Rewind: Positional Value Is Not a Crock

00:00:00
Speaker 1: What's up, everyone. It's JJ with another Late Round podcast rewind today's shows from two years ago, and it's actually one of my favorite Late Round podcast episodes of all time because it's sort of just one giant rant. After New York took Saquon Barkley with his second overall pick in the twenty eighteen NFL Draft, Giants GM Dave Gettleman said to the world that positional value was a crock, which is absolutely absurd. So I broke down why Gettleman was wrong and why he's still wrong on a show from two years ago, and of course, within the discussion, I relate it back to fantasy football because that's what we all care about the most within the context of football, of course. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy the rewind and I'll talk to you on Friday with this week's Mailbag episode. Todave Gettleman, the devaluation of running backs is quote a croc. I think a lot of that stuff is nonsense. I think it's someone who had decided to get into the analytics of it and went through whatever. At the end of the day, a great player is a great player. No, guys, really, that's not a quote that I pulled for my Twitter mentions. That's a quote from an actual NFL general manager, and that general manager selected a running back with a second overall pick in this year's draft. Now I need it to be known that I love Saquon Barkley, that running back who is selected second overall by the Giants on Thursday night. I think Barkley is the best running back prospect that we've seen in probably over a decade and a half. And sometimes it's difficult to understand how I can say that I love Saquon Barkley and yet I can't fathom taking him with a top pick in the NFL draft. I get that it seems a little backwards, but it has to do with this thing called positional value, something that general manager Dave Gettlman thinks is a croc. And his reasoning is because a great player is a great player, and that's complete and utter hot garbage. When I analyze a topic a lot on social media or on this podcast, I'll get responses from people telling me to just give it a rest, that I'm overanalyzing the situation. But the reason I do it is because I'm so so over National Football League front offices making fans of the game dumber. This is not an arrogance thing either. Let me tell the world right now that I get things wrong. I am wrong all the time. This has nothing to do with me really wanting to prove people wrong and be right with some analysis that I've done. Because this past week I did a long study on why running backs should be devalued. Perhaps you think I'm on this crusade because I'm just trying to promote some research that's not true. So to prove that that's not true, Let's go about this from a completely different angle. If you think running backs are valuable in some way, then fine, we'll lead the discussion with that. We'll kick things off with the assumption that my analysis was wrong and that running backs do help you win. Even under that assumption, you could still very easily dispute Dave Gettelman's remarks about positional value being irrelevant. And it's due to the fact that there are predetermined contract values for players selected in the NFL draft, Meaning, no matter who the Giants selected at the second slot in the NFL Draft, they'd make the same amount of cash as Saquon Barkley is about to make. This is why, no matter how you feel about a particular position in football, there is some form of psay value because value is determined as relative worth. Value is what you're extracting versus something at a replacement level, and what you're relating Saquon Barkley's contract to is the rest of the running back contracts that are being handed out in today's NFL and of the major positions in football. So I'm not talking about like long snapper and punter. Here running backs get paid less money than everyone who doesn't play fullback. Fullback is the only position making less money than running backs on average, and it's not even a real position in this era's NFL. This is why Dave Gettleman's answer to positional value is making all of us dumb. Imagine a world where someone hands you one hundred dollars and says, go take yourself to a dinner. Go use this one hundred dollars on a nice meal, but know that all the money that's left over will come back to me. You don't get to keep what's left over. What kind of meal would you get? Because here's what Dave Gettlelman did. He said to himself, you know I really like eating a Bojangle's four piece chicken Supreme. It's one of my favorite meals, and I know what I'm getting out of that meal when I perch. So I'm gonna purchase a seven dollars four piece chicken Supreme with this one hundred dollars that you just handed me. Dave Gettleman could have risked going to a fancy restaurant that he's never been to, but he decided to go to a fast food joint that has good chicken. He decided that safety was more important than value. The crazy thing is that we run into the same kind of situations in our fantasy football leagues. And no, guys, I'm not saying our fantasy leagues have the same type of