Wait, how many USC quarterbacks are starting?

As impressive as that might sound, it’s not even halfway to the record. You can take a second to think about which school had the longest run with at least one of its former players starting at quarterback, but first, another bit of trivia: I noticed that in week 12 of the 2009 season, Matt Leinart, Matt Cassel, Mark Sanchez, and Carson Palmer all started. But believe it or not, that’s not a record, either.

In week 13 of the 2000 season, five quarterbacks from the University of Washington — Warren Moon, Mark Brunell, Damon Huard, Chris Chandler, and Brock Huard — were starting in the NFL. Add in Washington State’s Drew Bledsoe and Ryan Leaf, and seven quarterbacks that played college in the Evergreen State were starting in the NFL that weekend.
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With Anquan Boldin being traded to San Francisco, he’ll have the rare opportunity to win the Super Bowl in consecutive years with different teams. Here’s another bit of trivia: if Boldin makes it back to the Super Bowl, he’ll become just the 11th player to ever make Super Bowls with three different teams. (man, the Anquan Boldin tag at Football Perspective has gotten way more use than I ever expected).

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Kruger takes down Andrew Luck.

After selecting Josh Freeman, Julio Jones and Brandon Marshall early in the draft, I needed to use my picks in rounds 4 and 5 to build the core of the rest of my team. The two most critical positions I had ignored were left tackle and pass rusher. Fortunately my need largely coincided with what was left: I didn’t see a true difference maker at corner or defensive tackle, so it was easy to focus on 3-4 outside linebackers and 4-3 ends.

On offense, my choice at left tackle was made easy once Jake Long, Trent Williams, and Tyron Smith went off the board at the end of round four. I had D’Brickashaw Ferguson with those four in my final tier of what I would consider above-average left tackles, and Ferguson ranked second to only Williams. His reputation took a bit of a hit with a a poor 2011 and the Jets general implosion since then, but Ferguson quietly had a nice rebound season last year. He allowed only two sacks in 2012 according to Pro Football Focus, and came in as PFF’s #7 left tackle. He’ll only turn 30 in December, so I think my team can count on him for another five years at least. He’s got size and great athleticism, and keeps himself in good shape, so he seems unlikely to fall off a click as he ages. As the 14th offensive tackle off the board, I think Ferguson represents strong value this late in the draft. He’s capable of being a franchise left tackle, which makes him a pick I can feel comfortable about at the end of the fourth round.
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If you’re a reader of this site and in college, chances are this opportunity might interest you.

An NFL team is looking for football research interns for the summer. There is a chance that the position could become full time after the summer if the candidate is outstanding.

All interested candidates should send a resume and cover letter to nflanalyticsintern [at] gmail [dot] com. In the cover letter, please detail any relevant analytics experience and describe one question you would like to study if you had access to an NFL team’s data. Special preference will be given to those with database and/or programming skills.

Best of luck to anyone who applies.

Welker won't have any more 'rare' drops in New England.

In some ways, it’s hard to find a comparable receiver to Welker. He’s been so productive for so long that it’s easy to be unimpressed with the 118 catches, 1,354 yards, and six touchdowns he had last year, but no receiver had ever switched teams after catching more than 101 catches in a season. Only two receivers — Muhsin Muhammad and Yancey Thigpen — gained more receiving yards in a season than Welker did in 2012 and then played for a new team the next year.

But Welker’s amazingly unique numbers are a product of playing in a very pass-friendly environment on a team that threw 641 passes last year. To compare players across systems and eras, I came up with a wide receiver ranking system last month. That will allow us to look at the best receivers to switch teams and not just the ones from the last couple of decades. For some perspective, Welker ranked 8th among wide receivers last season, although that’s without any Tom Brady-adjustment.

The table below contains a lot of information. It shows receivers who added over 200 yards of value over average in Year N and then played for a new team in Year N+1. For each player, I’ve listed his old team, his age in Year N, some traditional statistics, the amount of value added by the receiver, and his rank among wide receivers. Then starting in the “N+1 tm” category, we see his new team, his statistics in the new season, how much value he added in Year N+1 and his rank in that season.
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Mike Wallace dropped Pittsburgh for Miami.

