So Christian ponder is good? Or the Vikings defense is actually really good? I'd agree that RB doesn't matter that much usually, but he's like their only offensive threat and he's still ridiculous

[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 6:05 PM. Reason : And they're probably making the playoffs]

12/30/2012 6:03:38 PM

somebody is being willfully ignorant ITT

no idea how you could watch even a quarter of a Vikings game over the past 2 months and not think Peterson is the only reason they are currently a playoff team

maybe you haven't watched at all and just check the box scores

12/30/2012 6:06:34 PM

No, Ponder is not good. Just plain old average. Defense is average as well. They do have a very good special teams though.


The Vikings aren't a good team. They're certainly not in the top half of the league. They just have been on the lucky side of a few games. People don't realize how much randomness there is an NFL season. The games are so close and can be decided by 1-2 plays some of which is based on luck. It's only a 16 game season so in reality a 5-11 team can be better than an 8-8 one.

Vikings have literally no shot at winning the Super Bowl. They are a little better than the Colts but not much.

They aren't better than the Panthers for instance.




Think about basketball. If you take a 44-38 NBA team and pull a random sample of 16 games out of it, you may pull a sample where that team went 13-3 or a sample where they went 6-10. Just looking at a team's record in the NFL is a really poor way to evaluate whether they are a good team or not.

Green Bay won the Super Bowl when they were 9-7. Everyone in the gambling industry knew they were a juggernaut heading into the playoffs that year. Why is that?

[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 6:20 PM. Reason : a]

12/30/2012 6:17:56 PM

ADP has two 200+ yard rushing games in the last 4

thats not lucky, thats ADP being a fucking horse

12/30/2012 6:19:33 PM

You guys really have issues with framing arguments. AP is a great RB. No doubt about it. He just shouldn't enter the MVP discussion. When a RB gets 3,000 yards and really distinguishes himself from the pack, maybe.

Bottom line is that yards are a counting statistic. A lot of those yards would have been gained by some other RB as well. Not all of them, clearly.

If you look at his total yards and compare them to other RB's and historic seasons (think Faulk/Priest Holmes) they aren't nearly as impressive as if you look at his standalone rushing stats. AP doesn't make plays in the passing game.

12/30/2012 6:22:18 PM

I want pitbull dead

12/30/2012 6:22:32 PM

none of ^^^^ has anything to do with why you think Peterson shouldn't be the MVP

in fact, it's supporting the argument for him being MVP

[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 6:24 PM. Reason : without him, they'd be lucky to have 3 wins. I'd say that's pretty fucking valuable]

12/30/2012 6:22:35 PM

face, opposing defenses put 8-9 in the box every play because they dont respect ponder

he still breaks off 70 yard runs

Faulk had Warner, Priest had Green

ADP has PONDER

12/30/2012 6:25:56 PM

Yeah, the thing is, he actually does run harder and break tackles and get first downs. Yards are a counting stat, but along with the yards are first downs which keep the other team off the field. Dude is a monster. Football needs a WAR

12/30/2012 6:26:31 PM

Why is this pitbull guy famous? He looks like a dorky middle aged man.

12/30/2012 6:30:08 PM

Quote :

"none of that has anything to do with why you think Peterson shouldn't be the MVP"

Sure it does. One of you guys biggest argument is that Peterson is doing THIS with Ponder.


And I'm saying let's look at exactly what THIS is. The Vikings are a slightly below average team.

Yes, they'd be worse if they had an average running back, but not significantly worse. RB just isn't an important enough position. Look at last year. They had AP last year and won 2 fucking games. A few years ago with Favre they were a great team. The RB just doesn't matter very much in the NFL. The Chargers were fucking terrible for most of LDT's career and he was clearly a terrific RB.



Brady and Peyton on the other hand are leading spectacular teams. Teams that are legitimate Super Bowl favorites. Swap Peterson and Ponder for Brady and Ridley and guess which team is the Super Bowl contender. Hint: It's not New England.

12/30/2012 6:32:22 PM

i dont think anyone is arguing that QB isnt as important a position as RB

but LDT also helped the Chargers to a 14-2 record one year

and because the Vikings don't even have an average QB, they WOULD be significantly worse if they didn't have one of the top running backs in the NFL this century

nobody is gonna argue how good Brady and Peyton are, but the fact that the Vikings are a win away from the playoffs WITHOUT an elite QB like Brady or Peyton is evidence that ADP should be near the top of the MVP discussion

[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 6:37 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2012 6:36:43 PM

I mean yeah, honestly Brady, peyton, Rodgers should win every year.. They're the absolute best players in football, but that's boring. Might as well give it to a RB in a near record breaking season. Like giving the MVP to Cabrera instead of trout

12/30/2012 6:39:11 PM

Tied Peyton manning

12/30/2012 6:40:09 PM

Look I'm going to list the top 5 QB's by DVOA.


