draft position, which is going to influence playing time, and still there is no additional explanatory power found in vertical leap.
Also, I didn’t include either Jordy Nelson or Mario Manningham who both have very low VL, but whose breakouts didn’t really come in their first three years in the league.
