Iggles Blog - Philadelphia Eagles Blog

This Is What I Mean

When I say people's perceptions are overly influenced by the result on the scoreboard, this is what I mean:

Credit to McNabb
His final numbers were okay at best. Not poor, but not much to cheer about either. However, we saw McNabb manage the game in a way he hasn't all year. He didn't take bad sacks, he threw balls away when nothing was there, and he did a fine job using his legs to avoid pressue and even make one big play. He still checked down a ton, he still threw a ton of incompletions, he was off target at times... but the fact is when you play smart and manage the game well you can still win despite those things. I really liked his mentality today.

That was Jason's assessment of McNabb's performance today on Bleeding Green Nation. 

Now here's what he thought about last week:

The offensive problem
The problem was Donovan McNabb was not seeing any open receivers. Whether he was not seeing them because none were open or whether he just wasn't finding the open guys I do not know. A few times FOX showed replays where they showed one or two guys covered but we never actually saw. Maybe if someone was at the game they could give us their thoughts on that. The one thing I do wonder though is how there were open receivers the last two weeks but none this week. The Giants were without both starting safeties and most Giant fans will tell you it's not as if they have shutdown corners anyway. Someone needs to answer the question why the QB was looking downfield and not seeing anything. It's the most important question facing this offense and maybe this team headed into this offseason.

And here's a statistical comparison of the past two weeks:

I'm not intending to criticize Jason for what he wrote.  I think most people would agree -- broadly speaking -- with most of what he said.  And this will not be the most egregious example of this phenomenon once everything's said and done.  Jason's just good at getting his posts up fast.

It's just interesting that when the offense scores 13 points and they lose, McNabb's a goat.  When they score 10 and win, he's one of the heroes.  Even if the stats suggest he played better the first week.   

More Irrational McNabb Love

McNabb ranked number nine by Scouts Inc., those lousy Eagles apologists.

With That Said...

Look, big picture I think everyone needs to take a deep breath, let McNabb prepare with his first healthy offseason in three years, and give him a chance to show what he can do next year.  However, this is just more statistical sleight-of-hand designed to defend the indefensible:

The chic new theory to explain why the offense has sputtered suggests that it is McNabb's refusal to throw the ball deep that has grounded the passing game...

The numbers really don't suggest that McNabb has been overly-conservative this season. In fact, they suggest that he really hasn't thrown downfield all that much less than he has throughout the rest of his career.

In the 11 games in which he has played this season, McNabb has attempted 38 throws that traveled 20 yards or more in the air. That means that on the average Sunday, he throws 3.5 deep balls.

Since 2000, McNabb averages 4.2 throws of over 20 yards per game – a difference of less than one full attempt.

In fact, following the 2000 season, McNabb finished as the runner up to Marshall Faulk in the league MVP voting, and that season he had attempted only 3.9 passes of 20 yards or more per game. In 2001, he attempted only 3.5.

There are multiple problems with this argument.  The first and most important is that you can't compare McNabb's current pace to his career numbers and call it a day, because this didn't used to be a big play offense.  In fact, back in McNabb's early days the common criticism of the Andy Reid offense was that it was too "dink and dunk" with no big play threat whatsoever.  It wasn't until the jerk arrived in 2004 that we saw the truth -- Reid's offense was bomb-happy when he had the personnel to run it. 

Unfortunately, I don't have access to the same stats the guys who work for PE.com do, so I'll have to make do with the public numbers.  Here's a table with big plays of 20+ / 40+ yard plays as a percentage of total attempts:

As you can see, there's a clear difference between McNabb's early and later years.  (And it's truly a measure of just how sputtering the offense has been at times this year that McNabb is on course to post the second-lowest big-play percentage of his career.)  And while we can't say for sure that there's a tight relationship between long attempts and long completions, thanks to that article we know that McNabb attempted 3.9 "deep balls" per game in 2000 and 3.5 in 2001 -- both of which are lower than his 4.3 career mark. 

It's also worth nothing that 2000 was the year McNabb attempted 569 passes, a figure he's never come close to reaching again.  The difference between 3.9 and 3.5 can be almost entirely attributed to the fact that McNabb simply threw fewer passes in 2001.  This is why deep pass per attempt would be a much better number to use.

The second problem with the argument is that it's only given us one piece of information.  Even if it were true that McNabb was trying almost as many passes over 20 yards, I'm willing to bet that his percentage of passes that travel at least 10 or 15 yards in the air would also be lower than in years past.  Maybe I'm wrong, but the six-yard checkdown seems to be a larger part of the offense than it has been the last few years. 

