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In 1996, Desmond Howard Broke Punt Returns

The 1996 Green Bay Packers were one of the best teams in league history for a variety of reasons. They are one of just two teams since the merger to lead the league in both points scored and points allowed, joining the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins. [1]The Packers accomplished this feat against an essentially league-average schedule, while the Dolphins were one of three teams since the introduction of the playoffs who managed to go an entire … Continue reading

But the most historically notable performance from the Packers that season didn’t come from Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre. Nor was it from Hall of Fame defensive end Reggie White. In fact, it wasn’t anybody from either the offense or the defense. No, the Packer who really broke football in 1996 was their return specialist, Desmond Howard.

In 2014, Chase used a simple method to rank every punt returner in history. He took punt return yards, added a 15-yard bonus for any touchdown, divided by total return attempts, subtracted the leaguewide per-return average, and then multiplied by the number of returns to generate a sort of “value over average returner”. By that measure, Howard’s 1996 was, indeed, the most valuable season by a punt returner, though the difference between Howard (330 value) and second-place Patrick Peterson (321 value) was small, and if you pro-rated his performance to sixteen games, Billy “White Shoes” Johnson would come even closer still (328 value).

But for several reasons, Chase’s simple analysis underrates Desmond Howard’s 1996 campaign. I believe with the proper context, Howard’s 1996 season isn’t just the top punt return season in history, it’s possibly further ahead of second place than any player at any position has ever been ahead of the second-best historical season in any statistic.

To make my case, I’ll compare Howard’s season to the next-best seasons by Chase’s methodology, Devin Hester‘s 2007 and Patrick Peterson’s 2011. [2]I would love to add Johnson’s 1975 campaign as well, but I record-keeping in the ’70s wasn’t robust enough for these comparisons. Regardless, this list of seasons passes the smell … Continue reading

Looking at the raw statistics, Howard doesn’t really stand out. Howard (58/875/3) had more yards than Hester (42/651/4) and Peterson (44/699/4), but fewer touchdowns and fewer yards per return. Adjusting for era doesn’t change any of this: Hester averaged 6.6 more yards per return than the average punt returner (excluding Devin Hester) in 2007, Peterson averaged 6.2 more yards per punt return than the average punt returner in 2011, and Howard averaged 5.3 more yards per punt return than the average punt returner in 1996. If you multiply these values by the number of returns, Howard created 308 marginal yards vs. 279 for Hester and 273 for Peterson.

Howard had one fewer return touchdown, but return touchdowns were lower across the board in 1996. In total, Desmond Howard produced 23.1% of all punt return touchdowns during the 1996 regular season while Devin Hester produced 23.5% and Patrick Peterson 20% in their respective years. Again, everything to this point looks fairly comparable. You might think all three players were similarly effective and Howard simply cashed in on the fact that he had 30-40% more opportunities, a factor that was largely outside of his control.

(The one area where Howard does stand out from the other two is fumbles. In 2011, Patrick Peterson fielded 44 punts and fumbled three of them. In 2006, Devin Hester fielded 42 punts and fumbled five of them. Despite fielding 58 punts in 1996, Desmond Howard only fumbled one of them.)

Football Outsiders compares every return to league average and estimates how many points a unit was worth in any given season [3]The usual caveats apply; performance of an entire unit reflects the contributions of all eleven players on the field, etc.. In part because of Howard’s superior ball security, Football Outsiders values the 1996 Packers’ return unit as worth 25.3 points, the 2007 Bears’ as worth 18.0, and the 2011 Cardinals’ as worth 20.0. If you divide those point values by the total number of returns, the Packers gained 0.44 points per return, the Bears gained 0.41, and the Cardinals gained 0.43. By this measure, the Packers were slightly more efficient per opportunity, but again, all three returners were in the same ballpark.

