The NFL season is not over, but I thought this would be a good time to collect my thoughts on roster construction in general and the Seahawks situation in particular. I’m excited to compare these ideas to what the team actually does over the next six months.
The Seahawks are in a fairly good position heading into the offseason. They have one of the league’s best quarterbacks, and quarterback is 3-10x more valuable than other positions (excluding specialists, who are even less valuable).
The relatively new nflfastR package is pretty incredible. One command and you get a local SQLite database with 20 years of cleaned play by play data:
update_db( dbdir = “/home/michael/Documents/NFL/”, dbname = “nflpbpdb”, tblname = “pbp_raw”, force_rebuild = FALSE)
And you can run the same command to update with any new games. Incredible.
Playing around with it, one measure you get is completion percentage above expectation (CPOE), which takes into account the relative difficulty of each throw and the outcomes.
Today’s question: What position groups have each team invested the most draft capital in over the past 10 NFL drafts (2010-2019)? I looked at overall leaguewide trends in draft capital from the last 10 years here.
This analysis might indicate that certain teams have a tendency to target certain position groups more than others. Let’s not overinterpret these results, though. Teams can bring in players through other means than the draft, such as resigning previous draftees, or signing free agents (veteran or undrafted).
With the Seahawks season over, I was curious to look at the current 2020 NFL draft capital of the Seahawks vs the rest of the NFL. The final draft order will not be set until after the Superbowl, but most of it is set as of today.
Here I looked at draft capital in two ways: Chase Stuart’s numbers the the older Jimmy Johnson numbers.
The Seahawks GM, John Schneider, has often traded down and generated additional picks (and surplus capital), so it would not be surprising to find him doing so again.
The view from my seats
The Seahawks are known as a run first team. The numbers strongly suggest that passing more would lead to a more successful offense.
It’s well known in the analytics community that passing is generally better than rushing. See here for some examples:
https://thepowerrank.com/2018/09/24/the-surprising-truth-about-passing-and-rushing-in-the-nfl/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/for-a-passing-league-the-nfl-still-doesnt-pass-enough/ https://www.cmusportsanalytics.com/nfl-expected-points-nflscrapr-part-1-introduction-expected-points/ Here I’ll review some basic analyses to make that point in general and for the Seahawks in particular for the 2019 regular season.