In fact, if you really want to make the case that McNabb's not just checking the ball down all the time ... why don't you give us the percentage of passes that travel fewer than 10 yards in the air?  Let's compare that to previous years and see where things stand.  (And since we're making requests, please control for the frequency of called screen passes, which seems to have declined this year as opponents started game planning to take away this important part of the offense.)

The last bit of evidence we have comes from this fantastic statistical website I linked to a couple weeks ago.  He has access to Yardage-After-Catch (YAC) numbers that allow him to back out what he calls "air yards" for every quarterback in the league.  If you compare his numbers through week 12 of this season to the numbers for last year you can see that McNabb's average completion is traveling only about six yards through the air this season.  Last year the number was almost seven.  That's a difference of about 15 slots in the QB rankings for that stat. 

The other reason things seem so much tougher this year?  McNabb averaged 7.8 yards of YAC per completion last season, by far the highest number in the league.  This year (through 12 games) the figure is about 5.9 and the difference doesn't seem to be related to any dropoff in the receiving production of Brian Westbrook, the human YAC machine who is on pace to catch even more balls this year than last.

Right now this is a station-to-station offense, with no home run threat and too few base stealers.  It does no good to pretend otherwise.

How Quickly People Forget

The folks who don't like McNabb generally fall into one of two categories.  The first is the group that argues McNabb has always been overrated, he's never run the offense well and the Eagles have mostly won in spite of him.  These are generally the same people who think the Eagles are "cheap."  There's little point in arguing with these individuals, since they're not operating in the realm of reason when it comes to these matters.

However, there is another, saner group that concedes McNabb once was good, but now they feel he no longer is and its time to move on.  (Depending upon how you define the parameters of this group, its membership could be pretty large.)  The stronger version of this side's argument is that McNabb was very good in 2004, but since then he's had three bad years, so clearly he's finished and it's time for the Kolb era to begin.

The problem is that -- factually -- this isn't true.  Yes, McNabb has had injury issues the past three years that have seriously diminished his performance.  And yes, I think everyone would concede that for whatever reason he just doesn't look "right" out there these days.

But as I wrote just a couple of days ago, the evidence is clear that while McNabb isn't having the kind of season we're used to, his performance this year is (just) above average for the league.  More importantly, what people seem to be forgetting is just how well McNabb was playing last season before he got hurt. 

For purposes of comparison, I've taken every quarterback in the league this season and extrapolated their stats as if they played a full 16-game schedule.  I did the same thing with McNabb's 2006 and 2004 seasons, and then compared his "healthy" stats with the league leaders across six important quarterback categories:

(I don't know why typepad keeps screwing up my pictures when I upload them, by the way.  It's annoying.)

If you look at the numbers, you'll see that McNabb -- assuming a 16-game season for him last year -- would have been among the league leaders across the board.  This is emphatically NOT the picture of a guy who wasn't any good.

In fact, if you plot out the guys who appear in the top 10 for at least four of those six categories, you find it's a pretty exclusive list AND that McNabb is settled in nicely upon it (this one's big so click for the full-size image):

This is why, for all the frustration of this year, I'm not ready to give up on McNabb.  He was this good last year.  Are you willing to argue -- do you honestly believe -- that the odds of Kevin Kolb making that list next year are better than McNabb's? 

It's Not All McNabb

It's funny, for years there have been Eagles fans who -- depite all the evidence -- would argue that Donovan McNabb wasn't a top five caliber quarterback because of his worm burners, puking or mom.  Now that McNabb truly isn't playing at a top-tier level, those same folks would have you believe that Don has become one of the league's worst QBs, a scattershot, no-mobility shadow of his former self. 

That's just not true.  And while it's clear McNabb is struggling right now (and doesn't appear to have much confidence), he's not having an Adam Eaton type season.  Throw out your preconceived notions for a minute and just look at the stats. 

The strange thing is that we're only two seasons removed from bad quarterbacking in this town.  Remember the Mike McMahon / Koy Detmer experience?  How could anyone forget?

Go back to that list of current NFL quarterbacks.  Name the ones playing better than McNabb right now.  I'll give you the 11 guys in front of him and throw in Derek Anderson.  You'll probably want to take Carson Palmer too, but a 21/17 TD/INT ration is ridiculous for a guy with his experience.  And that's it. 

So McNabb at his worst is playing as the 13th-best QB in the league.  Now think about how many other guys the Eagles have who could claim a similarly high ranking at their position. 

It's not just McNabb.

