What do we want out of the NFL?

mrt144 · Feb 7, 2019

I was musing about this over the past couple of days and some thoughts stuck with me.

1. Is the current meta strategy that preferences rookie QBs on less cap consuming contracts something fans collectively want to be the seemingly more optimal strategy? Why or why not?

2. What weighting would you, a fan, assign to things you want to have importance in the outcome game? Anything and everything could qualify here but to give a breadcrumb - Do you want coordinator tactics and coaching strategy to be the most important factor in outcome over player personnel and team building or another factor? Compare and contrast to how you enjoy college football.

These are the two specific ones that stuck with me but it opens to a bigger question pertaining to game and league design.
With some games like Chess, which is Player versus Player, the outcomes are determined mostly by the cognitive abilities of two opponents with near equal tools at their disposal. To most this would be called a 'fair game' since the only advantage a player enjoys over the other is the capability with which they can play the game.

But within Chess, there are still multiple ways to accomplish a win. What differentiates Chess from other games with multiple tactical methods to win is that for the most part, the access to those tactics is not bound to the pieces in play before the game starts, access to those tactics are determined by the state of the game once it starts and involves a risk/reward heuristic in each players mind. In addition Chess doesn't rely on a mechanic of imperfect information except future possible moves which is near equal for both participants.

Still there are ways to goose a Chess match to put it in your favor - selecting opponents who have a clearly inferior rating to yours so that while you might not climb in ELO you also don't risk the chance of a straight up loss nearly as frequently.

So using Chess as one pole of game type, lets look at another. Games that have multiple ways to achieve victory, that aren't evenly distributed to each participant by design, and require some sort of pre contest selection to not only differentiate participants from one another but test each participants ability to navigate their specific situation better than their opponents. Think Poker for example. It isn't just a test of cognitive abilities vis a vis risk/reward functions, crunching the probabilities of hitting the nut hand, it also involves reading imperfect information appropriately, and doing so in excess of your opponents. Poker isn't really a polar opposite of Chess though especially as fans of the game interact with it.

For that I give you modern video games where there are multiple 'types' or 'styles' or 'characters'. You select this before the game starts (Kirby in Smash Brothers for example) based on the strategic advantage you think it will convey to yourself over your opponents. Fans of these types of games are enthralled with the various possible combinations you could use to win but are constantly pissed off that there really are only a handful of 'optimal' 'types, styles or characters' that win the tournaments.

The paradox of a game that promises many ways to win is that only is conditionally true in the absence of experience and people seeking to 'solve' or 'win' with tools selected before the game even begins. Once people get a feel for what tools are best to win, it quickly becomes apparent there aren't THAT many ways to win and that some tools are better than others and the game starts going towards optimization by participants. This is why people who play video games that promise that kind of dynamic and diverse strategic/tactical means to win are always complaining about things being nerfed, buffed, OP, UP etc etc.

Tying this back to the NFL and a much larger question - Do you feel that the rules in the NFL, as they stand, give preference to certain styles or types of football over others and by extension, do you think there should be a greater variety in viable offensive and defensive tactics? If not, do you think measuring teams by how close they achieve an optimized solution over their peers is another viable way to measure football teams?

I know that I'm leaving a lot out of the discussion vis a vis football because football is a very complex game with distributed responsibilities and actions across several layers. I wanted to avoid gumming up the general point about games with optimized solutions versus games without optimized solutions with specifics of football because drawing clear lines to optimized in football is fraught with variance and coincidental and causative factors. Football doesn't have hard coded parameters of what can and can't be done and discrete probabilities but has more generalities like "Across the league X is successful Y amount of times, for Participant Z, X is successful A amount of times while for Participant C, X is successful B amount of times". I don't want to pretend like the game of football has been solved but by the same token I don't want to disallow the possibility that some things are better than others tactically in football.

The bottom line question here: Is the NFL set up in a way that conforms with your idea of 'fair' or 'interesting'?

