*Does Speed for OL matter?

[Swanty]

It's hard to quantify the value of Speed for an offensive lineman. Conventional wisdom would suggest the guards and centers probably wouldn't have much use for it. But for those tackles who are looking after the edge with no tight end support, you'd imagine that it would be important to get yourself in front of a fast blitzer and make his route to the QB longer.

Something which might give us a clue as to the relative value of Speed is in uncredited sacks allowed. For those of you keeping score, we are up to 241 sacks in the ISFL after 5 weeks of play. However, only 72 of these show up in the 'Sacks Allowed' stat for offensive players.

That means there are 169 sacks that happened a result of no block being beaten. Some of these will just be a result of the play design and the formation matchups, but certainly some of these might have been salvageable if someone could have run fast enough to get in front of the rusher.

Here's the rankings of how many of these uncredited sacks there have been per team so far:
Team (Sacked - SA) = Uncredited SA
OCO 23-3 = 20
PHI 24-6 = 18
AUS 25-7 = 18
BAL 21-5 = 16
SAR 18-3 = 15
HON 15-2 = 13
COL 17-5 = 12
YKW 15-4 = 11
NYS 18-7 = 11
NOLA 16-7 = 9
ARI 18-9 = 9
BER 11-4 = 7
CHI 10-4 = 6
SJS 10-6 = 4

I averaged the speed of each team's OL and compared them against these totals to see if there was a correlation.

First up is the average speed of the guards and centers.



Arizona has by far the fastest inside OL but the overall picture doesn't really show much of a correlation. Likewise, SJS have the slowest G/Cs but have conceded the least number of Unc SAs. The correlation coefficient for G/C Speed & the Unc SAs is just 13%, essentially indicating that if it does have an effect on the overall number, it's a very small one. I would bet that it doesn't really have much of an effect at all, and the small correlation coeff is a product of a team's G/Cs being built in the same way as the tackles.

Next is the average speed of the tackles.



This paints a much more interesting picture. The correlation coefficient comes out at 50%, indicating that while it doesn't explain all the differences between teams' uncredited sacks allowed, there definitely seems to be a relationship between the two.

There are a couple of anomalies, notably Philly with almost max speed tackles but 18 uncredited sacks allowed, and Berlin with just 65 speed but the 3rd fewest. Berlin's I would have put down to them running short passing strategies, meaning the ball should have been out of the QBs hands quicker, but it appears Philly have been running the same strategy, so who knows!

But overall, there definitely seems to be some truth behind the idea that Tackles with high speed reduce the number of uncredited sacks your team concedes.

Now let's try and figure out whether getting in front of the rusher has a tangible effect on the result of the play, or whether the rusher would have broken through to the QB anyway. In order to illustrate an extreme (and impossible to achieve) example, I upped all OL to 100 speed and simmed the rest of this season.

Measuring weeks 1-5 separately from weeks 6-16:

• The % of sacks that went uncredited dropped from 70.1% to 57.0%.
  
• The percentage of OL 'Sacks Allowed' per QB dropback went from 1.7% to 1.8%.
  
• The number of OL pancakes per QB dropback went from 0.63 to 0.68.
  
• And perhaps most significantly of all, the percentage of dropbacks where the QB was sacked dropped from 8.6% to 6.5%.
  

This indicates that while there was a marginal increase in SA attributed to a blocker, it's much more likely that by reaching the rusher, you will prevent a sack and probably rack up more pancakes too!

In conclusion.. if you're playing at the tackle position, Speed matters!

[Memento Mori]

This is really cool.

[infinitempg]

mmm i love a fresh cup of statistical analysis in the morning

real interesting stuff here!

[CalvinGolladay]

So you're saying never increase speed so I have less chances to make blocks and therefore less chances to allow a sack?

[Cody]

Swanty you've done it again. This was fantastic.