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Lew Bowen has a really great piece on McNabb in today's Daily News.  It's comprehensive and fair.  Even the McNabb haters will find something to love at the end.

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Finally, I wanted to pass along an email response I got when I was bemoaning the fact that McNabb isn't making things happen like he used to:

He’s definitely playing tight.  But we have to give the guy a break.

1. He’s coming off knee surgery that is just now healing.
2. For the first time since he’s been here he knows his days are numbered.
3. He’s the biggest goat in a city that loves to hate superstars.
4. His receivers are, at best, decent for this league. 
5. He was on his back 12 times in the first game.

I think you were a little to quick to give up on the whole running thing. I mean, they got their asses beat the first time around and this time they barely lost.

That said, they’re still only one really good receiver away from a 10 or 11 win season. Just imagine if he had Plaxico. Defenses couldn’t just key on Westbrook and play man on the receivers.

They’re just not playing with any confidence. It probably started with that very first Packers game they lost.

Thumbs Down, But Not to McNabb

Paul Domowitch:

THUMBS DOWN: To Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, who just won't let up with his "nobody knows the criticism I've seen" act. When asked at his Wednesday news conference how he thinks he will be welcomed by the crowd on Sunday, McNabb said: "It's really none of my concern. I can't waste my energy worrying about how people feel about me. A lot of you have written articles to get me out of here, and I'm still here. I'm interested to see the reaction of how you guys go [write] after this wonderful [news] conference.'' For a guy who says he doesn't waste energy worrying about what people think of him, it seems as if he does nothing but worry about it. Buy a pair of freaking earplugs and stop reading the paper, will ya, fella.

And there's your answer, Don.  They'll act jerks.

Besides, he said "can't" not "don't." 

Closer Look at Sack Stats

A reader named George raises a good question about the sack point I made in a post on Tuesday:

"Don't you think you have to take the Giants game out of that sack stat? I think you can make a case that the protection in the Giants game WAS the problem. If it is 18 sacks in 8.5 games, then the difference isn't nearly as much. So you're getting one more sack per game with Donovan. Sure, he should throw it away more, but the sack is better than the INT."

It's a good point (especially considering this week's opponent), so let's dive into the issue a bit more deeply.  To start, here's a look at the career sack numbers of Donovan McNabb, Jeff Garcia and A.J. Feeley.  The sack "Rate" is simply (sacks) / (pass attempts + sacks).  The "Adj. Rate" is (sacks) / (pass attempts + sacks + rushing attempts) to control for the fact that most quarterback runs are actually scrambles on called passing plays.

As you can see, Donovan has the highest sack rates of the three quarterbacks, as well as the largest spread between the two rates.  Neither observation is that surprising.  McNabb has always taken a lot of sacks, partly because he's so careful with the football and partly because he can use his legs to keep a play going longer -- he doesn't have to just throw it away when the pressure's on.  Unfortunately, he doesn't always escape.  And when he avoids a sack, it's with athleticism, not timing.

Feeley, in contrast, is more of a timing guy.  If it's not there, he'll throw it to Lofa Tatupu away.  Garcia is somewhere in the middle, with good speed but also the savvy to get rid of it when nothing's there. 

The contrast is especially stark when you look at how the three players have fared over the past two years, even if you take out this year's Giants game:

Even if you pretend the Giants game didn't happen, McNabb is still getting sacked twice as often as Feeley did during his brief stint as the starter.  Given that that's the exact same pattern we saw last season with three quarterbacks, it seems fair to suggest that it's not just a coincidence.  McNabb is more sack-prone.

It's also worth noting that the leaguewide average is 6.5 percent.  Feeley's mark would be the third-best in the league, behind only Derek Anderson and Drew Brees.  So it's not like McNabb is going down at some absurdly high rate, it's just higher than we probably should be seeing, given the quality of his line. 

None of this is meant to bash McNabb.  As George pointed out, it's better to take a sack than throw a dumb interception (although throwing it away can be the best option).  And McNabb clearly hasn't been 100 percent all season, which has affected his ability to move and avoid the rush.  But when we're evaluating players after this season mercifully draws to a close, we'll need to understand that the line hasn't taken the step backwards that the statistics would first suggest.

Backfill

Sorry, I realize now that something about that last post may not have been entirely clear.  That's the problem with blogging first drafts.

Anyway, if I were running the team, my top priority this offseason would be bringing in the types of free agent weapons who would let Donovan be Donovan.  Then we ride with him for a couple more years and try to win a Super Bowl.

