As disciplinarian commanding officers go, Wade Phillips and Norv Turner are Henry Blake and Colonel Klink, which is why trips to Las Vegas and Champagne toasts in November go unaddressed in Dallas and San Diego.
The Chargers are 14-0 in December games since 2006, but Turner teams of the past were notorious for starting their holiday shopping early. This game is as close as either team will get to the Super Bowl.
Football Outsiders via the New York Times
I'm starting to get fed up with these guys' attitudes towards Turner and the Chargers. Their bias is starting to border on absurd. And it's not all Turner--I went back and read some of their stuff from when Marty was coach and it was the same crap.
They claim that their personal feelings don't affect their numbers, and that may be true, but it sure as hell affects their analysis.
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You can be sure that if we lose to Dallas
no matter the reason, they’ll be right back with the “Turner and the Chargers suck” schtick.
"I aim to misbehave." - Mal Reynolds
by Zach (maestro876) on Dec 11, 2009 7:58 AM PST reply actions
Even if they win
"I did not invent the wheel, I was the crooked spoke adjacent." - Aesop Rock
by John Gennaro on Dec 11, 2009 9:50 AM PST up reply actions
Couldn't agree more.
Rec’d and FP’d.
I don’t understand what Turner’s teams with the Redskins or the Raiders has anything to do with here, and I really don’t understand how his success (or lack thereof) with those teams manages to make the FO guys completely disregard a perfect December record over several seasons.
"I did not invent the wheel, I was the crooked spoke adjacent." - Aesop Rock
Thanks John.
I’ll still look at their numbers, but I’m not going to take their analysis seriously anymore. I can read the stats and come to my own conclusions just as well as they can.
"I aim to misbehave." - Mal Reynolds
by Zach (maestro876) on Dec 11, 2009 9:54 AM PST up reply actions
That's basically the way I feel at this point
About 3 years ago I thought a lot of their analysis was spot on. But, it seems to have gotten lazier as the site has gotten more popular and also as they branched out into Fox Sports, ESPN, New York Times/Sun, etc.
Although, this piece is written by Mike Tanier and most of his commentary is very tongue-in-cheek.
Wisdom can not be cultivated through ignorance of information.
This is the NYT talking, not FO, right?
They don’t know what they’re talking about. They probably only know Turner from the Redskins, where he earned a “can’t finish” reputation. But I’d say that anyone who seriously follows NFL football would be happy to tell you that Norv beat that rap when he went to a good team.
by Neoplatonist Bolthead on Dec 11, 2009 10:22 AM PST up reply actions
This is one of the FO writers doing a weekly piece for the NYT.
"I aim to misbehave." - Mal Reynolds
by Zach (maestro876) on Dec 11, 2009 10:25 AM PST up reply actions
Ouch.
Yeah, the Chargers do get a lot of hate. Norv’s training camp is fair game for potshots in September and October, but in December? They promised to put up a SD-based article next week; I’m curious as to what they have to say.
FWIW, no aggregate stats are ever truly objective or unbiased. Just sayin’. Any time you try to draw a conclusion from empirical evidence, you’re doing violence to the evidence itself. The more complex your stats, the more thoughtful your formula, the more you try to say with the data at hand, the more true this becomes. DVOA is informed by the objective, yes, and its processes are independent of favor for one player or team and thus may be more objective than some columnist writing in the heat of the moment. But it’s still a human construction, and is only as accurate as its assumptions.
by Neoplatonist Bolthead on Dec 11, 2009 10:32 AM PST up reply actions 1 recs
That’s exactly how I felt when i was doing the Power Rankings post the other day. I felt a little weird referring to the FO numbers as “objective”, but they’re not purely objective as there’s still the human element.
That's true.
"I aim to misbehave." - Mal Reynolds
by Zach (maestro876) on Dec 11, 2009 10:56 AM PST up reply actions
I don't fully follow this line of thinking
The only human element is the limit of the mind to come up with things that might lead to better correlations. I get the feeling that you guys are thinking there’s some person looking at the outputs from the formula and saying “this works” and then lets the thing run every week for the entirety of the football season. That’s not the case. The outputs of the formula are taken and correlations are run with past years (where we know the outcomes already) and you see if the changes you made increase or decrease those correlations. The human is barely involved.
