"The Chart", F1 Time Horizons, and Blocking Kicks

Sep 13, 2021

"The Chart”

We made it! It’s officially NFL season.

From a fan perspective, I cannot recall feeling as excited for a season as I am for the 2021 season. There are interesting storylines on every team: rookie quarterbacks taking the field, veteran quarterbacks taking the field for new teams, and even the potential impact of players’ vaccination statuses.

From an analytical perspective, it is interesting to consider the construction of each team. How was each roster built? What decisions can General Managers (GMs) make to gain an edge on their peers in building out a team?

The NFL Draft is the primary opportunity for GMs to out-strategize their peers. If you can scout talent better than fellow GMs, you will draft better players, which will bring success. But drafting better players than your competitors is only one way to gain an edge. Another way is to exploit the system NFL teams use to evaluate the cost of a draft pick.

Here is what I mean.

In the 1990s, Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson wanted a better way to evaluate the relative value of draft picks. If an opposing front office offered him the 19th overall pick and the 27th overall pick for the 4th overall pick, should he accept the offer? He needed an objective method of answering that question.

So he enlisted Mike McCoy, a mathematically-minded minority owner of the Cowboys. McCoy designed a system that assigns points to each draft pick position. People commonly refer to McCoy’s system as “The Chart.” According to “The Chart” for example, the 7th overall pick is worth 1500 points while the 24th overall pick is worth 740 points. Each pick has an attached numerical value. The system enabled the Cowboys to take a consistent approach to proposing and evaluating trade offers.

The system spread. Today, nearly every team uses the system. Some front offices have created revised versions of the chart, but having different charts muddies negotiations among teams. “Hey, I understand that your chart shows that this trade is fair, but my chart shows that we’re getting a bad deal.” Maintaining different points systems across the league leads to stalemates during trade negotiations. As a result, teams just use “The Chart” designed by Mike McCoy.

But “The Chart” does not value draft picks properly. It fails to value draft picks in accordance with their historical value. For instance, “The Chart” assigns double the points value (3000 points) to the first overall pick compared to the seventh overall pick (1500 points). The first overall pick is not worth anywhere near two seventh overall picks. “The Chart” is too steep.

Cade Massey, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote about the shortcomings of “The Chart.” To illustrate its flaws, he created “The Fortune Teller’s Chart,” an approach that models the value of each draft pick by removing uncertainty from the NFL Draft.

In simpler terms, he calculated the value of each draft pick if you knew how successful each drafted player would be in the future:

In the above graph, “The Chart” refers to Mike McCoy’s chart developed in the 1990s. The colored lines represent Massey’s fortune teller chart by year.

Massey’s lines demonstrate the discrepancy between how “The Chart” values picks to how these picks should be valued. The point is that “The Chart” overvalues top draft picks relative to late first round and early second round draft picks.

From Massey’s article,

The Chart values the 32nd pick at about 20% of the value of the first pick. In contrast, the Fortune Teller’s values for the 32nd pick range from 34% to 48%. There isn’t a single year that a Fortune Teller, with perfect foresight, would pay anywhere near the 5x premium for the first pick relative to the 32nd.

Oh, by the way, Massey’s chart is not factoring in salary considerations. Trevor Lawrence, the first pick in the 2021 NFL Draft, will earn $6.6M against his team’s salary cap this season. Mac Jones, the fifteenth pick in the 2021 NFL Draft, will earn $2.8M against his team’s salary cap this season. This makes later draft picks even more valuable (relative to top picks) than Massey’s visualization represents.

If everyone uses “The Chart”, and we recognize that “The Chart” overvalues picks at the top of the draft and undervalues picks at the end of the first round, how could we act on this information to find an edge?

The simplest tactic is to trade back. If you hold the 5th overall pick in the NFL Draft, and you know that teams following “The Chart” are willing to overpay to draft in that position, great! You should let them! Trade your 5th overall draft pick for a couple late first round draft picks.

So I looked at which teams have prioritized trading back. I pulled all draft picks from the past ten years for draft spots between the 22nd overall pick and the 53rd overall pick. I chose this range because according to Massey’s analysis, these picks represent the most valuable draft spots relative to the point values prescribed by “The Chart.” Since I chose a range comprised of 32 sequential picks, and since there are 32 teams in the NFL, we should expect each team to have one pick in this range per year for a total of ten picks over ten years.

In theory, teams who have drafted more than ten times from this range have embraced the information that “The Chart” is too steep. Thirteen teams have drafted from this range more than ten times:

Most of the sharpest front offices in football are on this list.

Sure, the Cleveland Browns were awful for a long time, but I like the path they took to build for the future. From 2017 to 2021, we would have expected the Browns to draft from picks #22-#53 five times. Instead, after making trades, the Browns ended up with nine draft picks in this range. Good stuff!