However, if you're not going to do that and you truly think the receivers are fine and you just want to patch around the edges, then I think maybe it's time to move on. 

Keeping McNabb and not changing the team would pretty much be your worst-case scenario.

Donovan McNabb...

The more I think about Sunday night's game, the more I'm settling on a new theory of Donovan McNabb.  It all makes sense, from the touchdown passes down to the interceptions, to everything else that's happened in the last four years.  Here is it, the theory that explains everything:

Donovan McNabb doesn't like throwing the ball into tight spaces. 

I know what you're thinking.  "Well, duh, we all knew that."  And yes, we did all know that.  But we knew it as a fact, like the fact that pizza tastes good or the fact that Marty Mornhinweg gives even more boring interviews than Andy Reid.  I'm saying it's bigger than that. 

To prove it, let's look at some of the competing theories that people are tossing around and show why they don't make as much sense.

Competing theory #1:  Donovan McNabb sucks.

Ludicrous on its face, which doesn't stop many people from bleating it as much as they can.  He doesn't suck, he's never sucked and once the proponents of this view get back to us with an explanation for how such a crappy quarterback could make five Pro Bowls and carry an offense for years, then maybe we'll take it a little more seriously.

Competing theory #2:  Donovan McNabb isn't accurate.

This one has a kernel of truth to it, but it's not enough to explain everything.  Did you see how many throws A.J. missed on Sunday night?  I plan to look at it in more detail when I do the video rewind, but off the top of my head I can remember at least three times that Feeley missed guys who were really wide open.  I mean all by themselves wide open. 

Quarterbacks miss throws.  No one has ever gone a full season with a 100 percent completion percentage.  When Brady misses a guy, people think it's because there was a hand in his face or he couldn't step up or maybe the ball was a little slick.  When McNabb misses a guy, people say it's because he's an inaccurate quarterback with a serious aversion to worms. 

We see what we expect to see.

Competing theory #3:  It's the wide receivers. 

I've gone back and forth on this one all year and the lack of internal blog consistency really ticks me off.  I defended them after the first Redskins game when Ron Jaworski spent the night ripping them on national television.  Then I whacked them after the Dallas game when it looked like they were shooting BB guns while the Dallas receivers were packing howitzers.

At this point, I think we can fairly state what we have -- a good crop of wide receivers, each with various strengths, but no truly physically dominant guy in the mode of Randy Moss or Terrell Owens.  I still think Curtis spends a lot of time out of position (Wes Welker?  Hello?) and it's clear none of these guys is a field stretcher in the mode of Donte Stallworth, but as a group they are "good enough."

Competing theory #4:  His teammates hate him.

I mean, really.  The whole thing doesn't make sense, but do we really think that guys are tanking because they don't like the quarterback, who isn't even a bad guy?  If this were the case, wouldn't we have heard something -- anything -- from the locker room now about how the team is rallying behind A.J. and doesn't want to see McNabb come back?  You don't think Dana Pennett O'Neill is out there right now trying to coax some third-string special teamer into making some headlines? 

In the absence of even some smoke, we can rule out fire.  Which doesn't mean there's not some truth to the next idea...

Competing theory #5:  His teammates play better when he's not on the field because of his lack of energy/fire/whatever. 

I think this is partly true.  Jeff Garcia and A.J. Feeley are both guys who play with a lot of emotion.  People seem to feed off of that.  But the thing is, this wasn't a problem before.  Back in 2002, no one was claiming that the Eagles would be better if McNabb would just knock some heads around.  (Ok, this isn't totally true, lots of fans have wished he would smile less and curse more for a long time.  But the upbeat approach didn't seem to hurt on the field.) 

And it's not like Garcia and Feeley are all that comparable.  I'll buy the Garcia, "saddle up boys 'cause this is my last shot at a winner" thing, but A.J. Feeley?  Really?  Where was this magical team-building fire in Miami or San Diego? 

I love A.J., just as every good Eagles fan who remembers the way he saved a season does, but I'm not buying the coincidence that the Eagles just happened to have two backup quarterbacks who fired up their teams in the exact same way when McNabb went down. 

Maybe there's a marginal effect here, but it can't explain the whole shebang.

Competing theory #6:  His teammates play better when he's not on the field because they take it upon themselves to make plays rather than waiting for Superman to emerge from his phone booth.

I thought there was something to this last year.  A number of guys even said as much after McNabb went down.  But did it look like guys were playing above their heads on Sunday night?  Or did it instead look kind of the same except the execution was a bit better? 

