One of the great things about using R for analysis (as opposed to Excel for instance) is that R code makes it easy to repeat whatever it is you’re doing.  When the fantasy season ended I just pulled up the code that I’d used to generate last year’s Crop Report and I ran it again so that I could have all of the graphs for this season.  The page below is an excerpt which shows Reggie Wayne’s career by numbers.

A few notes: TRG = targets.  Fantasy Points Over Par is an efficiency measure that is kind of like FP/Target, except that it is also adjusted for field position because targets from the red zone are more valuable than targets from your own 20.

I threw together the chart below as a quick illustration of the trajectory of the San Diego franchise over the past decade.  It shows the Simple Rating for the Chargers over that time and then I’ve drawn a box in to illustrate where the Marty Schottenheimer era ended and the Norv Turner era began.

To make it easy to understand what the Chargers’ SRS in 2006 would be like, you might think of the 49ers’ 2012 team, which also has an SRS of about 10 positive points.

One of the things that we see with NFL teams is that they sometimes make decisions where they are choosing between a known quantity (that they might find sub-optimal) and an unknown quantity, and they will often choose the unknown quantity just to make a change.  This is a mindset that goes “We’re not where we want to be right now, so any change must get us closer to where we want to be.”  That mentality probably has some application with a losing team, but with winning teams it will more often than not lead to the franchise going in the wrong direction.  This is simple probability at play.  If you have a coach whose lifetime winning percentage is .613 and has been recently winning, your expectation when you fire him is that you are going to be hiring a worse coach.  It’s kind of like in blackjack if you were to hit on a 17 when the dealer is showing a face card.  It might seem like you have to do something in order to beat that expected 20 that the dealer might have, but the action you take (hitting) is actually going to be worse for your odds of winning.

The Chargers probably have bigger problems than just Norv Turner, as their personnel also seems to be a mess now.  But I don’t think it’s debatable that the Chargers fired a good coach and replaced him with a coach who is maybe average.  Again, we have to worry about the decision making ability of franchises that can’t understand the odds when they make choices like that.

If you think about managing an NFL team as a formula, you would break it into a dependent variable (maybe winning, or point differential), and then a series of independent variables (things like coaching, scheme, personnel, luck) that will eventually give you that depenedent variable.  So maybe it would be:

POINT DIFFERENTIAL = COACHING + PERSONNEL + STRENGTH OF SCHEDULE + LUCK

My outlook is that a lot of NFL teams have a tough time figuring out how to win because they don’t understand their dependent variable very well and they also have a tough time isolating the independent variables.

To put it another way, they mistake W/L records for the dependent variable because of their “stats are for losers” mindset and this ends up infecting a lot of other decisions that they make.  If teams don’t even know the dependent variable in the formula, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to solve for any of the independent variable values.

The firing of Lovie Smith strikes me as a move that doesn’t contemplate winning in the NFL as a formula.  To start with, the 2012 Bears were actually probably a little better than their 10-6 record if you look at Expected Win/Loss, where they would have been a little closer to 11 wins than 10 wins.  Expected win/loss has more predictive power on following year wins than actual win/loss records do.  So I would argue that the Bears made a decision based on the wrong dependent variable when they applied the NFL’s results oriented mentality.

But if you were going to look at the Bears and try to figure out what things need to be addressed in order to make improvements in the organization, what changes would you make, and would a coaching change be needed in order to improve the team?  It strikes me that a coaching change would be low on the order of priorities.  I realize that the Bears have missed the playoffs a number of times recently, but Smith is still the coach that took them to a Super Bowl and has only had two years of negative SRS during his tenure.  He took over a team that had only been positive in SRS one time in the seven previous years.

So what changes would you make to the Bears if you were going to leave in place the parts that aren’t the problem and you were going to try to improve the parts that are a problem?  The defense seems fine.  They were one of the best, or the best, defense in the league this year depending on which numbers you subscribe to.  The special teams seem fine as they were top 10 in the league according to Football Outsiders. 

Most of the offensive pieces also seem fine.  The Bears have one good wide receiver in Brandon Marshall and one promising young wide receiver in Alshon Jeffery.  Jay Cutler isn’t great, but you can win with him.  Matt Forte seems like a fine running back and fits with the kind of offense that works well in the NFL today where running backs are as valuable for their receiving skills as their running abilities.  The major glaring weakness for the Bears seems to be their offensive line.  It stinks.  Since Jay Cutler got to Chicago, they’ve given up the 2nd most sacks in the league over that time.

But I think a reasonable question to ask is whether firing Lovie Smith is going to cure this issue with the Bears line, or whether you could address that issue independently and keep Lovie Smith on as coach given that he appears to be an above average NFL coach?  That’s obviously a rhetorical question and I would argue that the Bears offensive line probably shouldn’t be any better than it is right now.  Here are the Bears’ draft picks in rounds 1-3 going back to 2006.

Year	Rnd	Pick	Player	POS	From	To
2006	2	42	Daniel Manning	DB	2006	2012
2006	2	57	Devin Hester	DB	2006	2012
2010	3	75	Major Wright	DB	2010	2012
2011	3	93	Chris Conte	DB	2011	2012
2012	1	19	Shea McClellin	DE	2012	2012
2007	2	62	Dan Bazuin	DE
2011	2	53	Stephen Paea	DT	2011	2012
2009	3	68	Jarron Gilbert	DT	2009	2012
2006	3	73	Dusty Dvoracek	DT	2007	2008
2008	3	90	Marcus Harrison	DT	2008	2010
2012	3	79	Brandon Hardin	FS	2012	2012
2007	3	94	Michael Okwo	LB
2011	1	29	Gabe Carimi	OL	2011	2012
2008	2	44	Matt Forte	RB	2008	2012
2007	3	93	Garrett Wolfe	RB	2007	2010
2008	1	14	Chris Williams	T	2008	2012
2007	1	31	Greg Olsen	TE	2007	2012
2012	2	45	Alshon Jeffery	WR	2012	2012
2008	3	70	Earl Bennett	WR	2008	2012
2009	3	99	Juaquin Iglesias	WR	2009	2011

 

If I didn’t know anything about the Bears, and only looked at that table, I would expect their offensive line to be bad.  Over a seven year span, they took only two linemen in the first three rounds.  They used a bunch of their picks to take defensive players and they used two first round picks to acquire Jay Cutler in a trade.

There are a lot of issues at play when any coach is fired and I guess it’s possible that the Bears could hire a better coach than Lovie Smith.  But the expectation that they should have when they hire a coach is not that the new coach would be better, as most NFL coaches are actually probably worse than Lovie.  Also, the Bears shouldn’t confuse their line problem with a coaching problem, which is what I think a lot of teams do.  I guess it’s conceivable that Lovie Smith was the reason that the Bears haven’t addressed their offensive line issues, but the fix to that problem seems as simple as telling Lovie that you think he’s a good coach, but he stinks at addressing offensive issues in the draft and some of that control has to be taken out of his hands.

I think the problem with a lot of decision making in the NFL is that it’s tough to expect that a team that would confuse its offensive line woes with coaching woes is going to be any good at making the necessary changes in order to actually improve.  If you had a doctor that couldn’t tell the difference between soft tissue damage and damage to bones, would you expect that doctor to be any good a prescribing treatments?