Happy New Year to the NFL, which opened for business at 4PM yesterday. It’s been a busy couple of days, as the Seahawks (Percy Harvin) and 49ers (Anquan Boldin) acquired veteran receivers a day before the floodgates opened. The Dolphins made the biggest waves yesterday by signing WR Mike Wallace and ILB Dannell Ellerbe from AFC North heavyweights, and then later released ILB Karlos Dansby and signed OLB Philip Wheeler from the Raiders. The Colts chose to go quantity over quality by signing four different players (G Donald Thomas from New England, OLB/Colin Kaepernick turnstile Erik Walden from Green Bay, T Gosder Cherilus from Detroit, and DE Lawrence Sidbury from Atlanta). The Ravens lost Paul Kruger to Cleveland but did sign former Giants DE Chris Canty.

Tennessee made some noise signing G Andy Levitre from Buffalo and TE Delanie Walker from San Francisco, while the Chiefs picked up 3-4 DE Mike DeVito and TE Anthony Fasano from the AFC East. Chicago helped out Jay Cutler by signing TE Martellus Bennett (Giants) and T Jermon Bushrod (New Orleans), while Sam Bradford will be happy to know that the Rams added TE Jared Cook from Tennessee. The Broncos added guard Louis Vasquez from division-rival San Diego to keep Peyton Manning upright, and are rumored to be after Steelers running back Rashard Mendenhall. The Eagles won’t win the headlines, but made a couple of interesting signings in NT Isaac Sopoaga (San Francisco) and TE/HB/WR/FB/Chip Kelly chess piece James Casey from Houston. About an hour later, the Eagles added CB Bradley Fletcher (Rams), S Patrick Chung (Patriots) and LB Jason Phillips (Panthers). And there were some releases, with Ryan Fitzpatrick (Buffalo), Nnamdi Asomugha (Philadelphia), Sione Pouha (Jets), and Darrius Heyward-Bey and Michael Huff (Oakland) among the more notable cuts. You can check out Pro-Football-Reference.com’s free agent tracker to stay up to date on the latest signings.

The first few days of the league year provide fans across the country with an opportunity to ring in the new year with a dash of optimism. But how often does adding a veteran or two via trade or free agency land a team in the Super Bowl? The table below lists every notable veteran acquisition ^[1]Here, notable means having an AV of 4 or greater in Year N. by the 40 teams to make the Super Bowl since 1993, the start of the Free Agency era in the NFL. The “W/L” column shows whether the team won or lost in the Super Bowl, while the AV column shows how much Approximate Value the player provided in his first season with the new team. The N-1 Tm and N-1 AV columns show where the player came from and how valuable he was in the prior year; the table is sorted by the average of the player’s AV in Years N and N-1.
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Warfield played for Woody Hayes, Don Shula, and John McVay.

I was pretty happy when I noticed that Warfield ranked 16th in my wide receiver ranking project last month; that’s much higher than most (all?) stats-based ranking systems place him, although some would argue that it would still underrate him.

One way to understand Warfield’s statistics is to see just how infrequently his teams passed. The table below shows some of the top wide receivers in football history to enter the league since 1960, including some Warfield contemporaries like Gary Garrison, Fred Biletnikoff, Harold Carmichael, and Gene A. Washington. While career numbers are interesting, you can often learn more by just looking at a player’s best seasons.

The table below shows the top 7 seasons for each wide receiver (based on the formula from this post) and how many pass attempts per game his team attempted during those seasons:
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The master and the puppet?

The first step in trying to measure the aging patterns of quarterbacks is to figure out a sample to analyze. I decided to look at all quarterbacks who entered the league since 1970 and have since retired. I further limited my sample to quarterbacks who had at least three seasons of above-average play based on this system. That brought us to a group of 77 quarterbacks, from quarterbacks like Jon Kitna, Jay Fiedler, and Dan Pastorini to Hall of Famers like Joe Montana, Brett Favre, and Dan Marino.

While before I graded quarterbacks based on how much value over average they provided, that baseline is too high for this type of post. Instead, I gave quarterbacks credit for their value over replacement, defined as 75% of the league average. I then calculated the best three seasons of value over replacement (VOR) for each quarterback’s career to get a sense of their peak level of play. The last step was to divided their VOR in each season of their career by their peak value. Do this for each of the 77 quarterbacks, and we can get a sense of quarterback aging patterns.

