Is Shawn Andrews Overrated or Just Off to a Slow Start?

Ask the typical Eagles fan who the team's best offensive lineman is and the likely response will be right guard Shawn Andrews.  Ask the typical Eagles fan which offensive tackle is the better run blocker and again you'll probably get pretty wide agreement that it's right tackle Jon Runyan.

So why are the Eagles running so much more often -- and so much more successfully -- this year to the left side?

Some context first.  Here's a chart showing "adjusted line yards" for each of the five running zones that Football Outsiders tracks:

		LEFT END		LEFT TACKLE		MID/GUARD		RIGHT TACKLE		RIGHT END
	TEAM	ALY	Rank	ALY	Rank	ALY	Rank	ALY	Rank	ALY	Rank
3	PHI	6.02	2	5.33	7	4.76	9	4.99	7	4.22	13

And here's a chart showing the Eagles attempts per area, yards per area, and "adjusted" attempts per area.  More on that in a second (click for full size):

The Football Outsiders guys only track five zones because their research suggests there's no "statistically significant difference between how well a team performs on runs listed middle, left guard, and right guard."  Which may be true, but drilling down a little bit more helps us figure out how the coaches are calling plays.

So, to create that chart above, I went back and pulled all the play-by-play information for the year.  Unfortunately, at least some of the NFL's stat trackers are on board with the FO mindset, because in two of the games (Washington and Detroit) the charter simply listed runs "up the middle," without specifying which side of the center.  That's why middle runs are artificially high in that chart and left/right guards are artificially low. 

I created the yellow line by assuming the Eagles coaches called the same ratio of left/middle/right runs in all four games.  I'm sure that's not an accurate assumption, but it's worth it to give us a better visual sense of how this is breaking down so far this year.  (In fact, I think this method might actually understate the left/right imbalance, because I recall many, many runs over left guard in the Detroit game.)

Taken together, these two pieces of information demonstrate that while the Eagles may be right-handed formation-wise, their clear rushing tendency this year has been towards the left, away from Andrews and Runyan.  (Last year the opposite was true, although they were more balanced overall.)

There are a number of reasons this could be the case.  Maybe teams are loading up to stop the run on that side of the formation so the Eagles have to go against tendency to have success.  Maybe it's a speed issue, with the Eagles preferring to pull with Andrews and Runyan, rather than Herremans and Thomas.  Or maybe it's that the Eagles' linemen are such good individual run-blockers that it makes sense to attack the weak side of the formation, which as we've seen is more often on the left.

However, it's also possible that maybe the Eagles are running more on the left because that's where the guys are doing a better job.  And if that's the case, what's up with Shawn Andrews?

I've noticed a few times this year that Andrews doesn't seem quite as strong at the point of attack.  He's still remarkably quick, but it doesn't always look like he's getting a solid drive off the ball when they try to run behind him.  Andrews has also been flagged for three holding penalties so far this year.  No other Eagle has more than one. 

It's not like he's been bad -- those numbers above are really pretty good across the board -- but he hasn't been dominant, and that's what we're expecting to see out of a guy who made the Pro Bowl last year.  I wonder how much his preseason ankle injury affected him early on.

One final point, check out the first and last tables on this FO page.  Third-best run-blocking line in the game coupled with the fourth-fewest rushing attempts.

Ye gods.