There is one significant problem with using total punt returns as a measure of opportunity, however. Some returners are more conservative, calling fair catch or letting a punt bounce. Being more selective about which punts to return will boost a player’s per-return average. Other returners are more aggressive, trying to return everything they get their hands on, which hurts their average but results in more yards for their team.

If we instead we measure opportunity by the number of punts faced instead of the number of punts fielded, Desmond Howard actually had the least opportunity of the trio. The 1996 Green Bay Packers, despite their vaunted defense, forced 90 punts compared to 92 for the 2006 Bears and 94 for the 2011 Cardinals. This means the Packers punt return unit added 0.28 points of value per punt faced compared to 0.20 for the Bears and 0.21 for the Cardinals, a significant difference. (Alternately: Howard averaged 9.7 yards per punt, Peterson averaged 7.4, and Hester averaged 7.1.)

Of course, measuring player performance per punt presents challenges of its own. Opposing punters might deliberately kick shorter to prevent a return, which means the returner has impacted field position despite not touching the football. One way to attempt to control for this is to look at the gross and net punting averages of all punters to face each returner.

In 1996, the teams Green Bay played averaged 43.3 gross yards per punt over the whole year and 42.5 gross yards per punt against Green Bay. Teams that faced the 2007 Bears averaged 44.2 gross yards per punt over the whole season but just 40.5 per punt against Chicago. Teams that faced the 2011 Cardinals averaged 46.2 gross yards per punt over the whole season and 44.4 against Arizona. By this measure, Hester was probably the most-feared returner as punters seemingly went out of their way to avoid him, sacrificing a whopping 3.7 gross yards per punt against Chicago.

But what about net average? The teams that faced the 2011 Cardinals averaged 39.1 net punting yards, but that figure fell to 36.8 against Arizona, a drop of 2.3 yards per punt. The teams that faced the 2007 Bears averaged 37.2 net yards per punt over the whole season but just 33.1 against the Bears, a drop of 4.1 yards per punt. The teams that faced the 1996 Packers averaged 35.2 net yards per punt overall but just 31.2 yards per punt against the Packers, a drop of 4.0 yards.

Taken together, these stats tell a compelling story. Peterson’s year, while incredible, takes a clear back-seat to Howard and Hester. Hester was probably the most-feared returner of the trio, but the stats tell us that Howard’s Packers were just as effective at gaining field position and substantially better in terms of ball security. Everything leads to the same conclusion Chase originally reached: Howard’s 1996 campaign was (by a relatively thin margin) probably the best season by a punt returner.

Everything so far overlooks one crucial fact, though. To this point, we’ve looked only at each player’s regular-season performance. While a punt returner can’t reasonably be held liable for his team’s overall success and failure, Desmond Howard didn’t play just 16 games in 1996, he played 19. And while we shouldn’t penalize Hester and Peterson for not reaching the Super Bowl, we similarly shouldn’t pretend that those extra games never happened for Howard. As good as Howard was in the regular season, he was even better in the playoffs, facing 19 punts and returning 9 of them for 210 yards and one more touchdown (23.3 yards per punt returned, 11.1 yards per punt faced).

In just three playoff games, Howard managed to record what at the time were the 3rd- and 5th-highest single-game punt return yardage totals in postseason history. (They still rank 4th and 9th.) Out of 118 players with at least 6 punt returns in a single postseason, Howard’s 23.3 yard per return average is the best by 4.9 yards. (There are 132 more instances of a player having either four or five punt returns in a single postseason; Howard’s 23.3 yard per return average is better than all but two of these seasons, too.)

Moreover, Howard capped off his season by becoming the first and only player in history to win Super Bowl MVP for his contributions on special teams. A large part of that was based on a kickoff return touchdown (which is beyond the scope of this post), but he also set a still-standing Super Bowl record for punt return yards.

Overall, in 1996 Howard had the most regular-season punt return yards in history, the second-most playoff punt return yards in history, and the most Super Bowl punt return yards in history. Combined, Howard returned 67 punts for 1085 yards and 4 touchdowns, which isn’t just the highest total in history, it’s 46% more than second place.