There is another thing to consider when coming up with an age curve: The intuitive way is to sum up each quarterback’s value (relative to his peak) in each season and divide that total by the number of quarterbacks active at that age. Another way is to divide that total by 77, the number of quarterbacks in the study. The former method will make really young and really old ages look closer to average than they really are, but I have decided to include both methods in the picture below. The blue line represents the average performance based on the number of quarterbacks actually playing in the NFL that season; the red line shows the aging patterns when you divide by the total number of passers in the group.
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Better than Elway?

In addition to Lewis, Matt Birk of the Ravens also joins the list, and for the heck of it, I’ve included Anquan Boldin, who has hinted that he might retire. Full disclosure: I defined a player as “retiring after winning the Super Bowl” if his last season came during a year in which he played for the eventual Super Bowl champ. So Wes Chandler, who played for the ’88 49ers but retired in mid-season, is included in this list even though he shouldn’t be. Ditto Michael Dean Perry, who was on the Broncos in 1997 but actually finished the season with the Chiefs. I could filter out all the Chandlers and Perrys of the world, but my time is better spent elsewhere (for that matter, just about every person’s time is better spent elsewhere), and therefore I’ll present the full, overinclusive list instead of spending an extra hour of time fixing it and possibly not presenting it at all.

The table is sorted by the Career AV column; the AV column shows the player’s AV in his final season.
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Emmitt knows the point of a good fullback.

As it turns out, 30 of 47 Super Bowl champions saw their quarterback made the Pro Bowl. That doesn’t include the 2012 Ravens, as Joe Flacco was not a Pro Bowl selection, but it does include the ’69 Chiefs, the only team with two quarterbacks to make the Pro Bowl (Len Dawson and Mike Livingston). The Ravens did have two Pro Bowl running backs, though (Ray Rice and Vonta Leach), joining the ’93 Cowboys (Emmitt Smith, Daryl Johnston) and the ’72 and ’73 Dolphins (Larry Csonka, Mercury Morris) as the only Super Bowl champs with multiple Pro Bowl running backs.

Arguably the least represented position is cornerback, which might be relevant to yesterday’s post: the average Super Bowl champion had just 0.45 Pro Bowl cornerbacks, the lowest average among positions that always have multiple starters (as opposed to defensive tackles or inside linebackers). Both Charles Woodson and Tramon Williams made the Pro Bowl for the 2010 Packers, but eight of the last nine Super Bowl champions failed to place a single cornerback in the Pro Bowl in that season. The full table, below:
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There are four things the Jets could do with Darrelle Revis.

Option 1: Trade him before the draft to the team (not in the AFC East or in New York) willing to offer the most.

Option 2: Trade him during the five-month period after the draft but before the trading deadline, under the assumption that Revis will be able to fetch more in return once he is healthy and playing at his old level (assumption #2). [Update: As pointed out to me on twitter, the Jets will also incur the $9M penalty discussed in Option 3 if Revis is traded after June 1st.]

Option 3: Have Revis play out his contract, and then watch him sign with another team in the off-season (or enter a bidding war and try to win Revis on the open market). In return, the Jets will receive a compensatory draft pick, roughly the 100th pick in the 2015 draft. And, since Revis was given an $18M bonus on a six-year deal in 2011 — a deal that Revis has the option of voiding after this season — the Jets will also incur a nine million dollar cap penalty in 2014.

Option 4: Re-sign Revis to a mega deal now. The Jets will get a slight discount off the enormous contract Revis would get on the open market based on the questions about his knee and the fact that he’s due to make “only” $9M in 2012.

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On Tuesday, I discussed the RSP Football Writers Project, a 32-team start-up draft of every player in the NFL.  I was assigned the 32nd pick, which does bring with it one advantage.  In order to balance the values assigned with the random draft order, the selection picks for the third round is “reversed”, a common fantasy football technique known as 3rd Round Reversal.  So while I picked last in round one after 18 quarterbacks had been drafted, I got to pick first in rounds two and three.

As you now know, I drafted Josh Freeman and Julio Jones with picks 32 and 33.  At 65, there were several ways I could go.