QB

1) Brady
2) Manning
3) Rodgers
4) Wilson
5) Ryan

What do all these guys have in common? All five are the QB's for one of the only six teams who can win the Super Bowl (with the exception of SF who has two highly ranked QB's and a good defense).


QB is what matters in this sport. Having a good RB is like having a girlfriend with pretty ears. Better than bad ears, but pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.


I wouldn't want Adrian Peterson on my team, because at his contract level he doesn't add value. Sure he's a great player, but to pay him that ungodly salary diminishes your talent level at other positions too much. Negative ROR overall. Not that salary should matter for the MVP debate, but just pointing that out to show how much the public overvalues RB's worth.

12/30/2012 6:44:44 PM

the top 3 are good enough QBs where they have a legit chance to win the Super Bowl this year (and every year)

4 and 5 are pipe dreams

12/30/2012 6:47:29 PM

If you're going to go the "its boring to give it to a QB every year" route why not give it to Calvin Johnson? Statistically, his season is much more impressive than Peterson's. Several guys have put up 2,000 yards. Once even in a 14 game season.

No one has ever come close to breaking Rice's record before.


And WR's are slightly more valuable than RB's...

12/30/2012 6:48:50 PM

fair point

i would just say because megatron was absent from the first half of the season, aside from catching 6 balls for 90 yards during garbage time during losses in september and october

adp was doing it since opening day

[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 6:53 PM. Reason : btw he's about 71 away]

12/30/2012 6:50:00 PM

Seattle is not a pipe dream. They are the best team in the NFL right now by a wide margin.

They will have a very difficult road though having to go on the road three times though.

They'd be the clear favorites to win it all if they had gotten the #2 seed instead of the #5.


I think either Denver/NE will win it all though. They don't have any competition in the AFC other than themselves.

12/30/2012 7:00:18 PM

Plus, how "valuable" can you be on a 4-12 team

12/30/2012 7:00:51 PM

they are the hottest team in december, but like you said, they suck away from home

12/30/2012 7:01:10 PM

Ponder with a bomb.

12/30/2012 7:09:21 PM

Seattle doesn't "suck" anywhere they are a great team. Playing on the road is just fucking tough in the NFL. The Giants and Packers have both done it lately though. It can be done.

If RW wins a Super Bowl as a rookie I will hang a shirtless oil painting of him over my bed for one year. Done.


I mean fuck if Alex Rodriguez can hang a painting of him as a fucking centaur half man/half horse fantasy creature over his bed. That is the gayest thing ive ever heard. Sometimes i wonder if he's really that big of a douche, or if hes doing it just to be liek im fucking alex rodriguez and i wanna see how many hot women i can bang while this is over my bed just to prove im immortal. that i can get behind if its that.

12/30/2012 7:25:22 PM

Seattle is the hottest team in the NFL, but they're also 3-5 on the road

they're a completely different team away from The 12th Man

12/30/2012 7:28:24 PM

I hope this will be the worst day of Christian Ponder's life.

12/30/2012 7:34:08 PM

Wilson should have thrown it to himself

12/30/2012 7:34:25 PM

looks like Peterson will "only" rush for 199 but will make the playoffs

imagine if he was as valuable as Ponder, a QB

12/30/2012 7:43:03 PM

Yeah, AP probably should be MVP.

12/30/2012 7:44:58 PM

I am glad to see that he was more worried about winning a playoff berth than his record

also, i had much more fun watching him chase that record than that other receiver on a loser team chasing a record with the help of over zealous referees and Goodell mandates

[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 7:46 PM. Reason : i]

12/30/2012 7:45:53 PM

he answered that question perfectly

12/30/2012 7:48:52 PM

Who the fuck is One Direction

12/30/2012 7:56:09 PM

They're in that drew brees Pepsi commercial. I believe that is their lone redeeming quality

12/30/2012 7:57:51 PM

my 8 year old cousin knew them when i had dinner with him and my aunt and uncle about a month ago

[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 7:59 PM. Reason : actually it was my cousin and his wife, so i guess the 8 year old was my great nephew or 2nd cousin]

12/30/2012 7:58:32 PM

they won the british x factor and have been forced down the gullets of teen girls and gay teen males

12/30/2012 8:05:37 PM

Interestingly, most of the playoff teams are in the bottom half of the NFL in terms of percentage of plays that are passing.