I can see how the human’s analysis of the numbers “do violence to the evidence”, but the stats themselves have no such biases (except towards their correlations with wins and losses). Which boils down to the quote from the fanshot “They claim that their personal feelings don’t affect their numbers, and that may be true, but it sure as hell affects their analysis.” I would go a step further and say that their personal feelings do not affect their numbers at all, unless you consider running correlation with wins and losses as feelings.
Wisdom can not be cultivated through ignorance of information.
by Wonko on Dec 11, 2009 11:03 AM PST up reply actions 2 recs
There are lots of ways to screw up statistics.
You can weight them wrong. You can base all your calculations on the football that’s being played one year, but five years later a new crop of players, coaches, strategies, tactics, counters… and all of a sudden the relative value of a play outcome just isn’t the same. Also, the relationship between an average result and a successful result is kind of screwy: sometimes good teams spend a lot of time doing stuff that they’re not good at because a poor result will still succeed.
As far as W/L correlations go, I’m not convinced that they can be all that certain. If I told you that I polled 256 people on a yes/no question, you’d say, “man, look at that outrageous MoE.” So correlation with winning might mean something, but whether it means what you think it means is impossible to ascertain. This is why stat geeks like baseball: there aren’t a whole lot more plays per season in baseball, but that’s not where the statistical problems creep up so much as when you look at how likely a particular combination of characteristics is to win you the game.
by Neoplatonist Bolthead on Dec 11, 2009 11:13 AM PST up reply actions
But that's not really what you were talking about
You were talking about some sort of human factor. Now you are trying to say that a stat that is based a “how teams have won in the past” might not be able to tell you “how teams might win in the future.” Isn’t that inherent in the stat. The only human factor that contains is screwing up is in the interpretation of the statistic, not the statistic itself.
And and I don’t want to hear the baseball stuff. Football statistically can’t be like baseball, so bashing in on that regards is just a cop out. Stat geeks like everything statistical, lazy stat geeks that don’t like a challenge like baseball. Football is the new frontier. We might need GPS trackers on players and footballs or something to get the best statistics, but until then correlating the ability of teams to succeed on each play with winning sounds like a step in the right direction. Even if the a-holes doing it can’t get their heads out their rears with regards to Norv.
Wisdom can not be cultivated through ignorance of information.
by Wonko on Dec 11, 2009 11:49 AM PST up reply actions 2 recs
Rec'd
Because you nailed it.
With that being said, I’d love to hear FO’s reasoning for how the Chargers (ranked 13th) beat the Eagles (ranked 2nd). I know there’s not a chance in hell they would’ve credited coaching, and it’s not like the Chargers had any specific health advantages.
I bet they’d say the Eagles just don’t play well on the West Coast.
"I did not invent the wheel, I was the crooked spoke adjacent." - Aesop Rock
by John Gennaro on Dec 11, 2009 11:53 AM PST up reply actions
They'd say
that the talent of the Chargers overcame Turner’s awfulness.
"I aim to misbehave." - Mal Reynolds
by Zach (maestro876) on Dec 11, 2009 12:01 PM PST up reply actions
And if we beat Dallas
it’ll be more Wade Phillips sucks than the Chargers were better.
"I aim to misbehave." - Mal Reynolds
by Zach (maestro876) on Dec 11, 2009 12:02 PM PST up reply actions
I'm thinking
They’d feel that Andy Reid coached poorly in the game and that’s why he got outcoached. Passing so much in that game instead of running is poor decision-making. Still, Norv did outcoach him, and since in their minds Norv is Bozo the Clown, that should be saying something (but they won’t see it that way).
There’s also the execution of the players on the field and I think the Chargers players out executed the Eagles that day. I’m not going to say that only has to do with coaching, but it sure seems like it should. However, Rivera coaches the defense and IIRC the defense executing near the goal line is what really won that game.