• I think it’s hard to overestimate the value of a great passing game, so adding a receiver or tight end isan attractive option. That’s doubly true when Brandon Marshall and Aaron Hernandez were still available. Marshall was my highest-ranked receiver from last year and is relatively young; he turns 29 this month. Hernandez is 23 and is an incredible asset in the passing game.
• If you think of the big positions in the NFL as quarterback, pass rusher, and left tackle, then you probably want to fill those slots as quickly as possible. At left tackle, Duane Brown, Joe Thomas, Matt Kalil, and Nate Solder are gone. Michael Roos is a solid pick, but at 31 in October, does he fit my model of fielding a young team? Ryan Clady was a player I might have taken, but he was selected just a few picks before I was up. I didn’t see an elite player available, so I crossed this off the list (a few picks later, Matt Waldman selected Russell Okung.)
• On the pass-rusher front, Von Miller, Aldon Smith, Clay Matthews, Cameron Wake, Jason Pierre-Paul, DeMarcus Ware, Charles Johnson are all gone, as are 3-4 defensive ends J.J. Watt, Calais Campbell, Muhammad Wilkerson and Justin Smith. While there were some attractive options out there, my hope is one of them will be around when I pick again. The most interesting option was Mario Williams, a player I really wanted to take, but his struggles in 2012 were too significant to overlook.

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Don Hutson is down with era adjustments.

Calvin Johnson caught 122 passes last year for 1,964 yards and five touchdowns. In 1973, Harold Carmichael had 67 receptions, 1,116 yards and nine scores. Which season was better? You might be inclined to think Johnson’s season was much better regardless of era, but both receivers led their respective leagues in both receptions and receiving yards. But let’s think about it another way.

In 1973, all the players on the 26 teams in the NFL combined for a total of 4,603 catches and 58,009 receiving yards. That means Carmichael was responsible for 1.46% of all receptions and 1.92% of all receiving yards. Of course, with only 26 teams, we need to multiply those numbers by 26/32 make for an apples-to-apples comparison of the modern environment. If we want to transport Carmichael into 2012, that means he needs to be credited with 1.18% of all receptions and 1.56% of all receiving yards accumulated last year. That would give him 128 catches and 1,970 receiving yards, and thanks to recording 1.93% of all receiving touchdowns in 2012, 14.6 touchdowns.

This analysis is actually unfair to active players, as there are more three-, four-, and five-wide receiver sets than ever before. Elroy Hirsch gained 1,495 receiving yards in 12 games — an outstanding rate of production in any era — but that translates to an absurd 2,667 receiving yards in 2012. In Don Hutson’s magical 1942 season, after multiplying by 10/32, he gained 2.3% of the league’s receptions, 2.8% of the receiving yards, and 4.9% of the touchdowns — for a 254/3501/37 stat line.
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Matt Waldman and Sigmund Bloom are once again running the RSP Football Writers Project this off-season. Last year, a salary cap value was assigned to each player and we were asked to assemble our team within the confines of a salary cap. You can see my team here, but my basic philosophy was to invest heavily in building an elite passing offense. One of the questions we had to answer was who were our stars and why did we pick them? I wrote:

Peyton Manning is the key. With an elite quarterback and competent weapons, you can just about pencil your team in for the playoffs. With Jimmy Graham and Victor Cruz, I’ve got one player who ranked in the top three in receptions and one in the top three in receiving yards in 2011. Those three can form the cornerstone of the offense for the next three-to-five years.

This year, the RSP Football Writers Project (you can see the draft recap here or follow the picks on twitter here) is being run as a 32-team start-up draft with fantasy football style serpentine order that includes a third-round reversal. Trades are not allowed and the player pool will consist of veterans only (i.e., no players available in the 2013 draft).

We were told the draft order was random, although I choose to believe that I was assigned pick #32 because of my performance in last year’s project. Having the 32nd and 33rd picks in the draft placed me in a unique position, and I figured I’d explain my team-building methods here.
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Smith kept a low profile during his playing days.

To the extent that the Hall of Fame is supposed to mirror the consensus view, Smith’s absence from Canton is justified. But that’s only because he’s tragically underrated. If you take a normative view of how the Hall of Fame should operate, then the lack of traction Smith’s case has made is downright appalling.

No wide receiver of his caliber has ever been so overlooked. Even Art Monk was a finalist for the HOF every single year he was eligible until being inducted in 2008. Ditto Cris Carter, who was a finalist the first five years he was eligible before being selected for the Class of 2013. Tim Brown has been a finalist each of the first four years in which he’s been eligible. Smith, on the other hand, appears to have fallen through Canton’s cracks.