Nobody has ever come close to the combination of volume and efficiency that Howard produced. Howard had the 2nd-most returns in history; of the top 50 seasons, Howard is the only player to average more than 13 yards per return. Counting regular season and playoffs there have been 126 players who fielded at least 45 punts in a season; only one other player (Jermaine Lewis for the 2000 Baltimore Ravens) is even over 14 yards per return, and no others are over 15. Again, Howard cleared 16.

There have been 975 seasons in history where a player returned at least 25 punts. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I’ll close with two charts that hopefully help illustrate just how far ahead of the rest of the field Desmond Howard’s 1996 campaign truly was.

 

The last 100 years have shown us that the only constant in football is change, so I hesitate to call any record unbreakable. I will say that of all the records, this is one of the ones I’d be most surprised to see fall. In 1996, Desmond Howard didn’t just break records; for one season, he broke punt returns entirely.

References

References
1 The Packers accomplished this feat against an essentially league-average schedule, while the Dolphins were one of three teams since the introduction of the playoffs who managed to go an entire regular season without playing a single team that would go on to make the playoffs.
2 I would love to add Johnson’s 1975 campaign as well, but I record-keeping in the ’70s wasn’t robust enough for these comparisons. Regardless, this list of seasons passes the smell test; Howard 1996, Peterson 2011, Johnson 1975, and Hester 2007 are the only four seasons in history where a player averaged 15 yards per return on 40 or more returns.
3 The usual caveats apply; performance of an entire unit reflects the contributions of all eleven players on the field, etc.
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Guest Post: Adam Harstad on Sammy Watkins

Today’s guest post comes from Adam Harstad, a co-writer of mine at Footballguys.com. You can follow Adam on twitter at @AdamHarstad.


It’s probably not really news at this point, but the 2014 WR class has been pretty good. How good?

Well, Jarvis Landry just broke the old record for receptions through two seasons… by 26 grabs. Jordan Matthews joined the short-list of receivers to top 800 yards and 8 touchdowns in each of their first two seasons, (a list which, since the merger, contained just five names prior to last year). Mike Evans joined Randy Moss and Josh Gordon as the only players in history with 2200 receiving yards through their age 22 season.

Allen Robinson just became the youngest player to top 1400 yards and 14 touchdowns in the same year. And 2nd-4th on that list? Randy Moss, Jerry Rice, and Lance Alworth.) Outside of the first two years of the AFL, no undrafted receiver in history has produced more yards or touchdowns in his first two years than Robinson’s teammate, Allen Hurns. [continue reading…]

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Today’s guest post comes from Adam Harstad, a co-writer of mine at Footballguys.com. You can follow Adam on twitter at @AdamHarstad.


On Saturday, the Hall of Fame selection committee will meet, lock themselves in a room, and debate the relative merits of the 15 modern-era finalists for induction. After an intense discussion, the results will be announced nationally as the final event in the festivities leading up to Sunday’s Super Bowl.

While the list of 15 finalists includes several names who have been waiting longer than they should for their call, the one that stands out the most to me is Terrell Davis, who has been a semi-finalist more than anyone else in this year’s class, reaching the top 25 ten times in his ten years of eligibility.

Hopefully the Hall of Fame committee can manage to make room for him in what could easily be a stacked class. Whatever they do this Saturday, however, will not change one simple fact: Terrell Davis should have long ago been elected to the Hall of Fame. [continue reading…]

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Today’s guest post/trivia question comes from Adam Harstad, a co-writer of mine at Footballguys.com. You can follow Adam on twitter at @AdamHarstad.


While researching my article on DeAndre Hopkins’ receiving first downs, I came across a striking statistic. Since 1994 (as far back as Pro Football Reference has queryable play-by-play data), there have been three seasons where a receiver gained at least 800 receiving yards and had at least 49.5% of that receiving yardage come while his team was trailing by at least 14 points.