I have my answers somewhat but want a few replies before I go off on another rant

Sports Hernia · Feb 7, 2019

Mine are all officiating related:

Streamlined rulebook.

Holding officials publicly accountable.

If as an official you keep getting crappy grades youre gone.

Call only obvious penaltys not the ticky tack crap that you may have thought you saw.

Eliminate “emphasis” edicts/rules.

Stop with the “steering”.

Only accountability and transparency of officiating will save the game that is starting to circle the drain.

chris98251 · Feb 7, 2019

Sports Hernia":6lyncty6 said:
Mine are all officiating related:

Streamlined rulebook.

Holding officials publicly accountable.

If as an official you keep getting crappy grades youre gone.

Call only obvious penaltys not the ticky tack crap that you may have thought you saw.

Eliminate “emphasis” edicts/rules.

Stop with the “steering”.

Only accountability and transparency of officiating will save the game that is starting to circle the drain.

I would add have the Coaches have a influence on the Officials grades. When I see players and coaches having to mentor officials about the rules I tend to think it's a problem.

mrt144 · Feb 7, 2019

Sports Hernia":vhhfw8mc said:
Mine are all officiating related:

Streamlined rulebook.

Holding officials publicly accountable.

If as an official you keep getting crappy grades youre gone.

Call only obvious penaltys not the ticky tack crap that you may have thought you saw.

Eliminate “emphasis” edicts/rules.

Stop with the “steering”.

Only accountability and transparency of officiating will save the game that is starting to circle the drain.

Man, I feel like an entire new thread could be dedicated just to rule changes here but I agree with a lot of these.

This is another aspect of sport vs other games where the human factor in rules leaves a ton to be desired. One thing of note is that I think people are more frustrated with officiating because the technology to capture every little detail highlights the seeming inferiority of on the floor or field officiating at times. This isn't unique to the NFL and we see it across all sports now where because we, the fan, have almost perfect views of everything as they happen and then incredible amounts of replay (especially in the NFL), we feel the officials themselves should be as equally informed as we are in the moment.

I think one of the hardest elements of getting the ruling right is your first point - there are a seemingly large amount of rules to cover for the game of football. Just technical ones. And even in covering weird fringe cases the rulebook can be misinterpreted on the spot by the officials themselves or misremembered or not invoked such as batting the ball out of the endzone

Holding officials accountable with a public grading system would be neat but obviously contested by the refs who make great 'part-time' salaries doing their thing. I think the professionalization of refereeing would be a step in the right direction and setting up an academy of sorts that basically selects applicants from the college field could be a step in the right direction.

Before getting to the other points though I think one of the hardest elements in congruity between the game at all levels. In general the ruleset between high school, college and the NFL should be similar. Would having a technological solution to penalty calls in the NFL be a tenable solution for all of football - no, obviously not. Some AAA high school in Western PA isn't going to be installing Ref Cam and have Ref Cam operators doing their thing. This is actually a huge factor in Soccer's lack of adoption of a more technological officiating solution - it doesn't scale down. I think I would much prefer having refs on the field perform one set of duties related to officiating the game while booth officials monitor for infractions and have overrule or invocation ability over the field refs. Combining this with slimming down the rulebook and what constitutes a penalty could make it more tenable than current.

I think holding, both offensive and defensive, need to be reevaluated both in how its called and the penalty consequence itself. Part of me leans towards calling either with about half the frequency we see now. The consequences for defensive holding are too steep and the calling of offensive holding too inconsistent between teams and players. This has consequences, some of them might be distasteful to our sense. I would also throw in Pass Interference as something to look at possibly adopting the college rules. I know there's a moral panic about how WRs will be mugged all day on high leverage plays but I think empirically it's swung too far the other direction where the level of interaction to warrant a DPI is so slight and the penalty so steep, that offenses use the yardage the penalty gives explicitly to their advantage. They're playing the expected yardage from hitting either their low % moonshot or getting the DPI and that's a cynical way of playing the game, IMHO at least. If you evaluate your risk/reward matrix of a play with likelihood the defense could give you a penalty and then pursue that like Flacco and the Ravens or cross-sport James Harden leaning into anyone within 3 feet of him to draw a foul...I just keep thinking cynical here. Is the defense mugging on passing plays in high leverage situations less cynical? I think it slightly is less cynical because the impact of repeated penalties to avoid giving up 'the big play' at some point will make it very difficult to avoid giving up any play at that high leverage moment. There are perhaps some workarounds where at the 2 minute warning DPI goes from 15 yard flat penalty to spot foul? Why not?