When I came up with my era-adjusted career rankings, Smith came in as the 12th best wide receiver in history. The issue with Smith has never been production but perception. Let’s go through the reasons Smith’s been overlooked.
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Griffin against the Sooners.

I’m not too surprised to see Geno Smith‘s game last year come in as the top game over the last eight years. And seeing Robert Griffin III come in with the third best passing game since 2005 isn’t too surprising, either. He threw for 479 yards and 4 touchdowns — including a memorable game-winner — on just 34 passes against the #5 team in the country. But #2 on the list is a game I doubt many remember. UCLA’s Drew Olson put together one of the craziest stat lines you’ll ever see in a 45-35 victory over Arizona State. Olson threw just 27 passes but racked up 510 passing yards and 5 touchdowns, en route to a ridiculous 21.5 ANY/A average. A future Jacksonville Jaguar had a big game for Olson, but it wasn’t Maurice Jones-Drew; Marcedes Lewis caught 7 passes for 108 yards and two touchdowns.

The full list of the top 400 games, below:
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Not the answer.

But I suspect Warner makes it on his first try because he was a two-time AP MVP choice, he appeared in three Super Bowls, revived two franchises, and he used to bag groceries. Few have a story as incredible as Warner’s, and sportswriters seem to love the guy, so I don’t expect there to be too many hurdles. If he doesn’t get in on the first ballot, he’ll certainly get in eventually.

And that would be a pretty rare feat. Can you name the last quarterback to be selected to the Hall of Fame who was not as a first-ballot choice?

Tim Tebow prays for not Josh McDaniels' job security.

With 2012 in the books, I wanted to provide a quick update. While Cam Newton is not a bust and the jury is still out on Christian Ponder (although some are calling for OC Bill Musgrave to be fired), it’s worth noting the situation of the other two first round quarterbacks. In Tennessee, OC Chris Palmer was fired in part for yet again failing to develop a rookie quarterback, this time with Jake Locker as the prized pupil. And in Jacksonville, a year after HC Jack Del Rio and OC Dirk Koetter were shown the door for largely non-Gabbert-based reasons, the GM who selected Blaine Gabbert — Gene Smith — has been fired, along with the 2012 HC (Mike Mularkey).
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The uniform worn by the Boston Redskins in 1935

The nickname ‘Redskins’ predates the team playing football in Washington. The organization began playing football in 1932 — in Boston — under the nickname Braves. That was changed in 1933 to Redskins, and the franchise moved to Washington in 1937.

So where did the name Braves come from? The NFL was a fledgling league in the ’20s and ’30s, and teams in that era often chose names synonymous with the local baseball team. George Halas saw the success of the Cubs and named his team the Bears. When the Portsmouth Spartans moved to Detroit in 1934, the name “Lions” made sense for a city that already loved the Tigers. Major League Baseball’s San Francisco Giants began playing in New York in the 19th century, so it didn’t take the football team long to come up with a nickname in 1925. Like the Giants, the Boston football team simply copied one of the baseball team’s names — and they didn’t pick ‘Red Sox’. In 1932, the Atlanta Braves were still playing in Boston at Braves Field, and since that’s where the football team was scheduled to play, I imagine the team spent all of several seconds coming up with a name.
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Yesterday, I ranked every quarterback in college football last season. Today, I’ll do the same for every quarterback since 2005. If you read yesterday’s article, you can skip the next three paragraphs, which explain the system I used.

These guys were great in college.

Once I have calculate the ANY/A for each player, I then adjusted their ratings for strength of schedule. This involves an iterative process I described here and is virtually identical to how I calculate SRS ratings in college football on the team level. You adjust each quarterback’s ANY/A (weighted by number of pass attempts) for the qualify of the defense, which is adjusted by the quality of the quarterbacks it faced, which is adjusted by the quality of all the defenses all of those quarterbacks faced, and so on. After awhile, the ratings converge, and you come up with final, SOS-adjusted ANY/A ratings.
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The Chiefs play the Baylor game on an endless loop for the other 31 teams.

There are many differences between college and professional football, but many of the same stats still matter. For quarterbacks, Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt is still the king of the basic stats ^[1]For the uninitiated, ANY/A is calculated by starting with passing yards per attempt, adding 20 yards for each touchdown and subtracting 45 yards for each interception, and subtracting sack yards lost … Continue reading, and it is arguably even more important in college where teams play at varying different paces.

