Interesting 538 article on the Rams success running the ball - and they claim its because of formations

Submitted by jbrandimore on January 31st, 2019 at 2:47 PM

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-secret-to-the-rams-blocking-success-isnt-the-linemen-its-sean-mcvay/?ex_cid=story-twitter

Interesting observation in this article is they are claiming that the best rushing team in the recent past was JH's 49ers that made yards running into stacked boxes.

Is there a chance he learned the wrong lesson from this "success"?

MGoBoard

Football

MGoTrumpet

January 31st, 2019 at 2:56 PM ^

Even when he's wrong he's right!

Harbaugh II.gif

Joined: 05/16/2018

MGoPoints: 5271

stephenrjking

January 31st, 2019 at 3:07 PM ^

I read this yesterday. I found its premise intriguing, and the charting of anticipated ypc by field position and box composition is interesting.

But it doesn't even come close to answering the thesis of the headline. Why is Sean McVay the reason the Rams run well? Other than waving its hand vaguely toward his use of 11 personnel, it never says. And their use of the "adjusted line yards" stat that places the Rams in fifth amongst recent teams while the 49ers under Harbaugh are first directly contradicts the thesis.

Part of this is because they never really explore how many blockers are in use against these 6 and 7-man fronts that they're discussing. No stats to support it. No discussion of the effectiveness of the Rams receivers in blocking, or what happens when they use jet motion to divert defenders. This stuff is all relevant, and never addressed. It's 538, so they use statistics, but their stats simply do not tell the story that the headline or the introduction suggests that they will.

There's some really interesting stuff in that article, but it is also rather disappointing.

Joined: 03/15/2012

MGoPoints: 20143984

Tex_Ind_Blue

January 31st, 2019 at 3:44 PM ^

Sometime people use statistical methods and packages on a data set, simply because the data set is there. This is one of my many pet peeves. Nuance is lost and with it proper understanding and future evolution.

As an example, Michigan MBB goes into long scoring droughts in a game. Sometimes once, sometimes twice or more. Just plotting the number of times MBB went into a 4 minute scoring drought over multiple seasons will tell us how likely are they to go in a funk in the next game. This doesn't say whether the opposing defense was strong or some personnel grouping always leads to a scoring drought. I would be curious to see someone put some numbers together for that :)

Joined: 12/31/2014

MGoPoints: 7717