Targeting/Emphasis - if there's one thing I never want to see ever again in football it's Ricardo Lockette style leveling and subsequent neck injury. The players themselves need to understand that even if it feels like war and you've got the adrenaline pumping and you're trying to put the fear of God in the opponent, something like that could kill someone, and not like in an accidental freak way that happens in football with Alex Smith's leg break, but in an intentional "I'm going to potentially end your day if not more and I know it and you never even saw it coming" way.

But the rules about falling on a QB and all that business. Yes, protect the players but don't make it so utterly confusing as to what is the right amount of spicy in playing the damn game for at least 4 other guys on passing plays. The burden on some of this stuff for players is nuts and we saw a few times during the season baffling D line plays where they wanted to avoid the penalty and the QB made a play because of it.

And on that point, call these QB hits consistently. Cam Newton, say what you will about the character, the player, the whatever, never gets a call about getting hit. Yes, he runs a lot, yes he's a mountain of a man, but we've all seen the hits that were obvious that would have gotten dudes ejected if the same hit was on Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady. Yes, Cam brings a ton of risk on himself simply by being who he is in every way, but the indifference of the league to the obvious hits he's taken - I don't like it one bit. And Cam is just the most obvious symptom of the seeming favortism we perceive in who is untouchable and catered to.

I think the only point of emphasis that should be strictly enforced are headshots and complete blindsides. Defenders can't always perfectly tackle and crap happens but launching yourself head first into the earhole of a WR just catching a pass or jogging down the field trailing the play CAN and SHOULD be avoided. If you don't make the play because you couldn't jack a dude up wantonly, cut your losses on that play and do better and practice your ass off on doing it right next time. If you just felt like jacking a dude up who was completely unaware and away from the play then you're just a punk who doesn't deserve to play the goddamn game because you can't act like a professional would and should be expected to. Seriously the hit on Lockette still kinda flusters me to this day. Even if we accept football is a game that engenders physical harm and danger, I don't accept that football also engenders malice and complete indifference to how you conduct yourself on the field in relation to injuring opposing players. Burfict is malicious. James Harrison was malicious. Suh is malicious and also somehow just a cosmic force of injury infliction.

I think one of two things that would help take the edge off with officiating is either fans collectively accepting that refs are fallible, overwhelmed and under supported semi-professionals, who have biases they might not even realize, and would benefit from having themselves raise the bar on how they perform OR we fans accepting we're watching theater and spectacle and soak in the narrative like we're watching Game of Thrones. We are in Season 7 now and it's not great.

knownone · Feb 8, 2019

How would the NFL be set up in an unfair way? All teams play under the same rules.

There is nothing quantifiable about the NFL that lends itself to any reliable form of predictability. As you've noted, optimization is much easier to achieve with hard-set parameters. Since the NFL is roughly the polar opposite of those examples and has no hard-set parameters (even rules because they fall victim to interpretation) it becomes hard to determine what optimization would look like.

In fact, you could make a pretty solid argument that optimization in the NFL is best described by a sort of zero-sum variant of Nash equilibrium; such that optimization is reached by the teams who do the opposite of everyone else. For example, if everyone does the same thing they become predictable and those who become the least predictable of the set will be the hardest to stop.