There’s a small problem, however, if you want to calculate ANY/A at the college level: the NCAA counts sacks as rush attempts and sack yards lost as negative rushing yards. I manually overrode ^[2]Unfortunately, some estimation was involved. The player game logs at cfbstats do not identify quarterback sacks, but the team game logs do. So for each quarterback, we know how many passes he threw … Continue reading that decision in my data set, so going forward, all rushing and passing data will include sack data in the preferred manner (keep this in mind when you compare the statistics I present to the “official” ones).
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In the pre-season, I wrote three pieces on Cleveland Browns rookie Trent Richardson.  As part of a thought experiment, I wondered who would lead the NFL in rushing yards from 2012 to 2021? I narrowed my finalists to LeSean McCoy, Beanie Wells (was I drunk?), DeMarco Murray (ouch), Richardson and the rest of the rookies, and then a few college running backs. I concluded that Richardson was the obvious frontrunner, with McCoy, Doug Martin, and Marcus Lattimore (double ouch) as the next best bets. I’m not really sure 2012 helped clarify the issue, although Martin and Alfred Morris certainly raised their chances.

Then in August, I looked at the production of the highest drafted running back in each draft class.  I discovered that slightly fewer than half of the highest drafted running backs led their class ^[1]Note that this only includes drafted running backs. in rushing yards as a rookie; as you can see, “the field” also turned out to be a better bet than Richardson in 2012:

In that post, I also noted that the running back drafted first in his class was slightly less successful over the course of his career: only one-third of the highest-drafted running backs finished with the most career rushing yards in their class.

The final post on the topic ended up being more relevant to Alfred Morris than Richardson. In August, I compared how the top rookie running back performed over the rest of his career relative to the other members of his class. From 1992 to 2002, 10 of the 11 backs to lead their class in rushing yards as rookies ended up finishing with the most career rushing yards. But in recent years, that trend has reversed itself: the odds are long that Ben Tate (2011), LeGarrette Blount (2010), Knowshon Moreno (2009 and competing with Arian Foster and LeSean McCoy), or Steve Slaton (2008) will also finish with the best careers from their class.

So where do we stand on Richardson and Morris? A year later, how much credit do we give Richardson for having been the #3 pick in the draft? For Morris, how much do we downgrade him for being a 6th round pick? And how does the presence of Robert Griffin III complicate things?
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The GSOT.

From 1995 to 1997, the Denver Broncos also pulled off this feat. You could probably guess Shannon Sharpe, Rod Smith, and Ed McCaffrey, but they were joined by Vance Johnson and Anthony Miller in ’95, Miller and Patrick Jeffers (!) the following season, and Jeffers and Flipper Anderson (!!) in 1997.

That leaves just two teams. Bill Belichick’s Cleveland Browns are one of them, as Eric Metcalf, Derrick Alexander, Mark Carrier, Michael Jackson, and Keenan McCardell were all on the 1994 team. Today’s trivia question focuses on the first team to roster five players who, before or after, had a 1,000-yard receiving season.

As this question is, well, impossible, I’ll simply list the players from “least useful” to “most useful” in terms of guessing the team and year. Post in the comments after which player you figured it out!

And you thought the 'Luck' puns were bad...

Guards generally don’t get drafted so early. It’s not always easy to typecast a player as a guard (as opposed to a center or tackle), but according to Pro-Football-Reference, Chris Naeole (Colorado) is the last guard to be selected in the top 10, when the Saints took him at 10 in 1997. Before that, you have to go back to 1988, when Dave Cadigan (USC) and Eric Moore (Indiana) went to the Jets and Giants. The last guard selected in the top five was Bill Fralic of Pittsburgh, who was taken by the Falcons with the second pick in the 1985 draft.

But when it comes to guards, there’s an even rarer feat than landing in the top five of the draft. The last time any rookie made the Pro Bowl at guard – regardless of draft position – came in 1983. Can you name him?