Wisdom can not be cultivated through ignorance of information.
by Wonko on Dec 11, 2009 12:04 PM PST up reply actions 1 recs
And the offense executing so well
that they scored nearly every time they touched the ball. And took 7 minutes off the clock at the end of the game and made it an 8 point lead.
"I aim to misbehave." - Mal Reynolds
by Zach (maestro876) on Dec 11, 2009 12:08 PM PST up reply actions
Also
I think that they realize that a major task on their plate is figure out how to account for the Eagles playing like world beaters for certain games and then losing games while playing poorly, but yet not poorly enough to lower their total DVOA for the season. Basically, them being ranked in the top 5 every year is kind of a worrisome occurrence. Of course, they have made it to more NFC Championship games than anyone else this decade (including last year where their DVOA was seemed fluky). So, they could probably just chalk up that loss to the Eagles being Eagles in that they are capable of dominating any football game against any team, but don’t show up to play some of the time.
Wisdom can not be cultivated through ignorance of information.
Guess I could have been a little more clear
I wasn’t saying that FO’s numbers are manipulated to fit their own bias and that, for instance, the Chargers are ranked much lower using their numbers because they don’t like team or Norv Turner and they’re just furthering their agenda. And I didn’t take Bolthead’s comments to mean that either.
The point I was just agreeing with is that none of these stats are ever truly objective as it still takes humans to choose the inputs they want to use, weigh them according to what they feel, and to come up with the equation(s) to generate the ratings.
I will say that the mathematical weightings are far more objective than polling a population of pundits for their subjective feels on how a team is doing and ranking them. They are objective only in the regard that they do level the playing field and rate each team using the same methods, so it does remove any bias for an individual team in the numbers.
But it could have a built-in bias for what the statistician felt was the most (or least) important ratings for a team to win. So therefore, a team with a mediocre or poor rating can be finding ways to win other than what the stats prefer, and a team that’s lighting up in the ratings is having a hard time winning. In which case, either they update the ratings system to improve the correlations, or they keep pushing their own ratings and weights and just say, “they’re winning in the wrong ways”.
Where you're wrong
They don’t “weigh them according to what they feel” that would be bad statistical analysis. They weight them according according to how they best correlate with wins and losses. I think that’s where you are getting confused about this “human factor”.
Wisdom can not be cultivated through ignorance of information.
by Wonko on Dec 11, 2009 11:42 AM PST up reply actions 2 recs
Correlation with wins and losses
is still subject to the vicissitudes of sample size. And the sample of football games (instances of wins and losses) every year is small. And the game changes over the span of a few years. So it’s a very hard target to hit. The value of any given stat in the aggregate changes from time to time, and the lens for determining the value in the first place is a rather cloudy one. It’s not their fault, and it doesn’t make their analysis valueless. But no aggregate statistic can ever be truly objective, sorry. Especially not with the smallish populations and rapid evolution of American Football.
by Neoplatonist Bolthead on Dec 11, 2009 12:27 PM PST up reply actions
So what I'm saying:
Their perception of “wins and losses” is unreliable, and the correlation of a particular result with “success” is equally unreliable. A particular result on a particular play under particular circumstances can be compared to league-average if the circumstances are common, but the relative value of that is dependent on an accurate assessment of the (always changing) value of that play’s outcome. Fast-moving target, that, and any inferences drawn about plays by team A against team B from similar plays by team X against team Y are categorically suspect.
by Neoplatonist Bolthead on Dec 11, 2009 12:31 PM PST up reply actions
I still have no idea what your point is
Except that it has nothing to do with the human construction “problem” you introduced to this thread.
Wisdom can not be cultivated through ignorance of information.
I guess I could clarify that more
I don’t see what you’re trying to point out beyond that statistical interpretation of a real time problem has inherent flaws. But, anybody reading statistical analysis of a real time problem should understand that going in. Just like anyone looking at subjective analysis of a real time problem (which is what human-based rankings are) would understand those (many) flaws as well.