Now, as someone who works in the field of modeling systems and data science, I can tell you that every analytic approach to characterizing football is nonpredictive in the purest sense of the term. This is important to remember because these tools only paint a picture of what has happened in the past and offer nothing towards telling us what the best solutions are for the future. It's also fun to know that when someone offers you an 'analytic' argument as to why the NFL will be X, Y, or C in the future you can be 100% certain it's just their opinion and no more or less credible than yours or anyone else's.

This whole 'analytic revolution', is a silicone valley scam. Not that analytics and modeling can't play a part in optimizing various aspects of our life or create a more synchronous philosophy to build a team or a business around. But rather, that they are being used as a sort of vocal snake oil to sell ideas based on a set of logic that the average person does not understand.

Once you understand the logic behind the analytics you begin to realize that in some applications it falls victim to the narrative fallacy in how it is used and perceived and is no more or less predictive than anything else. What's worse is that it fails to predict outliers, and as anyone whose studied economics will tell you, outliers are the main determinant in shaping history. Which tells us that seeking optimization through analytics in the NFL is seeking mediocrity in a system that rewards the opposite.

IndyHawk · Feb 9, 2019

The_Z_Man":a7mpva2o said:
mrt144":a7mpva2o said:

Sports Hernia":a7mpva2o said:

Mine are all officiating related:

Streamlined rulebook.

Holding officials publicly accountable.

If as an official you keep getting crappy grades youre gone.

Call only obvious penaltys not the ticky tack crap that you may have thought you saw.

Eliminate “emphasis” edicts/rules.

Stop with the “steering”.

Only accountability and transparency of officiating will save the game that is starting to circle the drain.

Click to expand...

Man, I feel like an entire new thread could be dedicated just to rule changes here but I agree with a lot of these.

This is another aspect of sport vs other games where the human factor in rules leaves a ton to be desired. One thing of note is that I think people are more frustrated with officiating because the technology to capture every little detail highlights the seeming inferiority of on the floor or field officiating at times. This isn't unique to the NFL and we see it across all sports now where because we, the fan, have almost perfect views of everything as they happen and then incredible amounts of replay (especially in the NFL), we feel the officials themselves should be as equally informed as we are in the moment.

I think one of the hardest elements of getting the ruling right is your first point - there are a seemingly large amount of rules to cover for the game of football. Just technical ones. And even in covering weird fringe cases the rulebook can be misinterpreted on the spot by the officials themselves or misremembered or not invoked such as batting the ball out of the endzone

Holding officials accountable with a public grading system would be neat but obviously contested by the refs who make great 'part-time' salaries doing their thing. I think the professionalization of refereeing would be a step in the right direction and setting up an academy of sorts that basically selects applicants from the college field could be a step in the right direction.

Before getting to the other points though I think one of the hardest elements in congruity between the game at all levels. In general the ruleset between high school, college and the NFL should be similar. Would having a technological solution to penalty calls in the NFL be a tenable solution for all of football - no, obviously not. Some AAA high school in Western PA isn't going to be installing Ref Cam and have Ref Cam operators doing their thing. This is actually a huge factor in Soccer's lack of adoption of a more technological officiating solution - it doesn't scale down. I think I would much prefer having refs on the field perform one set of duties related to officiating the game while booth officials monitor for infractions and have overrule or invocation ability over the field refs. Combining this with slimming down the rulebook and what constitutes a penalty could make it more tenable than current.

