FanPost

The Lombardi Effect - How did the transition to Lombardi affect the players performance?

Do you guys like the snazy title? Normally I go with something a little more straight forward but I decided to editorialize it a little. In any case this quick analysis was inspired bu Bighaircut's "Things I think about" fanpost. In there he waxed poetically (maybe ranted poetically?) about the Lions offense, its expectation and fans reaction to it. In that section he said

There's a common theme here that Lombardi is quite bad at his job, even though he was a rookie at his respective position as well, just like Ebron or Van Noy was.

and then went on to talk about the situation for Stafford having a rough season and stipulating that a lot of it was learning the new offense. I will admit I am one of the major "Lombardi is quite bad at this job" people but this got me thinking just how much did this new offense that Lombardi installed effect the players performances? I have dubbed this the Lombardi effect just for the grandiose sounding nature of it.

In order to study the Lombardi effect I decided to look at the difference in performance for players in the offense from Linehan's last year (2013) to Lombardi's first year (2014). I think this is fair because the offense pretty much sucked equally as much both years. In 2013 we were ranked 19th in offensive DVOA and in 2014 we were ranked... 19th! Interestingly enough our passing offense was an identical 9.9% DVOA both years and in 2013 the rushing offense was better making the whole offense slightly better but not enough to change its over all ranking.

So now we know that our offense was equally as turrible we can start looking into the differences. Now I will start by saying in general when you have two straight year of poor but consistent production from a group with two different coaching staffs you have three likely reasons why

  1. One year was a fluke and one coaching staff is poor
  2. Both years were flukes
  3. The teams talent is actually at the level they are performing at
In general I don't think the third option is highly likely. We can use PFF cumulative offensive grades per a season as a sort of talent gauge. Now these things are dependent on coaches and opponents and what not but its probably not a terrible assumption. For the Lions offense they were ranked 11th in 2013 and 14th in 2014 so their cumulative "talent" was above average even though the offense was performing below average.

Next we really want to look at #1 and to do this we can look at players who were on the team, were not at the very beginning of their careers, so no rookies, or the very end, so remove Dom and Sims, but who also did not see a dramatic change in their usage rate, so no Reggie Bush either. Once we take all this into account we are actually only left with four players on the team and one special case I will hit on later. We are going to look at their PFF grade per play as a proxy for their efficiency. Its not perfect but it is the best we have.

2013 Grade 2013 Play 2013 Grade/Play 2014 Grade 2014 Play 2014 Grade/Play
Calvin Johnson 16.8 565 0.029734513 15 493 0.030425963
Riley Reiff -1.3 1127 -0.001153505 6.8 956 0.007112971
Matthew Stafford 20.5 693 0.02958153 -6.6 705 -0.009361702
Joique Bell 12.5 625 0.02 -2 624 -0.003205128

I choose to only look at ratings that were relevant to their primary focus, so Stafford was not knocked for a poor running score and Calvin did not get credit for a good blocking score in 2013. Yes I know that those things do matter but in general those non primary grades are more fluky than anything else. What we can see from this table is that first Calvin Johnson is a consistent BEAST!!! Or to put it more appropriately he really is a machine. Beyond that we see that Reiff improved from Linehan to Lombardi while Stafford and Bell took massive steps back.

Reiffs case is interesting and I tend to think it had more to do with the natural progression of his position than anything. If we look at the research PFF did on positional progression we can see that Reiff is following almost exactly the expected performance for an offensive tackle. Stafford and Bell on the other hand are young enough to really be following a progression curve and both took massive steps back in the new offense. I also want to mention the special case which is Brandon Pettigrew, he technically does not fit our mold because his usage was way down last year but instead of increasing his efficiency like Reggie Bush did it got a lot worse.

2013 Grade 2013 Play 2013 Grade/Play 2014 Grade 2014 Play 2014 Grade/Play
Brandon Pettigrew -4.5 925 -0.004864865 -11.7 598 -0.019565217

This says nothing about Lombardi because 2013 just happened to be the best year for Grew in the last three years mostly because he had less opportunities to rack up a bad grade...

Moving on! Stafford went from having one of his best PFF graded years ever to his worst non-rookie season. Now I understand the argument that it was a new offense, he wasn't comfortable, he was used to the last one, and so forth but do those things really apply here? In one sense Stafford is pretty unique in the recent history him and Peyton Manning are the only players to spend his first 5 seasons plus as the starter with the same OC. If we go ahead and say that switching from any long term run with an OC is probably about the same level of difficulty to switch from as the one Stafford performed last year we can look at the population of QBs who went through that transition and how they performed.

PFF Last Year with long term OC First Year with new OC Two years after
Philip Rivers 28.9 -1.5 34.4
Matt Ryan 35.4 56.5 13.6
Aaron Rodgers 61 47.3 16.8
Ben Roethlisberger 19.5 35.6 15.7
Peyton Manning 38.6 34.7 -
Joe Flacco 21.1 -11.9 5.2
Eli Manning -5.1 0.6 ?

The first thing that stands out is that is a pretty good list! Especially considering that Brady and Brees both belong on it but when they had their runs with their OC it was prior to PFF grading so I could not include it but I will not that their AVs for the same year range shown above was 15,15, and then 14 for both of them. What we can see is that Brady and Brees pretty much stayed at the same level of performance just like Peyton and Rodgers did (yes Rodgers went down but was really good both years). Funnily enough those are the four QBs most people would say are the best in the league.

Outside of Super HoFers like those four it is a pretty different story. Matt Ryan, Ben Roethlisberger, and Manning all saw first year improvements with their new OC. Flacco and Rivers though had Stafford-equse dips in their performance but then both bounced back to their more typical performances the year after. Unfortunately for us in neither case was it with the same OC. Rivers coordinator got fired and the Lions thought Caldwell had done such a good job with Flacco his first full year as OC that he needed to be our new head coach. (Yes I know not exactly how it happened but come on the ironing is delicious!)

Its hard to get a whole lot of value from this but if I were to add some narrative to these numbers I would say in cases where the player is not a Super HoFer a new coach comes in has some wrinkles no one has ever seen before gooses the offense with new ideas which increases the QBs performance and then they regress back to the mean a little. The only cases where this did not happen the coaches were not around the next year, possibly because in most of these cases the first year is the best so the outlook for future years is bleak? Or more than likely HC, GM's, and owners are not patient when they are watching their franchise QB struggle. In either case its not a great sign for Lombardi.

As fans though we can take solace in the fact that even with Stafford's performance falling off a cliff our passing game maintained itself. This was pretty much solely due to the addition of Golden Tate so if we can expect Stafford to at least be a lesser version of his Linehan years and to be a net positive the passing game is likely to improve. As for the run game... well don't count on it in 2011 and 2012 we managed to some how have and average and above average running game by DVOA but while in 2011 were average in Run EPA in 2012 we were 25th indicating that we were getting yardage on good run defensives mostly because they were letting us due to the score.

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pride Of Detroit or its writers.