Joe Goodberry - PFF trends of rookie Guards through Year 3

[jabor]

(04-23-2022, 07:24 PM)ochocincos Wrote: As usual, Joe Goodberry did some heavy lifting of PFF grades to see if there were any worthwhile trends.

Back in March, he looked to see what the average PFF grade was for rookie Guards with 500+ snaps since 2015 (47 players).
Then he tracked 2nd year, and then 3rd year.
He also added the difference between years 1-2, 2-3, and 1-3.

Kudos to Ochocinos for the OP info!

As he implies by his "caveats" later in his post, you have to put statistics into context for them to tell a story accurately.

I'm naturally skeptical of stats that just consider the most popular form of Avg (the "mean"), so I was curious what the "median" PFF change was. I've attached a table I threw together for you to look at.

I was surprised that only 58% showed cumulative improvement from years 1 to 3. IOW, 42% of draftees got worse!!

I would be interested to numbers for years past year 3. Anecdotally, it seems to me that linemen continue to improve with experience and that experience, not physical gifts, leads to a lot of growth.

Caveats:
- I don't account for round drafted. You may think that's an important factor affecting whether a lineman can improve.
- I'm uncertain whether numbers reflect a specific position or is averaged over multiple positions.
- The (potential) effect of a position change is not accounted for.
- Injury-related factors that could have affected a player's performance are not accounted for.
- No consideration is given to run-vs-pass-vs-combined PFF values. I think most of us would give emphasis on pass values because of our concern for Burrow's health.
- I only included players who have played for 3 years.

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Quick Stats Comments (just because I think it's very possible many of us forgot this from school)
-- The AVG typically used in conversation is the "mean," which is adding all values together and dividing that total by the number of variables.
-- Alternative Avg to consider... the "median," which is the middle value of all the numbers you are looking at.
-- Quick example. Take 3 numbers: 1,5,30. The Mean (what we normally use) is 12; the Median is 5. Big difference.
-- The danger of a mean is that large numbers can skew it. The median is not adversely affected by values far outside distribution, and which may be outliers.