decision making pressure as the NFL draft does. Please don't take that the wrong way. What I'm saying is we're factoring cost and positional value while we draft all the time. We know Aaron Rodgers is a relatively safe option in fantasy football drafts. We know he's going to produce, So why doesn't he get drafted in the first round because of positional value When you can select a really reasonable quarterback in the fifteenth round, And if you only need one quarterback, why would you then get Aaron Rodgers in the first guys. Dave Gettelman is the fantasy football owner who keeps picking quarterbacks over and over again because he thinks that he can trade one of them. Once the season starts, he'll get six of them. And while the draft is going on, he's gonna smirk at all the other owners in the room and he's gonna look at them and say, you guys are gonna need these quarterbacks eventually. And that's really not even an exaggeration through Gettleman's words and actions, that's precisely what he'd do. So here's what we've established so far. Positional value is a thing because there is a market in real football. That market is replacement level players and what you'd have to pay through a contract. Because Barkley was the second overall pick, he's now one of the highest paid running backs in the league. If it was a quarterback, he'd be something like the twenty second most expensive player. Sam Darnold actually will be the twenty ninth most expensive quarterback next season. At the fantasy football level, we know positional value matters because it's freaking obvious that it matters whether you're consciously doing this or not. During a draft, you're realizing that positional values exist, which is driving you to wait on positions like quarterback and tight end. Now, Gettleman did make football related comments last night and how Saquon Barkley is going to impact the Giants. One thing that he said, according to the New York Daily News, was quote, this kid makes our quarterback better. He makes our wider shivers better, he makes our offensive line better. He makes our defense better because we will have a much stronger ability to hold the ball. So in my running back article, I reference the study done by Ben Baldwin that was published on Football Outsiders that dug into the notion that a running back helps a defense because it keeps the defense fresh. And Ben concluded the following the main and perhaps the only channel through which an offense can help a defense on a per drive basis is through field position. Turnovers in quick three and outs make a team more likely to give up points on the following drive. But this appears to have everything to do with field position and nothing to do with a defensive rest time. In other words, whether it's one minute or eight minutes, Knowing how long a defense has had to rest tells one nothing about how the defense will perform given its starting field position. Should Saquon Barkley help the Giants move the ball down the field? Yeah, but it should be with his receiving ability and not his rushing ability. If we're talking about field position, then we should be talking about what's been more impactful and efficient in the NFL over the last fifteen years, and that's throwing the football. According to number five is expected points model, the difference between a quarterback pass and a running back rush over the last five years has never been smaller than point zero eight points in a given season, meaning a random rush is providing considerably less value than each pass. Now, if you don't know about expected points models, that's fine. You can think of this in terms of simple yardage as well. During the last five seasons, a pass attempt has yielded on average seven point one five yards. The average running back carry has yielded four point one zero yards. So ask yourself what is actually moving the chains. I won't sit here and say running is irrelevant, because it's not irrelevant. I'm merely pointing out that if we're going to credit something for extending drives and creating better field position. It shouldn't be the running game, it should be the passing game. And Saquon Barkley is arguably the best pass catching running back prospect of this generation. I can't even dispute that the problem is that the typical running back target during this five year timeframe has yielded about six yards, while a target to wide receivers and tight ends has brought about a yard and a half more per target. And yes, Barkley certainly isn't going to be just average, but according to the data that I compiled, running backs don't consistently hit well above average marks and per target efficiency through the air, not even Le'Veon Bell. So it's not that Saquon Barkley won't matter. It's that it's very hard for him to consistently matter year in and year out, especially at a position with a short shelf life. But the bigger point I think here is that the Giants we're talking about being this running team now that they have Saquon Barkley, and I actually think that's not what you want to do if you have Saquon Barkley. And it's not just because running is so much less efficient than