Why The National Experts Are Usually Wrong

I am a nutty Philadelphia Eagles fan.  I'm not this guy or this guy or even this guy, but for me there are only three times of year: 1) football season, 2) the depressive aftermath, and 3) the summer of gathering optimism.  Rinse, repeat.

Throughout the course of the year, I read just about every last scrap of information I can find about the team.  Philly.com, ESPN.com, profootballtalk.com, SI.com, Google News to track trade rumors in other cities ... everything.  It's a far cry from my early college days, when my father (sadly, a Cowboys fan) used to mail me the actual sports page from the Philadelphia Inquirer on Mondays so that I could read about the previous day's game. 

Of course, I also have the DirecTV NFL package, and I've actually turned down tickets to the Eagles season opener in Houston this year because I can't bear to not be in front of my two TVs watching six games at once on the first real day of the season.

(And yes, my wife is very supportive, despite the fact that I know she secretly roots against the Eagles in the playoffs because she wants the "depressive aftermath" part over and done with as soon as possible.  But she also roots against Peyton Manning because he has a big forehead and dislikes the Cowboys because BIll Parcells is "an asshat."  So it all evens out.)

I even watch the coaches' press conferences on PhiladelphiaEagles.com.  Jim Johnson is the best, but Harbaugh cracks me up.

All of which is to say I learn as much about the Eagles as anyone possible can who isn't actually in the locker room or part of Andy Reid's extended family.  So if you ask me for an informed opinion about the Eagles, I can quote you chapter and verse.  BUT, if you ask me about the prospects in this year's AFC South, I'm not going to be able to tell you very much.  I follow the big stories as much as the next guy (Mario Williams?  Really?), but beyond that I'm only going to be able to tell you the same things that everyone else is saying (the Colts will be fine without James; Vince Young will be starting by Week 8; the Jags have a crazy schedule, opening with DAL, PIT, IND, WAS; and the Texans still suck.)

Which is exactly the problem facing national sportswriters, and why they have to rely on a variety of shorthand techniques when they are forced to comment on teams around the league.

No one person can know the entire league.  So what happens is that a few salient points come out of the offseason noise, they get picked up in the national sports commentary echo chamber, and all of a sudden conventional wisdom solidifies a few key talking points for each team that people trade around and pass off as personal opinion.

The best annual example of this is the blizzard of mock drafts that come out in the weeks leading up to the NFL draft.  I'm not a statistical expert (maybe I'll dive deeper into this topic in a later post), but it's pretty clear just by eyeballing these drafts that there is a far, far greater correlation between the mock drafts of the "experts" than there is between any of those mock lotteries and the actual draft.  It's Mel Kiper's world and we're all just living in it, pretending it's our own.

This is the same process that happens with pre-season predictions.  There's way too much information for any one person to process in the off-season, so commentators take short cuts.  They're not bad people for doing this -- they just don't have any choice.  They have editors and a deadline and they need to get something pounded out.

Unfortunately, the results are often something like the following, which appeared in the offseason report card of Jeffri Chadiha, writer for SI.com:

What Went Wrong: They still think they have enough offensive weapons around quarterback Donovan McNabb. They don't. Unless wide receiver Reggie Brown makes a huge leap in his second year -- which is something most young receivers don't do -- McNabb will be relying on Todd Pinkston, Greg Lewis and Jabar Gaffney to get things done on the outside. That's not a pretty picture.

Now the larger point here may actually be true.  We won't know until the games are played if the Eagles have enough firepower on offense to match what I believe will be the fantastic efforts of a rebounding defense.  But it's in the details where Chadiha demonstrates the superficiality of his understanding.

There is NO scenario -- barring injury -- in which Reggie Brown is not our number one wide receiver this year.  To suggest that it's going to take a huge leap on Brown's part to pass such luminaries as Pinkston, Lewis and Gaffney on the depth chart is just daft.  He is already the number one guy. 

Secondly, let's take a look at this "huge leap" he claims Brown needs to make.  Here are last season's stats for these four guys (I used 2004 for Pinkston since he was out all last year with his Achilles issue):

	Receiving Stats
	YEAR	TEAM	G	REC	YDS	AVG	LNG	TD	FD	FUM	LOST
Brown	2005	PHI	16	43	571	13.3	56	4	24	1	0
Gaffney	2005	HOU	16	55	492	8.9	29	2	31	0	0
Pinkston	2004	PHI	16	36	676	18.8	80	1	24	0	0
Lewis	2005	PHI	16	48	561	11.7	34	1	30	0	0

Brown's stats don't really jump out, but they sit him nicely in this pack of starting NFL wide receivers.  So yeah, to be the number one guy, he's going to have to make the jump.

Oh, but wait.  I forgot to mention that Brown only really got on the field in the last nine games of the season after TO was suspended.  In those nine games he started, he had 34 catches for 463 yards -- despite the fact that for the final seven games he was playing with the incomparable Mike McMahon.

If you take Brown's production in this nine games and extrapolate it over a 16-game season (an iffy proposition, but a good approximation), you end up with 60 catches for 823 yards and seven touchdowns. 

If you stick with those numbers, you're basically talking about Eric Moulds (Brown would have fewer catches, slightly more yards and three more TDs) or Lavernues Coles (fewer catches, same yards, two more TDs).  The Moulds comparison is particularly ironic, given the panting of the Eagles fan base for him earlier this offseason.

If you add nine catches, 150 yards and four TDS (and fantastic blocking and leadership), you get Hines Ward.

If you add 23 catches (+1.5 per game), 230 yards and five TDs you get Marvin Harrison.

I think we can safely classify Marvin Harrison territory as a "huge jump."  That's a lot to expect, particularly because teams are going to start game-planning against him if he and McNabb have a lot of early success.

The Hines Ward progression, however, seems eminently achievable.  That wouldn't make him as good a player as Ward, given all the other intangibles and the system differences, but that's a more than serviceable top-line guy.

One more thing to consider.  The word out of Eagles camp is that McNabb treats Brown as his go-to guy.  Obviously you never know what's going to happen in the NFL, what with injuries and everything else, but my guess is McNabb and Brown are both out to prove they can be just as successful as McNabb and TO. 

Good luck with that, of course, but it's going to be driving them both. 

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So that's today's look at a national sportswriter spouting bunk about the Eagles.  Don't worry, there are plenty of other examples and we'll be covering them all soon. 

Maybe next time I'll even be able to keep the takedown under 1300 words...