Who Dat Report

Here’s a quick graph of the greatest Saints receivers in terms of receptions (minimum 100) and yards per catch. I feel like Joe Horn somehow gets overlooked these days, but this plot shows why he shouldn’t be. Same with Eric Martin, especially given the era he played in. Data from Pro Football Reference.

Here’s each team’s average points scored and allowed including all years from 1978-2012. Data from repole.com and cleaned up by me.

Administrative notes: I marked the team by their current location, so STL includes the Rams games when they were in LA. CLE includes all of the Browns data, BAL is just the Ravens stuff. Also: I had forgotten about the Tennessee Oilers.

Other notes: Pittsburgh’s defense is hurt by the fact that the data starts well into the Steel Curtain era. Tampa and Cleveland have been historically bad on offense and kind of average on defense. Arizona has just been historically bad.

Here’s another plot using DVOA data from Football Outsiders and salary data from The Guardian. This time, I plotted offensive and defensive spending and wins.

Note that The Guardian’s salary data is only approximate, and other sites have different measures of how much teams spent. Oakland’s spending, for example, had to have been a bit higher than this, right? So take this as roughly right, which is good enough for our purposes.

2 interesting things:

(1) five of the seven teams that fired their coach (represented in the graph with a *) spent above league average on offense.

(2) Of course Bill Belichick can take a team with league average salaries and coach them to the AFC Championship game. Of course.

I updated the 2014 offensive and defensive cost-efficiency graphs to include a third variable: number of wins. To do this, I had to switch from Stata to R, which is good, because the whole purpose of this is to help me improve my skills with these programs. Anyway, number of wins is represented by the color of the marker for each team, with darker blues meaning more wins. I also added an asterisk next to teams that fired their coach. (UPDATE: I forgot to put an asterisk by Tennessee, who did fire their coach. Whoops.)

Here’s the offensive graph. Again, DVOA from Football Outsiders and salary data from The Guardian.

Next, defensive. Remember with defense, the LOWER the DVOA, the better, so teams in the lower left quadrant were the most cost efficient.

Interesting that bad, expensive offense seems more likely to get a coach fired than bad, expensive defense. If I can get historical salary data and more free time, that might be worth exploring.

Here’s a scatterplot comparing 2014 defensive expenditures to defensive DVOA. Remember that a lower defensive DVOA is better, so the lower-left quadrant is the most cost-efficient part of this graph. I (somewhat arbitrarily) highlighted the most efficient and least efficient teams.

Looking at this graph, Carolina’s defense was probably the most efficient in the league in terms of production per dollar, probably thanks to young, cheap talent like Luke Kuechly. As for the Saints, they spent a bit above average and were a bit above average, about like you’d expect.

Also notable: how much better Seattle was than the rest of the league, presumably because they are a bunch of cheating cheaters.

DVOA data from Football Outsiders and salary data from The Guardian.

For grins, I plotted offensive DVOA (Football Outsiders’ opponent-adjusted measure of offensive efficiency) vs salary spent on offense. As expected, the teams that spent more money generally tended to have higher offensive DVOAs, though there were plenty of exceptions. The upper-left corner is the “super efficient” quadrant: teams that got above average offenses despite spending below average money. The lower right corner is the “pack your bags, coach” quadrant, where teams spent above average $$$ and got below average output. Note that 4 of the 6 teams in that quadrant fired their coaches, and the Giants likely would have if Coughlin wasn’t a multiple Super Bowl winner.

The Saints weren’t particularly cost-effective, but they were good on offense. They spent a lot and got a lot, which helped them reach the second round of the playoffs. Not bad.

DVOA data from Football Outsiders, salary data from The Guardian, of all places.

I’m working on some visualizations of the Saints’ season in my spare time. Which I don’t have any of, so this could be the last one. Anyway.

Here’s the Saints’ 2014 offensive and defensive DVOA rankings by week. Since it’s the ranking, the lower the better. All data from Football Outsiders. Since this is DVOA, the ratings are a bit flaky in the beginning of the year before becoming more reliable later. The Saints were fairly stable after about week 12, though the offense got a little worse and the defense a little better.