1 Dallas
7 Atlanta
10 Indy
16 Baltimore
--
18 Cinn
19 Green Bay
20 Denver
21 New England
26 Houston
28 Minn
30 SF
31 Washington
32 Seattle

[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 8:14 PM. Reason : Doesn't mean they have to pay a RB a lot]

12/30/2012 8:06:09 PM

Quote :

"31 Washington 32 Seattle"

teams that pass the least = obvious front runners for rookie of the year passers

also:



[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 8:18 PM. Reason : classic]

12/30/2012 8:16:58 PM

Amazing Peterson stat: he ran for 1598 yards over his final 10 games, which would've been good enough itself to lead the league in rushing. Wow

12/30/2012 8:21:35 PM

Quote :

"If RW wins a Super Bowl as a rookie I will hang a shirtless oil painting of him over my bed for one year. Done."

What will you do with the painting of you sucking him off and then spitting on a picture of TOB, then?

12/30/2012 8:37:46 PM

Cap hit versus running back stats. Sorted by DYAR/2013 Cap hit.

Peterson is middle of the pack in terms of value

	2013 cap hit	Yards	YPA	DYAR	Yds/Cap	YPA/Cap	DYAR/Cap
Morris		0.5	1410.0	4.7	166.0	2759.3	9.2	324.9
Ridley		0.8	1189.0	4.4	173.0	1486.3	5.5	216.3
Lynch		5.5	1490.0	5.0	332.0	270.9	0.9	60.4
Murray		0.8	587.0	4.1	34.0	724.7	5.1	42.0
Rice		5.8	1138.0	4.5	221.0	197.9	0.8	38.4
Gore		6.5	1144.0	4.8	227.0	177.4	0.7	35.2
AP		11.2	1898.0	6.0	364.0	170.2	0.5	32.6
Ballard		0.4	737.0	4.0	13.0	1730.0	9.4	30.5
Moreno		3.5	484.0	3.9	54.0	139.3	1.1	15.5
Foster		8.0	1328.0	4.0	119.0	166.0	0.5	14.9
Benjarvus	3.0	1094.0	3.9	18.0	364.7	1.3	6.0
Turner		7.5	785.0	3.6	-78.0	104.7	0.5	-10.4
A. Green	1.5	464.0	3.4	-46.0	309.3	2.3	-30.7

12/30/2012 8:40:38 PM

props on formatting that with the code tags, however i'd be curious to see how the non-playoff running backs stacked up as well

12/30/2012 8:47:25 PM

what the shit do those stats mean?

12/30/2012 8:55:19 PM

Nothing, just more data for stat heads to drool over

12/30/2012 8:56:44 PM

I'm not doing that. Eyeballing the list, looks like detroit, pats, and the colts are the only teams who don't spend money on RB.



The panthers and falcons are fucking stupid with what they are paying RBs.

12/30/2012 8:56:44 PM

^^^it means you'd rather have Vic Ballard on your team over Arian Foster, unless you don't understand stats

[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 8:58 PM. Reason : ^^^]

Quote :

"The panthers and falcons are fucking stupid with what they are paying RBs"

maybe so, but no panthers backs are on the list, so...

[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 8:59 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2012 8:57:55 PM

what the shit is a DYAR?

12/30/2012 9:00:14 PM

nevermind, I found it:

Quote :