But, beyond that, I don’t see your point.
Wisdom can not be cultivated through ignorance of information.
by Wonko on Dec 11, 2009 12:51 PM PST up reply actions 1 recs
Okay
I read your comments for like the 5th time. I guess your point is the inherent flaws don’t make the system objective? That really doesn’t make sense. It has issues, but it’s still objective.
I still think you’re struggling with what I brought up earlier in that the statistics presented by FO represent how well team/players are doing the things that the teams/players that won in the past did well. You are pointing out how their is an issue that the game will change and thus you won’t be able to tell if what a team is doing will lead to future success. That is definitely true. I don’t think anyone is trying to dispute that. However, that still doesn’t mean that the rankings aren’t objective unless they are presented as being one thing, but really measuring another thing.
Wisdom can not be cultivated through ignorance of information.
by Wonko on Dec 11, 2009 1:03 PM PST up reply actions 1 recs
Ah. So this is largely a semantic issue.
See, I agree with what you’re saying. I’m just saying that these well-understood inherent flaws are actually quite a big deal. There’s not much to be done about them except to nod and acknowledge their existence, so the tendency is to underrate their importance. That doesn’t mean they’re not going to throw the results off.
by Neoplatonist Bolthead on Dec 11, 2009 6:53 PM PST up reply actions
The way I look at it
Is they are only a big deal if you want to whine about how imperfect things are. But, in order to have some objectivity when evaluating football teams and players you need some sort of metric. You may strive for perfection, but it is just fine to settle for imperfection for the time being as long as it is the most effective method available. As you said though, it is extremely important to understand the imperfections.
Wisdom can not be cultivated through ignorance of information.
Until the Chargers win the SuperBowl this aint gonna stop...
"It dont matter if you win or lose your still a loser... said the Chargers Fan"
by ChargersWitch on Dec 11, 2009 12:40 PM PST via mobile reply actions
Oh it won't stop.
Turner will get zero credit, and they’ll find some way to diminish it. Maybe officials, or injuries, or some other such thing.
"I aim to misbehave." - Mal Reynolds
by Zach (maestro876) on Dec 11, 2009 12:41 PM PST up reply actions
Yep I feel u...
its one thing or the other and they’ll parade it like theres no ending.
"It dont matter if you win or lose your still a loser... said the Chargers Fan"
by ChargersWitch on Dec 11, 2009 1:41 PM PST via mobile up reply actions
there are other objective metrics out there
Sagarin, who posts at USA Today and is an MIT grad, has the Bolts 5th. His model is based on wins and losses.
DVOA scores every single play: it was 3rd and 3 in midfield and you got 8 yards and the NFL average is 4 yards, your DVOA on 100% for that play. You were double the average. I think that is how it works, or close to it. I think they do a lot of tweaks (competitive games vs. blow out, etc). They may try to optimize their weights against W-L’s at season end, but that is what I gleaned from their website.
So, our DVOA says to me, that we are not performing that well, on average, but doing something that wins games. And, watching the games, it does not seem like luck. We won some wons we could have easily lost (Oakland, NYG) but a lot of our wins we were in good control. It might be that they cap big plays. Like it is first and 10 and we throw a 54 yard bomb, that would have to be 1000% better than average, but they may put a cap on big plays or deaden the weighting somehow. And if we get a lot of points from big plays, then stuff like that might create the difference.
Cincy is the other team like us. Bad DVOA, good record. But I did not notice Tanier bashing them.
That all said, FO has a bias in their the teams they follow. And they don’t like Turner. And, until this run, they have had plenty of grounds for skepticism, even under the Bolts. We went from 14-2 to 11-5 to 8-8 in the regular season. Yes, I thought we played well in the playoff games, so he deserves some credit there, but it is not as though the Bolts have been playing so well consistently.