passing is, but that the Giants still have a lot of offensive line holes to fill. It's because that's not really why you're getting Saquon Barkley. You need to maximize his work as a receiver and get creative with the offense to create mismatches. Now. I do think that they see that, of course, but I also would have liked the coaching staff in front office to be more honed in on that sort of talk rather than we got to run the football to win. A key point I made in my running back study, too, is that we're also looking at descriptive data. This is data based on how coaches and offense is used players historically. If the Giants find ways to maximize the running back position as a receiver more than other teams have in history, then that would be great. That would be revolutionary. But I also think that's a little foolish to assume that that's about to happen, even if we base all of this on just their actions. I have a hard time believing a team is going to revolutionize the game when their GM doesn't even believe in positional value. I've seen comments asking me if I'm ready to die on this running backs should be devalued hill And my answer to that is that I don't die on hills. What I write about, what I analyze, what I talk about on this podcast. It's coming from a place of passion. It's coming from the perspective that I see mistakes happening in the NFL and in the fantasy football world, and I want to explain why I see those things as mistakes. I'm not always one hundred percent correct. NFL teams prove me wrong all the time, and the awesome fantasy football community does that as well. But like anything you do at work, when you do a giant report on something and you share it with an audience, I'm doing the same thing. I'm saying, look, guys, maybe teams really aren't thinking about this properly based on this pilo of evidence. I mentioned this in my running back article, but I think that there's also a correlation does not imply causation issue that's spread throughout the league. It's always been that way though. Evan Silva noted on Tuesday's podcast how the NFL is a copycat league, and I think it's a copycat league because teams aren't thinking outside the box and actually digging into the real reasons certain things are happening. Did Ezekiel Elliott help the Dallas defense in twenty sixteen? To most the answer to that is yes, because Dallas went from a middle of the pack defense in terms of points against to a top five to one, and that happened all after they drafted Ezekiel Elliott. But the Dallas defense actually ran more plays in twenty sixteen than they did in twenty fifteen. They weren't any more rested because of the running game, and Dallas's offense had a time of possession that was just three seconds longer from twenty fifteen to twenty sixteen as well. But how many times have you seen media members cite Elliott as a reason to get a running back early? Or what about Le'Veon Bell? I think Le'Veon Bell is one of the best running backs that I've ever seen. But isn't it kind of interesting that he's missed sixteen relevant games for the Steelers since he's entered the league. This includes games where the Steelers were resting starters, and in those contests, the Steelers have actually averaged more points per game than when they had Le'Veon bell on the field. Don't you find it odd that Todd Gurley was so bad from a production standpoint in twenty sixteen before his monster twenty seventeen season, or that Adrian Peterson didn't make a run in the playoffs until he got a quarterback. I've said it time and time again. Running backs can matter. It's just very hard for them to matter consistently, and as a result, I view the position much more as a luxury than a necessity in football. And it's really not that different than the way that I view quarterbacks and fantasy football. It's not that quarterbacks can't matter, it's that it's very difficult for them to matter. It's very difficult to pinpoint the quarterback who's going to give you a significant edge at the position in fantasy football. So as we move forward, let's continue to think about this correlation and causation issue. In the NFL, here's the thing. The Giants were actually better than their record indicated last year. Not only did they suffer key injuries, especially on offense, but they were the eighth worst team in football according to number fires metrics. They realistic should have been drafting a little bit lower than they did, and when you've got a decent enough team getting back players like Odell Beckham, you're going to see an increase in the win column. The Giants are going to be a lot better in twenty eighteen than they were in twenty seventeen, but it's going to be because of far more than just Saquon Barkley. Now, to be fair, there is one thing that I agree with Dave Gettleman about. Saquon Barkley is really really good. I think he's going to be a stud, and my takes on running backs certainly aren't fantasy football related. Saquon Barkley will produce as a fantasy football asset. He's going to post numbers, but just remember there's a lot more to this than just raw production at the running back position.