Battle Red Blog
As we move closer and closer to the 2025-2026 season, it starts to be time to reset our expectations and our methods. In the radio business, they say that your audience turns over every 15 minutes. I’m not sure how often it turns over in the blog business, but there is bound to be some turnover. In particular, SBNation has rolled out a new design and a new system behind the scenes for us. There will be people attracted to the new design and there will be people that are turned off by the new design.
I’m sure the powers that be have done the behind the scenes research on this and have determined that it is a net positive. I’m not here to debate that wisdom. Instead, I am here to reintroduce the concept of the value of things. How did it get its name? What can readers expect week to week? Finally, what can you get from this specific article?
I made my bones initially as a baseball analyst. I have written four books on baseball history and baseball statistics. The general idea is that all players have value. This is going to be true in every team sport. Even average players and backups have value. The question for every NFL franchise is how much value to place on every player. VOT got its start at the tail end of the Bill O’Brien era. Essentially, it was as a response to several players that had value, but were being drastically overpaid and overvalued.
This happens for a variety of reasons. As a former coach, I can attest to the fact that most of this is emotional. We get emotionally attached to players. No, that doesn’t mean we have a relationship with them, but it means that they may have come through in a pressure situation and so they have built up a level of trust. They also may just be a good kid that works hard. For one reason or another we lose objectivity and give them a larger role (or salary in the case of the NFL) than what they should get given their level of production.
So, the VOT will always have a more analytical bent to it. This happens for a couple of reasons. The most important reason is that this is how I am wired. I like statistics. I think data can provide most of the answers we are looking for. As a former coach, I will never discount the impact of so-called intangibles, but the mistake we often make is putting too much emphasis on that. If we can measure most things then we should start by focusing on that which we can measure. When it gets close in the end, then we can throw in the intangibles to break those ties.
So, I tend to utilize things like Pro Football Focus and pro football reference as sources of data. They are just one data point. There...