Amazingly, all three seasons belonged to a different Arizona Cardinals receiver. In 1995, Rob Moore gained 907 receiving yards, and 475 (52.4%), came while his team was down by at least two touchdowns. In 2000, David Boston gained 1156 receiving yards, and 591 (51.1%), came while his team was trailing by 14 or more. In 2003, Anquan Boldin gained 1377 receiving yards, and 682 (49.5%) came while trailing by at least 14.

Three different seasons. Three different receivers catching passes from three different quarterbacks, (Dave Krieg, Jake Plummer, and Jeff Blake, respectively). The only common thread uniting them was the franchise they played for. [continue reading…]

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Today’s guest post/contest comes from Adam Harstad, a co-writer of mine at Footballguys.com. You can follow Adam on twitter at @AdamHarstad.


This guy can pick up first downs

This guy can pick up first downs

Regular readers of Football Perspective are well acquainted with the sneaky-greatness of DeAndre Hopkins, who led the NFL in percentage of his team’s receiving yards in 2014 despite not even leading his own team in targets. [1]Hopkins had 127 targets in 16 games, or 7.9 per game. Then-teammate Andre Johnson had 146 targets in 15 games, or 9.7 per game. And, indeed, by “percentage of team receiving yards”, Hopkins is having another terrific season; his 37.0% share is slightly above the league-leading 35.0% he posted last year, (though it trails the 38.6% share he carried through his team’s first 14 games in 2014).

But Hopkins is having an even better season by a far less esoteric statistic: receiving first downs. As best as I have been able to determine, the all-time record for receiving first downs in a season is 92, set by Marvin Harrison in 2002 and tied by Calvin Johnson in 2012. [2]Obviously play-by-play data is virtually impossible to come by for older seasons. Thanks to frequent guest contributor Bryan Frye, I have complete first-down data going back to 1992; however (a) the … Continue reading Through eight games this year, Hopkins has converted for a new set of downs a remarkable 54 times, putting him on pace for 108, a ridiculous 17.4% more than the previous NFL record. (For context, if a quarterback wanted to break Peyton Manning’s single-season passing yardage record by 17.4%, he would need to throw for 6430 yards.) [continue reading…]

References

References
1 Hopkins had 127 targets in 16 games, or 7.9 per game. Then-teammate Andre Johnson had 146 targets in 15 games, or 9.7 per game.
2 Obviously play-by-play data is virtually impossible to come by for older seasons. Thanks to frequent guest contributor Bryan Frye, I have complete first-down data going back to 1992; however (a) the best first-down conversion rate by a receiver with 80 catches over that span was 85%, (Michael Irvin’s 75 first downs on 88 catches in 1993), (b) only 2.9% of 80-catch receiver since 1992 even managed to top an 80% first-down rate, and (c) there were only 12 seasons prior to 1992 that even had more than 92 total receptions. Assuming an 85% conversion rate, a receiver would have needed 109 receptions to beat 92 first downs. Assuming an 80% conversion rate, he would have needed 116 receptions. Art Monk had 106 receptions in 1984, but given his sub-13 yard per reception average, I find it impossible to believe he converted on 88% of them. So with all due respect to Jerry Rice’s 1990 season and Charley Hennigan’s 1964, I feel pretty confident calling 92 receiving first downs the all-time NFL record.
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Guest Post/Contest: PFRWhacks

Today’s guest post/contest comes from Adam Harstad, a co-writer of mine at Footballguys.com. You can follow Adam on twitter at @AdamHarstad.


Like most of you, [1]I assume. I like to spend my weekends building custom databases of NFL statistics. This past weekend, while doing just that, I happened to notice that Marshall Faulk topped 2,000 yards from scrimmage in both 2000 and 2001 despite playing just 14 games each year. Which sent me scrambling to the Pro-Football-Reference.com player season finder [2]Obviously. so I could share on Twitter the novel observation that Marshall Faulk was, indeed, good at football.