If the Bolts keep up what they are doing, Turner may have found his calling. Running an offense with a QB capable of executing his plays consistently. The D still makes me nervous, but if they can keep the game manageable in Dallas, Rivera may have really figured out his team and the 3-4. It would make AJ look like a frickin’ genius.
by jayman66 on Dec 11, 2009 2:30 PM PST reply actions 1 recs
I find DVOA's interpretation of to be much closer to the truth about the Chargers
I think in both the NYG and Oak games the Chargers were lucky. They were lucky that the situation presented itself where our best unit (passing offense) could go down and win the games. Still had to earn the win, but were lucky to have the opportunity to do so.
I also think you have to account for how bad our defense is and how average our special teams are. Both units are worse than last year and we were not exactly a first class team back then.
I think DVOA accurately portrays us as a non-elite team that, because of our really fantastic offense, still wins games. That’s enough to give me hope for some playoff wins and perhaps even a win streak that wins us a Super Bowl, but its really hard to convince me that we can hold a candle to some of the teams higher on the list when it comes to being an all-around solid team. Anyone who is ranking the Chargers much higher, especially in the top 3 or 4, is really overlooking a lot of flaws and just assuming that wins will come because they have been coming.
Wisdom can not be cultivated through ignorance of information.
Well said
The D still makes me nervous, but if they can keep the game manageable in Dallas, Rivera may have really figured out his team and the 3-4.
One part of the equation that is hard to sort out is turnovers. The Bolts have received critical red zone turnovers in NY, Denver (two) and Cleveland. What I’m not entirely clear on is if that is luck or simply good ‘Bend don’t Break’ defense. I’m starting to lean towards the latter as the defense tends to stiffen near the goal line and our run defense improves in the red zone. So against Philadelphia the defense gave up huge chunks of yards but also forced a lot of FGs; and perhaps just under what FO considers blowout territory. This is likely the same for Cleveland. I guess at the end of the day I think they are a very good team that could get hot and deep in the playoffs but will need to play at the top of their game and get a little lucky to do it. I’m also wondering if FO might underrate the BDB strategy as it gives up many successful plays versus those defenses that defend every blade of grass.
"Football is a physical sport, sometimes you have a disagreement on what's going on, and you have a discussion about it." Kris Dielman
by Brian (DaBolts) on Dec 12, 2009 8:10 AM PST up reply actions
Turnovers
Research at FO shows that forcing turnovers is a skill that defenses can be good at (although I’m not sure that red zone FF is a different skill or just a small sample of the overall skill), but recovering them is a 50/50 proposition. So, the Chargers were probably lucky to recover all those red zone fumbles, but creating them is a testament to the defense’s bend-but-don’t-break style.
Wisdom can not be cultivated through ignorance of information.
Turnovers is what made the 2007 defense so good.
I have to think a significant portion of fumble forcing/recovery is luck, with a smaller part being actively trying to strip the ball. I would guess that interceptions is more of a repeatable skill, as it depends on things like good coverage, making good breaks on the ball, and actually catching the ball. Obviously there’s luck involved, but I would guess less so than in fumbles.
But yeah, we have been significantly better this year at turnovers than last year. Not as good as in 2007, but better than 2008.
"I aim to misbehave." - Mal Reynolds
by Zach (maestro876) on Dec 12, 2009 12:53 PM PST up reply actions
Forcing fumbles is a repeatable skill, but recovering them is a 50/50 deal like Wonko said.
Bolts from the Blue // "I have got to be the most boring GM in the league." - A.J. Smith
Bloody Elbow // "I win again. Engrish is my bitch." - Steven Zucconi
by Richard Wade on Dec 12, 2009 2:43 PM PST up reply actions
So an interception is worth two fumbles
minus the value of a lost down and the average yardage loss on a recovered fumble?
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of the cheerleaders!
by Neoplatonist Bolthead on Dec 12, 2009 3:07 PM PST up reply actions
To add to the anti-Charger mystique ....
I recently conversed with a site owner regarding an application that they hosted. Having some program call errors. He was very nice & forwarded this problem to the developer.
Before he even addressed my issue, he proceeded to tell me that he hates the Chargers, particularly Philip Rivers.
I told him to bite my arse.
If the thunder don't get ya then the lightning will!!
Robert Hunter
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