All your NFL draft needs will not by satisfied by Football Perspective. I’ll be writing some meta draft articles, discussing draft pick value, historical expectations, and the like, but I won’t delve too deeply into the current crop of prospects for the 2013 draft. Fortunately, there are many excellent resources out there. I asked Sigmund Bloom and Matt Waldman for their thoughts on some of the best writers covering the 2013 draft. Listed below are their excellent recommendations (along with a few of my own) that should serve your draft needs well; I have also provided links to the twitter accounts of each writer (click on the person’s name for their twitter feed) for the more social media-friendly readers out there:

• Gil Brandt and Daniel Jeremiah both write at NFL.com (Brandt; Jeremiah)
• Josh Norris can be found at Rotoworld
• Rob Rang and Dane Brugler contribute at CBS Sports
• Eric Stoner and Ryan Lownes are both at Bleacher Report (Stoner’s profile; Lownes’ profile), and each does some work on the the side
• Ryan Riddle and Matt Miller can also be found at Bleacher Report
• Russ Lande is a must-read at the National Football Post, and he has his own site, RussLande.com
• Matt Bitonti writes at DraftDaddy
• Tom Melton has his own draft blog
• Eric Galko and Alex Brown can be found at Optimum Scouting
• Scott Wright and Shane Hallam are at Draft Countdown
• Walter Cherepinsky and Charlie Campbell publish a ton of material for Walter Football
• Chris Steuber is at Ourlads
• Josh Buchanan is your resource for small-school prospects
• Tony Pauline writes at Draft Insider
• Lance Zierlein can be found at The Sideline View

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Russell Wilson is too awesome for snide comments.

For example, have you ever considered how rookie quarterbacks performed compared to how their teams passed in the prior year? David Carr, Tim Couch, and Kerry Collins took over expansion teams, but we can compare the passing stats of the other 45 rookie quarterbacks to the team stats from the prior season. To compare across eras, I am grading each individual and team relative to the league average each season.

Let’s start with Net Yards per Attempt. Ben Roethlisberger averaged 7.41 NY/A in 2004 when the league average was 6.14; therefore, Roethlisberger was at 121% of league average. Meanwhile, the 2003 Steelers under Tommy Maddox were at 99% of league average. For each of the 45 rookie quarterbacks, I plotted them in the graph below. The Y-axis shows how the quarterback performed as a rookie, while the X-axis shows how his team performed in the prior season. Because it makes sense to think of “up and to the right” as positive, the X-axis goes in reverse order. Take a look – I have an abbreviation for each quarterback next to his data point:
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On Monday, I explained my methodology for ranking every wide receiver in football history, and yesterday, I presented a list of the best single seasons of all time. Today the career list of the top 150 wide receivers. As usual, I implemented a 100/95/90 formula, giving a player credit for 100% of his production in his best season, 95% of his value in his second-best season, 90% in his third year, and so on. The table below is fully sortable and lists the first and last year each person played wide receiver ^[1]Note that I have excluded seasons where a wide receiver played running back or tight end. This is generally not a big deal, but does hurt someone like Lenny Moore.; you can use the search feature to find the best receiver to ever play for each team (for example, typing ‘ram’ for the Rams ‘clt’ for the Colts.)
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Yesterday, I explained my methodology for ranking every wide receiver in football history. Today I’m going to present a list of single-season leaders, which presents some problems.

I think the method I described yesterday does a good job adjusting for era, as receivers are only given credit for their yards above the baseline, which is different each season. But there are some other complicating factors unique to football. Seasons have had varying lengths: a receiver who plays 12 games in a 12-game season can’t be penalized the way you would penalize a receiver who only plays in 12 games now. Since older receivers are generally at a disadvantage for many reasons, I decided to simply pro-rate the value for all non-16 game seasons as if it was a 16-game season. However, I have also included downward adjustments for players in other leagues and during World War II. ^[1]The fine print: For players in 1943, 1944, and 1945, and for players in the AAFC, I only gave the receivers credit for 60% of the value they created. For the AFL, I gave players 60% of their value in … Continue reading

The table below lists the top 200 wide receiver seasons of all-time.
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We know how this story will end.

The first step in this system is to combine the three main stats — receptions, receiving yards and receiving touchdowns — into one stat: Adjusted Catch Yards. We know that a passing touchdown is worth about 20 yards, so I’m crediting a receiver with 20 yards for every touchdown reception. Next, we need to decide on an appropriate bonus for each reception.

We want to give receivers credit for receptions because, all else being equal, a receiver with more receptions is providing more value because he’s likely generating more first downs. I looked at all receivers over a 12-year period who picked up at least 30 receiving first downs. I then used the number of receptions and receiving yards those players had as inputs, and performed a regression to estimate how many first downs should be expected. The best-fit formula was:
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