*An Advanced Statistical Look at Season 27 Offensive Linemen

[ddrector]

I want to start by thanking @mithrandir for compiling the raw data which made this a lot easier for me to do.

The offensive line is both the most overlooked position group in this league and also the largest position group. Technically not the largest in terms of users playing the position, because there are so many bots playing offensive line, but every team has at least five offensive linemen. With 14 teams in the league that is 70 offensive linemen. Imagine if we had a big enough user base to have all user controlled OL for every team? Since this is really looking at five different positions I’m first going to break the stats down by the five different OL positions. Going from left to right we will be starting with what is considered the most important position on the OL, the left tackle.



I decided to display the stats for the OL ordered by Pancake Percentage from highest to lowest. This was calculated by dividing pancakes by number of plays. I’m not sure why some of these teams put lower TPE players in the most important position on the line, but maybe their data from testing pointed to this being the best result. Chicago had a great regular season record, but had their lowest TPE player playing Left Tackle. This also could be an archetype difference. At this point I realized I needed to add a column on my sheet for archetype, and had to go find every player's archetype, so now we can see if that makes any difference. Alright, now that that info is added we see that there is no obvious correlation. It is worth noting that the majority of the Left Tackles were Athletic with four Balanced and one Mauler. I was hoping to see some kind of trend with the data here, but I’m not seeing one right now. From this list it is clear that Adam Mellott was the top LT this season with both the highest Pancake% and tied for lowest Mistake%. Mistakes are both penalties and sacks divided by number of plays. I find it interesting that the 350 TPE bot from Baltimore outperformed a lot of much higher tpe players. It would be nice to see more advanced stats like how often a player was beat on a given play. There are plenty of pass plays where the DLine player disrupts the play due to a missed block that isn’t accounted here at all. We also have no idea how these players performed on rushing plays. I have no idea if there is a way for Wolverine Studios to give us more advanced statistics, but that would be really helpful in figuring out which of these players was actually the best at their given position. Now that that long ramble is out of the way let’s look at Left Guard.



Unlike the LTs where over half were human players the LGs were slightly more bot than human. Among the human players at LG it looks like Byron Dolls was clearly the top one. The Left Guards were split pretty evenly among the archetypes and it is worth noting that Dolls was the Athletic archetype. It looks like generally the Mauler’s take up the bottom half of the list averaging less pancakes per play. Even Bayley Jr who led the group in TPE didn’t average many pancakes though he didn’t have many mistakes either. If I do this again next season I am not just going to include total TPE, but also show ratings for Intelligence to see if higher Intelligence correlates to less penalties. Next up the position with the least amount of human players, the Centers.



Unsurprisingly, Centers average the lowest Pancake% among the five OL positions. Only three human players in this group and it looks like Taylor Cooper stands out as not only one of the highest Pancake%’s of the Centers but also he is tied for lowest Mistake%. It would be interesting to look at the builds for each of these players to see if there is anything majorly different that could be the reason that two 750 TPE bots could be at the top of this list while a third with the same archetype ends up below the halfway mark. Anyway, onto Right Guard.



Right Guards really like to make mistakes it seems. Lots of sacks given up from this spot and tons of penalties from almost every player. Again it looks like the top human performer in this group comes from Berlin in Ananda Adyan. I’m not sure what Berlin has put in their water to get these great performances out of their human OL players, but it is impressive. Lord Beerus was the only human OL player amongst the RG’s to not allow a sack which is also a big accomplishment, and honestly if he hadn’t been penalized 7 times I might have considered him over Adyan for best human RG.



Right Tackle is another position that is dominated by human players. Unlike most of the other positions it is clear that the higher TPE players performed better than the lower TPE players at RT. Both Julio Jones and Greedy Sly topped the list for Pancake% and TPE. Jones was Balanced while Sly was Athletic, but the main difference between the two is the penalties. Sly has a big advantage there, so he gets my nod for best human RT last season.

I hope someday I can write this article and be able to remove that Human/Bot column as all the teams are using fully human OLs. We are about halfway there as I think we have 35/70 OL spots filled with human players last season.

[Starboy]

Chicken Chalupa is a god amongst men

[Jimi64]

ANANDA ADYAN THE GOAT

PS: Jakarta for Ultimus host