The McNabb Trade Decision

Lawlor has a long, thoughtful post up today in which he officially embraces the position that it's now time to move on from McNabb.

I don't agree with all the ways he arrived at that decision, but the analysis echoes a number of points I tried to make in last week's McNabb post.  The big guy just didn't look consistently great this year.  We can argue the "whys" on that issue, but the "whats" seem pretty settled.

Once you get to the trade discussion, there are a couple points I've been wanting to make.  Most of this stuff is pretty intuitive -- okay, maybe all of it -- but given the way the discussion's been framed so far, I think it's worth putting out there.

I had an economics professor in college who taught me the best lesson I ever learned:  If you can't draw a picture of something, you don't really understand it.  So today we're busting out some graphs. 

Here's the McNabb/Kolb decision model from which many people seem to be working:
 
It's a simple graph of time versus performance.  McNabb will likely get worse as he gets older (if the decline hasn't started already) while Kolb should get better as he hits his prime.  For now, try not to get hung up on things like the slopes of the lines and if they should even be linear.  They're just illustrative.

When you're looking at this graph, the Kolb/McNabb question is a relatively trivial problem.  You just go along until that point in time at which Kolb's performance surpasses McNabb's, and then you make the switch.

The dotted blue line represents where we were a couple years ago.  Everyone can decide for himself where we are now.

But there are a few problems with this model.  The biggest is that Kolb's progression isn't accurately captured here.  Sure, he's going to get better with time even as a backup, but to truly reach his peak he's going to need starting experience.  Which means the graph should be more like this:

Now, the solid red line indicates Kolb's performance increase for as long as he remains a backup.  The dotted lines kick in when he becomes a starter.

The interesting thing about this diagram is that it illustrates the danger of waiting too long to make the switch.  If we assume right now is the moment that the solid red and black lines cross, notice that we would have been better off today if Kolb had gotten the job some time ago.  The trade-off is that we would have been worse off last year.

To put this one in more realistic terms, think about it this way.  If your primary goal is to win a Super Bowl (rather than just maximizing long-term wins) then you have to decide when you need your QB to peak.  If you think you can win one immediately, then you stick with McNabb and don't worry as much about Kolb's development.  On the other hand, if you think the team is a year away, then you better go with Kolb now, so that you're maximizing your SB chances two years from now.

Of course, McNabb's not going to retire when you make the change, which means there's another complication here:  his trade value.  Even if you decide he's not the guy here, he's still better than half the other starters in the league.  If you trade him at the point marked by the lines in this graph, you should be able to recoup some of his value, as represented by the shaded area:

The key there being, of course, that the size of the shaded area decreases every year.  What was once three first-round picks becomes one first-round pick becomes "OBO."

For the sake of argument, let's pretend we're at the point right now where Kolb and McNabb have equal immediate value in terms of performance.  This would then be your decision:

The shaded area in black is the value we've gotten from McNabb the last few years.  The shaded area in red is the value we can expect to get from Kolb going forward.  The blue area is the additional value we get if we trade McNabb for picks or players who can help the team, as opposed to making the switch after he gets hurt in training camp or leaves as a free agent.

But wait, you're saying, what if I don't think Kolb and McNabb are equally good right now.  That's fine, that just gives you a graph that looks like this:

In that case, even if Kolb is worse than McNabb, you can still come out ahead as long as the value you get in trading McNabb makes up the difference.

And that's the really the key point.  Kolb doesn't have to be better than McNabb next year for a trade to make sense.  His contributions, combined with whatever comes back for McNabb, just need to be better.

Which is why not trading McNabb right now is probably the riskier move.  Unless they trade Kolb (in some ways the riskiest move of all) the McNabb/Kolb transition is eventually going to happen.  You can do it now, when you can get something back for Donovan that should greatly help the team, or you can wait until next year and hope he doesn't get injured AND you can finagle some way to get value out of both these 2011 free agents next summer.

If you care about maximizing results over the next eight years -- and not just in 2010 -- it seems like a pretty easy call.  You make the deal.