And would the same guys who figured out that they needed to step up their games last season somehow forget that over the summer as they saw their veteran QB rehabbing and coming back at less than full strength?  Again, decent theory last year, but it doesn't seem to have stood the test of time.

Competing theory #7:  The play-calling changes when McNabb goes down.

Not to say I told you so, but...

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And that's it, that's all I can come up with.  Please let me know in the comments if you have any to add, but for now, that's all I've got.  So now the tight spaces theory.

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For whatever reason, Donovan McNabb doesn't like to put the ball into tight spaces.  We know this now because:

1. He has a career-long track record of avoiding interceptions.
2. Quarterbacks who play in his place make throws in the same offense that we don't see him make.
3. Every NFL wide receiver can get open, it's just a question of how open.
4. He throws the ball far more often to physically dominant guys who can get really open (Owens and Stallworth).
5. He takes an awful lot of sacks -- more than a veteran quarterback who is this comfortable with the offense really should, simply because he's hesitant to pull the trigger.

We don't actually know why McNabb doesn't like to throw into tight spaces.  It's not because he can't, because when it's desperation time and he has no choice, he'll bury the ball right in a guy's gut with coverage draped on him.  It's probably instead because he had so much success doing things the other way, that he's never needed to change.

Then the injuries happened.

McNabb used to be a guy who could buy time for his receivers to go from "open" to "really open" by scrambling in, around, and outside the pocket.  His receivers did stink back in the day, but it didn't matter because his mobility could help them get time to get open.  Now that he's not the same guy, even though he has better wide receivers, he's struggling somewhat because he can't play the same way he did before. 

McNabb's career has basically had four phases:

1. The rookie
2. The guy who made plays with mobility
3. The guy who had great weapons who were able to get the kind of separation that made him comfortable
4. The guy who doesn't have his mobility and doesn't have great weapons (although, again, they're "good enough")

That leaves us with two problems, because I don't think McNabb is going to change.

First of all, McNabb needs to be healthy.  He is a fine pocket passer much of the time, but he can't go from above average to where he used to be unless he's healthy. 

Let me repeat that, because it's important.  McNabb is NOT playing that badly this year.  However, he's not going from a 6.5 to an 8.5 if he's lugging around a bum wheel.   

Secondly, the receivers are here to stay, and that's a problem.  Think of it this way.  Say you're a team with LaDanian Tomlinson.  You've got one of the best running backs in the league, so you figure, he's that good, he should be able to carry us on his own.  So you build a light-butted offensive line with a focus on pass protection and put your time and effort into fixing the passing part of your offense. 

Is that going to work?  No.

It's the same thing with McNabb.  You have a guy who plays the position a certain way.  For him to be truly successful, he needs to have certain types of receivers (unless he's fully healthy, and even then he's far better with better weapons).  Do you think that not giving him those types of receivers is going to work out well?

Nope.

Which means there are two possible fixes here -- ditch McNabb or ditch the wide receivers -- because praying he stays healthy and can be the old McNabb again doesn't seem to be working out.  With Kevin Kolb waiting in the wings, it's not hard to figure out which way they're going to go.

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Postscript

Here's the thing about all the people bashing McNabb.  What's going to happen when they trade him to Chicago?  And all of a sudden he's not throwing to Kevin Curtis and Reggie Brown, but instead Bernard Berrian (assuming he stays) and Devin Hester?  Or what if he goes to Baltimore and his protect-the-ball-at-all-costs approach is a perfect fit for how that team plays football?  Or San Diego where he gets to hand off 60 percent of the time and make his living off Antonio Gates the rest of the game like everyone else down there does?  Imagine him in Arizona with those wide receivers. 

The point is, maybe it's time for McNabb to go, for reasons that have little to do with him and more to do with how the front office didn't provide the type of receiver with whom he thrives. When he does, you'll sound just like the guy in Hoosiers who leads the charge to fire Norman Dale after the first vote on ditching the coach.  And you're going to look just as dumb when he's tearing up the league and shoving the "he can't play" crap back in his critics' faces every Sunday.  Which will happen. 

Unless he gets traded to Minnesota.  Then he's pretty much f'ed. 

McNabb Has to Play

I don't care if his ankle is sore or his thumb isn't quite right.  I don't care if he's struggled for much of the season to regain his prior form.  And I don't care that the smart play would be to concede the inevitable loss, let the backups get pounded on, and save McNabb for another day.

McNabb claims he's the leader of this team.  If that's true, he should strap it on, get on that field, and play his guts out against the league's toughest foe. 

His team needs him.  He damn well better be there for them.