I think holding, both offensive and defensive, need to be reevaluated both in how its called and the penalty consequence itself. Part of me leans towards calling either with about half the frequency we see now. The consequences for defensive holding are too steep and the calling of offensive holding too inconsistent between teams and players. This has consequences, some of them might be distasteful to our sense. I would also throw in Pass Interference as something to look at possibly adopting the college rules. I know there's a moral panic about how WRs will be mugged all day on high leverage plays but I think empirically it's swung too far the other direction where the level of interaction to warrant a DPI is so slight and the penalty so steep, that offenses use the yardage the penalty gives explicitly to their advantage. They're playing the expected yardage from hitting either their low % moonshot or getting the DPI and that's a cynical way of playing the game, IMHO at least. If you evaluate your risk/reward matrix of a play with likelihood the defense could give you a penalty and then pursue that like Flacco and the Ravens or cross-sport James Harden leaning into anyone within 3 feet of him to draw a foul...I just keep thinking cynical here. Is the defense mugging on passing plays in high leverage situations less cynical? I think it slightly is less cynical because the impact of repeated penalties to avoid giving up 'the big play' at some point will make it very difficult to avoid giving up any play at that high leverage moment. There are perhaps some workarounds where at the 2 minute warning DPI goes from 15 yard flat penalty to spot foul? Why not?

Targeting/Emphasis - if there's one thing I never want to see ever again in football it's Ricardo Lockette style leveling and subsequent neck injury. The players themselves need to understand that even if it feels like war and you've got the adrenaline pumping and you're trying to put the fear of God in the opponent, something like that could kill someone, and not like in an accidental freak way that happens in football with Alex Smith's leg break, but in an intentional "I'm going to potentially end your day if not more and I know it and you never even saw it coming" way.

But the rules about falling on a QB and all that business. Yes, protect the players but don't make it so utterly confusing as to what is the right amount of spicy in playing the damn game for at least 4 other guys on passing plays. The burden on some of this stuff for players is nuts and we saw a few times during the season baffling D line plays where they wanted to avoid the penalty and the QB made a play because of it.

And on that point, call these QB hits consistently. Cam Newton, say what you will about the character, the player, the whatever, never gets a call about getting hit. Yes, he runs a lot, yes he's a mountain of a man, but we've all seen the hits that were obvious that would have gotten dudes ejected if the same hit was on Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady. Yes, Cam brings a ton of risk on himself simply by being who he is in every way, but the indifference of the league to the obvious hits he's taken - I don't like it one bit. And Cam is just the most obvious symptom of the seeming favortism we perceive in who is untouchable and catered to.

I think the only point of emphasis that should be strictly enforced are headshots and complete blindsides. Defenders can't always perfectly tackle and crap happens but launching yourself head first into the earhole of a WR just catching a pass or jogging down the field trailing the play CAN and SHOULD be avoided. If you don't make the play because you couldn't jack a dude up wantonly, cut your losses on that play and do better and practice your ass off on doing it right next time. If you just felt like jacking a dude up who was completely unaware and away from the play then you're just a punk who doesn't deserve to play the goddamn game because you can't act like a professional would and should be expected to. Seriously the hit on Lockette still kinda flusters me to this day. Even if we accept football is a game that engenders physical harm and danger, I don't accept that football also engenders malice and complete indifference to how you conduct yourself on the field in relation to injuring opposing players. Burfict is malicious. James Harrison was malicious. Suh is malicious and also somehow just a cosmic force of injury infliction.

I think one of two things that would help take the edge off with officiating is either fans collectively accepting that refs are fallible, overwhelmed and under supported semi-professionals, who have biases they might not even realize, and would benefit from having themselves raise the bar on how they perform OR we fans accepting we're watching theater and spectacle and soak in the narrative like we're watching Game of Thrones. We are in Season 7 now and it's not great.

Click to expand...

Holy (&#&*@#@

wall
of
text

I'd be more inclined to read this if it was about half the length... maybe even a third. =O

My eyes hurt now..Forgot my reading glasses for long reads..

IronSaint · Feb 10, 2019

The Falcons.

:lol:

Seahawkfan80 · Feb 10, 2019

IronSaint":1adzljwd said:
The Falcons.

:lol:

:stirthepot: :rumble: :smilingalien:

What do we want out of the NFL?

mrt144

New member

Sports Hernia

Well-known member

chris98251

Well-known member

mrt144

New member

knownone

Well-known member

IndyHawk

Well-known member

IronSaint

Member

Seahawkfan80

Well-known member

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