Beyond The Numbers: Panthers’ Youth Focus Should Pay Dividends

[SBBlue]

Link:Panthers’ Youth Focus Should Pay Dividends (theriotreport.com)

In the 2021 NFL Draft Jaycee Horn, Terrace Marshall Jr, Tommy Tremble and Chubba Hubbard are all 21 or younger, with both Marshall and Tremble having turned 21 since the draft. This follows a 2020 draft where only Bravvion Roy was older than 22 to start his rookie season.

...The headline answer is that age has a negative correlation with AdjAV (so younger players are better) and the model has an R^2 of 0.31. So, while the evidence isn’t slam dunk conclusive, it does suggest that the NFL should value age more when determining where to pick players.

" a continued focus on drafting especially young prospects is unlikely to be some magic bullet that overcomes all other issues but...it has a chance to allow them to create the kind of small competitive edge that Matt Rhule has talked so much about. "

[kungfoodude]

Pretty cool analysis of the data. Makes me wonder what the data would look like crunched in a different way. 

Say, average "peak" performance age for players in specific positions. Or if that data changed significantly based on round drafted. 

[kungfoodude]

9 minutes ago, stbugs said:

Good point, kind of like what is the perfect age where if you do pay the second contract they don’t tail off in the middle of it and make it a bad contract or if they are 24 year old rookies do you basically get four good years and then you can not even bother with the second contract but get a decent comp pick on average?

I’d guess that the biggest reward is just plain hitting on the right guy. Kind of like stock investing if you buy that one Netflix it can overshadow lots of bad picks. If you select two of the top 5 day 2 picks, you likely win that draft regardless of age. The graphs of all players together smooth it out but you know that there’s likely a handful of players getting the huge values.

Exactly. It would be interesting to see what the sweet spot is for different positions and see if there is an obvious trend.

And, yeah, ultimately it is just about making the right decisions the majority of the time. Historically the Panthers have leaned fairly heavily towards paying players at exactly the wrong time or just plain paying the wrong players. 

That's something I hope we will get a lot better with under this new regime.

[panthers55]

So it seems the effect difference ignoring age and including it was pretty small. Then distilling a players value over 4 seasons into a single value or number for comparison seems somewhat unsound given the different ways to evaluate value. Finally using regressive analysis to show causality is like using rankings to compare individuals. Without comparing apples to apples and using absolute numbers the result is hardly conclusive or that useful. Just my opinion.

[Basbear]

8 hours ago, kungfoodude said:

Pretty cool analysis of the data. Makes me wonder what the data would look like crunched in a different way. 

Say, average "peak" performance age for players in specific positions. Or if that data changed significantly based on round drafted. 

If you look back at most panthers 1st round picks, they are the youngest in the draft. Feels like Shaq has been in the NFL for 12 years, but really its 6 and he just turned 26 years old. Burns, Brown, CMC, and Moore who was 2 years younger than ATLs Riley. 

One of my coaches did over a years worth of research into strength. He found a mans strongest years are 26-32. He said most are too hardheaded in their 20s to listen and by the they get "it" their prime years are in the past. Many can still be strong after 32, cause they also got much wiser too. Most young NFLers dont care about sleep, nutrition, nervous system, correct supplementation, good recovery, good habits, etc etc. Rhule does seem to focus on most of these, but trying to get young men to listen/buy in is the issue. 

[kungfoodude]

4 minutes ago, Basbear said:

If you look back at most panthers 1st round picks, they are the youngest in the draft. Feels like Shaq has been in the NFL for 12 years, but really its 6 and he just turned 26 years old. Burns, Brown, CMC, and Moore who was 2 years younger than ATLs Riley. 

One of my coaches did over a years worth of research into strength. He found a mans strongest years are 26-32. He said most are too hardheaded in their 20s to listen and by the they get "it" their prime years are in the past. Many can still be strong after 32, cause they also got much wiser too. Most young NFLers dont care about sleep, nutrition, nervous system, correct supplementation, good recovery, good habits, etc etc. Rhule does seem to focus on most of these, but trying to get young men to listen/buy in is the issue. 

There is also an amount of mileage that eventually catches up. So will your physical maturity and experience hit before your body starts to betray you. At some positions, you start to see a broad decline by 30(RB being the most obvious). We lost guys like Luke and Dan Morgan to injuries in their prime but Thomas Davis had a very long and very productive career after multiple serious injuries. 

The strength is the last thing to go, you are definitely right about that. It's the speed that goes first. You see the same in other professional sports, as well. 

[Basbear]

16 minutes ago, kungfoodude said:

There is also an amount of mileage that eventually catches up. So will your physical maturity and experience hit before your body starts to betray you. At some positions, you start to see a broad decline by 30(RB being the most obvious). We lost guys like Luke and Dan Morgan to injuries in their prime but Thomas Davis had a very long and very productive career after multiple serious injuries. 

The strength is the last thing to go, you are definitely right about that. It's the speed that goes first. You see the same in other professional sports, as well. 

Wear and tear is a real thing, some it doesnt matter and other normal people it does. Your joints, tendons, cartilage, etc all have limit before problems start. Thats when you should have been doing all the prevent stuff in your 20s, that many start doing in their 30s and go "O I should have been doing this at the start". You got like/love pain or be good friends with it to play NFL.

[BlitzMonster]

As a general comment on the graph I'll say that many of the very top NFL draft prospects tend to be younger since they leave school early.  So each year youth is disproportionally represented in the first round.  The junior players who are college football stars put their names in the draft as soon as they can.   It's a self-selection based on talent.   

Since the most talented players in a draft class are generally younger, your model may be showing a talent effect more than an effect based on young age. 

Here talent could be a confounder, could interact with age, it's hard to say without a careful review of the data.  But it's definitely something your discussion should consider (or, at least, clearly rule out).