The 2020 season was the first time in nearly 20 years that the Cleveland Browns made the Playoffs. And the Browns have one of the best rosters in the NFL for the 2021 season.

Intelligent analysis of information is valuable.

F1 Strategy and Time Horizons - Guest Author Richard Knight

Throughout professional sports, decision makers must decide how the state of their team aligns with both short-term and long-term goals. “Should we prioritize winning now or build for the future?” It is a question posed to any team constrained by finite resources, including Formula 1 teams!

Formula 1 is not a “spec” sport with standardized equipment. As long as the car’s build fits within regulations, or “formulae”, teams can configure their cars however they see fit. Engineers spend thousands of hours refining cars’ wings, turning vanes, vortex generators, and diffusers to optimize aerodynamics and drive performance. Teams enhance their cars throughout the season, which is expensive and time-intensive to test.

But starting next year, new regulations are set to change key aerodynamic components of the cars. The imposed regulations will make the cars slicker by decreasing turbulent air behind the cars.

In addition to navigating new regulations, teams must operate within a couple constraints. Introduced this year, rules prevent teams from spending more than $145M for the season. There are also limitations on the amount of aerodynamic testing that teams can do. Currently, wind tunnel testing is capped at 45 runs per week, with lower-placed teams receiving more opportunities and higher-placed teams receiving fewer opportunities. There are even limits on the amount of computing power teams can use for computational fluid dynamics simulations.

So what is the correct strategy for the remainder of this season? Is it better for teams to devote resources to enhancing their current car, or should teams focus on development of next season’s car, a car that must conform to new, stringent regulations?

Some teams, like Team Haas, have chosen to spend the entire year developing next year’s car. They are sacrificing results this season with eyes set on future success. Most teams have chosen to make small, obvious upgrades to their cars this season while focusing most of their resources on next season’s car. Team Mercedes, the sport’s most dominant team who was won each of the past seven seasons and leads again this year, stated that they stopped developing their current car two weeks ago.

But not every team has ceased development. Team Red Bull sits in second place and is the only threat to Team Mercedes. From the outside, it appears that Red Bull is shoving their metaphorical poker chips all in on this championship. The team has brought upgrades to every race this season.

Red Bull is motivated by a few factors. For starters, the winner at the end of the season receives ~$100M, while runner up receives ~$90M. Second, winning the championship provides a massive benefit from a marketing perspective. En route to their championship win in 2018, Mercedes generated $5.4B of advertising value through television coverage. And third, Red Bull finally has the opportunity to challenge Mercedes, the giant of the sport that has dominated for the past decade. Maybe it is time to give them a run for their money.

With a large regulation change on the horizon, next year is unpredictable. Red Bull may have confidence in their ability to field a competitive car next year, and they can make supplemental upgrades if they lag behind.

With fewer than ten races remaining, the conclusion of the Formula 1 season promises excitement. Will Red Bull’s strategy yield a championship this year? And how much will their performance suffer next year?

Blocking Kicks

Ryan Paganetti, former game management coach for the Philadelphia Eagles, went on a football analytics podcast last week. At the end of the podcast, he proposed an idea that I want to see attempted.

Paganetti believes NFL teams should experiment with rostering an extremely tall athlete who specializes in blocking field goals. After the football is snapped and the defensive line pushes into the backfield, the tall specialist would fill the gap and jump as high as possible to deflect the kick.

Paganetti acknowledged that when he proposed the idea to the Eagles coaching staff, coaches had scoffed at him, but he is serious about the idea. And now, courtesy of Trackman, he has data to suggest that it could work.

The median height of an NFL kick is 11.5 feet when it crosses the line of scrimmage. Freakishly tall athletes, like the Boston Celtics’ Tacko Fall, can reach 12.5 feet after jumping and extending their arms. Wearing football pads, the player’s maximum height would decrease, but they could still reach high enough to block a high percentage of kicks.

It would be quite the leap to suggest that this strategy would result in blocking 50+% of field goals. But roughly 2% of kicks are blocked in the NFL. If a team implements the strategy and blocks 10% of kicks as a result, they have an enormous advantage. Also, in addition to blocking kicks directly, surely the strategy would disrupt kickers.

Let’s try it?

Next Week

I anticipate spending most of next week’s newsletter previewing the Ryder Cup, which starts September 24th. At this point, every player for Team USA and Team Europe has been determined. If you have any questions, contact me and I will try to address your question in next week’s edition.

Contact/Feedback

Email: Joseph.LaMagnaGolf@gmail.com

Twitter: @JosephLaMagna

Finding the Edge