As luck would have it, the humble proprietor of Football Perspective just happened to be sitting at home, trolling around on Twitter, and likewise playing with various historical databases. [3]On second thought, I doubt luck played any role. He saw my tweet and responded in kind, with a list of all NFL players sorted by average yards per game from age 25 to 28.

All of this inspired a fun back-and-forth between various other users on Twitter which culminated in me providing a list of all running back seasons with 250+ carries and 50+ yards per game receiving. It’s a rather short list featuring just 8 total seasons. Marshall Faulk accounted for four of those eight seasons, consecutively, from 1998 to 2001.

I quickly noticed an interesting thing about that last list, though. Not only did Marshall Faulk account for half of those seasons in NFL history, but he actually had the top four by receiving yards per game. In fact, if we adjust our “receiving yards per game” baseline from 50 to 54, we wind up with this list, instead.

Now that is a rather more impressive list. Using just two simple cutoffs, we had managed to create a list that was just four names long, and every single one of those names was “Marshall Faulk.”

Seguing away for a second… in the early days of the internet, before there were continents composed solely of cat pictures (or handy NFL season finders to query, for that matter), people would resort to pretty much anything to keep themselves entertained. One game that sprung from these dark times was known as “Googlewhacking”. A Googlewhack was two words that, when entered together into the search bar of the eponymous Google, matched just a single result on the entire internet.

For instance, there was once a time when searching the words “ambidextrous scallywags” (but without the quotation marks) would return just a single match. This was then a successful Googlewhack. Googlewhacks were, by their very nature, ephemeral constructs, since the very act of publishing a Googlewhack would cause the published result to show up on Google and would therefore cause the words to lose their Googlewhack status. [continue reading…]

References

References
1 I assume.
2 Obviously.
3 On second thought, I doubt luck played any role.
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The Steve Smith Postseason Post

Today’s guest post comes from Adam Harstad, who is also part of the Smitty Fan Club. You can follow Adam on twitter at @AdamHarstad.


 

One of the greatest playoff receivers ever

Smith considers letting the chip roll off his shoulder.

IS STEVE SMITH THE GREATEST POSTSEASON WR IN HISTORY?

Prior to this last weekend’s slate of games, I remarked to several friends what a treat it was that we got to watch Calvin Johnson, Larry Fitzgerald, and Steve Smith all playing on the same weekend. In addition to being three of the best receivers of the last decade, all three could lay claim to the best per-game postseason numbers in history, depending on where you set the cut-offs.

Calvin Johnson had only appeared in one postseason game prior to this season, but he made it count with 12/211/2 receiving in a losing effort. Calvin was actually the fourth player in history to top 10 receptions, 200 yards, and 2 touchdowns in a single playoff game, [1]Oddly, all four receivers to reach those marks were active this past weekend; in addition to Calvin Johnson, they were Reggie Wayne, Steve Smith, and T.Y. Hilton. but each of the three previous have played additional games to bring their per-game numbers down. Among players who appeared in at least one playoff game, Calvin’s 211-yard “average” was the best by a mile.

If you moved the cutoff to 6 games, Larry Fitzgerald’s postseason averages took over the spotlight. Following the 2008 NFL season, Fitzgerald had arguably the greatest postseason run by a wide receiver, hauling in 6/101/1, 8/166/1, 9/152/3, and 7/127/2 in his four games, including what would have been the Super Bowl-winning touchdown and a likely MVP performance if not for some heroics from Ben Roethlisberger and Santonio Holmes. Fitzgerald followed that up with a strong showing in the 2009 playoffs, catching 12/159/2 over two games. All told, Fitzgerald had 53/705/9 receiving in just six postseason appearances, for a per-game average of 8.8/118/1.5. [continue reading…]

References

References
1 Oddly, all four receivers to reach those marks were active this past weekend; in addition to Calvin Johnson, they were Reggie Wayne, Steve Smith, and T.Y. Hilton.
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