unome
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ORIGINAL: The Happy Norseman
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ORIGINAL: unome
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ORIGINAL: TJSweens
WAR doesn't make a lot of sense in either sport. It amounts to deriving a context free value based on crunching context loaded numbers. It is valid in the sense that players with good stats will have a good WAR. As far as being an accurate method of ranking individual individual players or ranking the importance of one position vs another, not so much.
It was a pretty interesting study, although far from a conclusive report that should reconfigure your viewpoint on everything we know about football. It was fascinating to see how much, or how little, difference playing a backup had in some positions and not others. The more interesting part of the analysis was how small the difference was on defense. This is all really important in a capped league because generally you should not put in big salary cap dollars on Running Back, IOL, cornerbacks (defense starts at the corners?) and Safety by these numbers and spending your money or draft capital on offense, especially QB, WR, TE and Tackles seems to make the most improvement. Some of it was obvious, like starting QBs are super valuable, but the relative lack of importance of any one player on defense being out was very interesting, especially in how little negative impact having a starting Cornerback out was.
Using WAR to compare NFL player positions might have some benefit i.e. comparing LG "a" to LG "b", but using it to compare the "value" of completely different positions doesn't square with the reality of the NFL. We've all seen what happens when a team's starting corner goes down and is replaced by the inferior player. The opposing QB relentlessly attacks that player, usually with a lot of success. Conversely, we've rarely seen a team's offense suddenly become stagnant when their starting TE is replaced by a backup. If "value" is judged by which player has the most impact on his team's ability to execute it's game plan, then these WAR values don't align with what we've all witnessed on the football field.
I am not saying the results are unassailably true, I would have to believe in the unimpeachable validity of WAR and the ability to isolate the variability of using a replacement player to do so and this is not what I believe. However, if the value of a starting TE being out had little value on a team or a starting CB being out had a big effect on a team, wouldn't the data show it? And I did not read every page of the study so I may have missed this, but maybe you have touched upon a different effect that may not have been measured at all in the study. What happens when a Cornerback, or any position, goes out in the middle of a game? Since the game plan would not have been developed for that player, the effect of this injury replacement could well be higher than just using a replacement starter in the game due to injury or suspension. Plus, a third Cornerback is practically a starter anyway so maybe starting a third corner in the lineup is not a big issue, but then when the normal 4th and 5th corners come in, this is a problem, although no one that would be measured by this study.
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