"DYAR EXPLAINED After using DVOA for a few months, we came across a strange phenomenon: well-regarded players, particularly those known for their durability, had DVOA ratings that came out around average. The reason is that DVOA, by virtue of being a percentage or rate statistic, doesn’t take into account the cumulative value of having a player producing at a league-average level over the course of an above-average number of plays. By definition, an average level of performance is better than that provided by half of the league and the ability to maintain that level of performance while carrying a heavy workload is very valuable indeed. In addition, a player who is involved in a high number of plays can draw the defense’s attention away from other parts of the offense, and, if that player is a running back, he can take time off the clock with repeated runs. Let’s say you have a running back who carries the ball 300 times in a season. What would happen if you were to remove this player from his team’s offense? What would happen to those 300 plays? Those plays don’t disappear with the player, though some might be lost to the defense because of the associated loss of first downs. Rather those plays would have to be distributed among the remaining players in the offense, with the bulk of them being given to a replacement running back. This is where we arrive at the concept of replacement level, borrowed from our partners at Baseball Prospectus. When a player is removed from an offense, he is usually not replaced by a player of similar ability. Nearly every starting player in the NFL is a starter because he is better than the alternative. Those 300 plays will typically be given to a significantly worse player, someone who is the backup because he doesn’t have as much experience and/or talent. A player’s true value can then be measured by the level of performance he provides above that replacement level baseline, totaled over all of his run or pass attempts. Of course, the real replacement player is different for each team in the NFL. In 2011, the second-string running back in Washington (Roy Helu) had a higher DVOA than the original starter (Tim Hightower), and the third-string running back (Evan Royster) had a higher DVOA than either of them. Sometimes a player like Ryan Grant or Danny Woodhead will be cut by one team and turn into a star for another. On other teams, the drop from the starter to the backup can be even greater than the general drop to replacement level. The 2011 Indianapolis Colts will now be the hallmark example of this until the end of time. The choice to start an inferior player or to employ a sub-replacement level backup, however, falls to the team, not the starter being evaluated. Thus, we generalize replacement level for the league as a whole, as the ultimate goal is to evaluate players independent of the quality of their teammates. Our estimates of replacement level were re-done during the 2008 season and are computed differently for each position. For quarterbacks, we analyzed situations where two or more quarterbacks had played meaningful snaps for a team in the same season, then compared the overall DVOA of the original starters to the overall DVOA of the replacements. We did not include situations where the backup was actually a top prospect waiting his turn on the bench, since a first-round pick is by no means a "replacement-level" player. At other positions, there is no easy way to separate players into "starters" and "replacements," since unlike at quarterback, being the starter doesn't make you the only guy who gets in the game. Instead, we used a simpler method, ranking players at each position in each season by attempts. The players who made up the final 10 percent of passes or runs were split out as "replacement players" and then compared to the players making up the other 90 percent of plays at that position. This took care of the fact that not every non-starter at running back or wide receiver is a freely available talent. (Think of Jonathan Stewart or Randall Cobb, for example.) As noted earlier, the challenge of any new stat is to present it on a scale that’s meaningful to those attempting to use it. Saying that Tony Romo's passes were worth 131 success value points over replacement in 2011 has very little value without a context to tell us if 131 is good total or a bad one. Therefore, we translate these success values into a number called "Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement, or DYAR. Thus, Romo was fourth among quarterbacks with 1,344 passing DYAR. It is our estimate that a generic replacement-level quarterback, throwing in the same situations as Romo, would have been worth 1,344 fewer yards. Note that this doesn’t mean the replacement level quarterback would have gained exactly 1,344 fewer yards. First downs, touchdowns, and turnovers all have an estimated yardage value in this system, so what we are saying is that a generic replacement-level quarterback would have fewer yards and touchdowns (and more turnovers) that would total up to be equivalent to the value of 1,344 yards."

12/30/2012 9:01:49 PM

Quote :

"After using DVOA for a few months, we came across a strange phenomenon: well-regarded players, particularly those known for their durability, had DVOA ratings that came out around average."

fuck your well-regarded "eye test", the numbers never lie!!1

12/30/2012 9:07:20 PM

Peterson falls in the middle of DYAR/$ but the league as a whole way overpays for RB's because they are "names" and General managers are stupid sometimes (see: Carolina Panthers).

The Patriots model is clearly the best. The Packers implement the same strategy, albeit their RB's are a little too terrible sometimes.

Arian Foster, undrafted.

Alfred Morris, 6th round pick.

Terrell Davis, 5th round pick.

Curtis Martin, 3rd round pick.

Many of the greatest RB's in history have been late round picks. There is a plethora of talent available at RB. A lot of an RB's success is just how good his opportunity to produce is. Yes, some RB's have the ability to spring long runs, others break tackles with size/strength, while others provide value in the passing game... but overall, it is quite easy to find a productive NFL RB. Many teams employ more than one talented RB. There is no scarcity at all at the position, therefore the best RB's simply can't provide a ton more value than the replacement level RB's. They do however cost a shit load more in valuable cap space that can be better allocated to positions that effect your team's success more.


QB is a totally different story. Go from Peyton to Painter and you go from Super Bowl contention to worst team in the league.

Hell even the dropoff from Delhomme to Clausen is an asymptote.



^ The numbers weren't accurately displaying what they were trying to produce. While usage rates don't matter much in basketball, they certainly do in football.



[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 9:14 PM. Reason : a]

12/30/2012 9:12:11 PM

Quote :

"The Patriots model is clearly the best."

Patriots haven't won a title in 8 years

maybe all those "advanced stats" haven't mattered since 2003

perhaps whatever formula the Giants and Steelers use is the best

[Edited on December 30, 2012 at 9:14 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2012 9:13:52 PM

The Steelers won a Super Bowl with an undrafted free agent and I think Bradshaw might have been undrafted too.

So yes, I will agree that using a cheap as fuck running back is clearly the correct strategy.



Especially since they have a short shelf life and a high likelihood of injury. It's jsut not a position to commit a lot of resources to no matter how sexy they are.

12/30/2012 9:16:25 PM