Blogging The Boys
We’ve officially reached the dead part of the season after mandatory minicamp wrapped last week, but things feel quite sunny in Cowboys Nation. There’s palpable excitement about the new defense, the talking heads are whispering about the Cowboys as a potential top offense, George Pickens showed up for minicamp, both coordinators are already being discussed as potential head coaches, and Shotty ‘could not be more happy‘ with the Cowboys’ offseason.
All that must have made even the most jaded and weary Cowboys fans feel all warm and tingly inside, even if competitive football is still three months away.
Bill Parcells, who seemingly has a soundbite for every occasion in life, has a Parcells-ism for exactly this situation:
“Don’t eat the cheese.”
At this point in the offseason, there are a lot of promises floating in the (thin?) air, and there’s a lot of work still to be done. One thing the Cowboys have already done is bolster their roster with free agents and trade acquisitions, which is why today we’ll take a look at the positional rankings (or percentile rankings) of the new players the Cowboys brought in and how they potentially complement the existing roster.
The idea behind positional rankings is to find a metric that makes all players in the league comparable. Currently, the only service that offers a metric for every single player in the league is Pro Football Focus (PFF), but instead of looking at the grades they assign to the players, we’re going to look at where a given player is ranked relative to the other players in the league at his position.
Example: PFF ranks wide receivers by the cumulative grade they have received so far this season. That ranking lists all 146 wide receivers who had at least 15 targets last year. Going by their overall grade, George Pickens is ranked as the seventh-best wide receiver in the league, CeeDee Lamb is 24th, and Ryan Flournoy is 18th.
Because each position group has a different number of qualifying players (e.g. the QB list only features 43 players with at least 150 dropbacks, most other position groups have more), to make the rankings comparable across all positions, I’ve converted all positional rankings to a scale of 0 – 100. The highest ranked player at a position gets 100 points, the lowest ranked player gets zero. By that logic, Pickens gets a 95 positional ranking [(1-7/146) x 100], Lamb gets an 84, and Flournoy gets an 88. With me so far?
I repeated that calculation for all Cowboys acquisitions and returning players based on the overall ranking scale provided by PFF and divided the results into quintiles, which delivers the following positional ranking groups:
body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table { border: 1px solid #000 !important; border-collapse: collapse !important; } body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th { padding: 4px 6px !important; } Positional Ranking Description100-80Blue-Chip Players79-60NFL starter quality at position59-40Average to slightly below average player39-20Underperformer19-0Red FlagA player marked in blue is ranked...
