The Impact of 1st-Round Offensive Linemen: I. A History Lesson

AUTHOR'S NOTE: It's been about 3 months since I posted last (work = grind), so far any newbies out there, here's a brief introduction. I'm Niners Nation's resident statistics geek. Why? Because Fooch found me lurking over @ Maiocco's blog a couple of years ago. Background-wise, I've got a Masters in Sport Psychology, have published several studies using advanced statistics in peer-reviewed journals, and had the good fortune of presenting a study on NFL home-field advantage @ the 2007 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports, held at -- wait for it -- Harvard University. Definitely my crowning statistical achievement to date. In terms of my 49er credentials, I've been a fan since January 20, 1985, when the dynasty destroyed my hometown Dolphins in Super Bowl XIX...on my birthday. That'll definitely get a kid to start rethinking his fan affiliations. Anyway, hope you enjoy my posts.

This offseason has, in my mind, easily been the quietest in recent memory for the 49ers. No "will Nolan be back next year" talk. No offensive coordinator being hired/fired. No WRs refusing to show up for work. Basically, the two main on-the-field storylines in Ninerland over the past 6 months have been (a) the potential positive impact of OC stability for one, Alexander Douglas Smith, and (b) the potential positive impact of drafting 2 offensive linemen in the 1st round of this year's draft. I'll save a statistical discussion of the former for another time. Today, and for the rest of the week, I'll be focusing on the latter in a 3-part series investigating just how much of a positive impact we can expect from the addition of Anthony Davis and Mike Iupati:

• Part 1 will be the least stat-intensive of the 3 posts, and will simply consist of a brief description of 1st-round OL picks and the teams that have drafted them since 1994.
• Part 2 will be the most stat-intensive of the 3 posts, and will test the theory that drafting an OL in the 1st round makes a team's offense better via improvements in run- and/or pass-blocking.
• Part 3 will be a little less stat-intensive than Part 2, and will test the theory -- specifically addressed in the 49ers' chapter of this year's Football Outsiders Almanac -- that OL continuity is a good thing (presumably via improvements in run- and/or pass-blocking.

Before I get into the meat of the matter, let me just clear up one thing in advance. This series of posts is not an investigation into whether teams should take OLs in the 1st round. Being that this is Niners Nation, I know there's a sentiment out there that the team did much better when they were employing a McKittrick-based strategy of drafting undersized, athletic OL in the later rounds, rather than the gargantuan maulers they've selected early in recent drafts. While I might be sympathetic to this argument to a certain degree, the fact of the matter is that, in the context of the entire NFL, teams are going to continue drafting OLs in the 1st round in perpituity, whether the stats suggest they should or otherwise. As others like Brian Burke (Advanced NFL Stats) and Benjamin Alamar (University of California Berkeley) have repeatedly shown, whether or not a particular NFL strategy is successeful seems to have little to no bearing on whether or not NFL teams employ it. Unlike in baseball, there's little to no Moneyball being played in NFL team headquarters these days. So, rather than reading these posts with the thought, "Was drafting a 1st-round OL the right thing for the 49ers to do?" I suggest you instead read them with the thought, "Now that the Niners have drafted 2 first-round OLs, what can we expect in terms of their impact this year and beyond."

OK, on to the meat...

DESCRIBING THE OLs

Since 1994 -- which, for those of you who don't know, I frequently use as an NFL era marker -- there have been a total of 78 OLs taken in the 1st round of the draft. Of these 78, 63 were drafted as college Ts, 9 were drafted as college Gs, and 6 were drafted as college Cs. Obviously, once these OLs joined their NFL teams, many of them switched positions. But the above breakdown just gives you a general sense that college T is where teams focus their 1st round OL picks. In that context, whereas drafting Davis was in line with recent NFL trends, drafting Iupati clearly was not.

Using Pro Football Reference's Approximate Value (AV) statistic, which basically assigns a -- you guessed it -- approximate numerical value for each player in each NFL season, we can see what the average career looks like for an OL drafted in the 1st round. However, because many of the 1st-round OLs since 1994 are still playing, we need to adjust for number of years played. Let's call it AV per Yr, or AV/Yr. Below is a chart showing the average career performance (AV/Yr) by 1st-round OL's college position (Overall average = 6.14):

As you can see, it turns out that the 9 college Gs drafted in the 1st round since 1994 have had better careers, on average, than the 63 college Ts, and substantially better careers than the 6 college Cs. If we were to extrapolate these average careers to Davis and Iupati, we could say that Davis can be expected to be about as good as John Tait (KC, 1999; AV/Yr = 6.10), and Iupati can be expected to be about as good as Ruben Brown (BUF, 1995; AV/Yr = 7.15). I like the sound of that.

One aspect of the discussion thus far this offseason with regards to the Niners' OL picks has been along the lines of, "How long before they become full-time starters?" Well, if history is any guide, signs point to sooner rather than later. That's because, of the 78 1st-round OLs drafted since 1994, 57 became full-time starters in their rookie years, 70 were full-time starters by Year 2, and 73 were full-time starters by Year 3 (Note: full-time starter means 8 or more starts). So, to say this another way, the chances of Davis or Iupati being abject NFL failures are pretty slim. They appear even slimmer -- the chances, not Davis and Iupati themselves -- when you consider the following list, which are the five 1st-round OLs who did not start by Year 3 of their careers:

1. Trezelle Jenkins (KC, 1995, Pick 31, AV/Yr = 0.33)
2. Andre T. Johnson (WAS, 1996, Pick 30, AV/Yr = 0.00)
3. Marc Colombo (CHI, 2002, Pick 29, AV/Yr = 4.57)
4. Jason Smith (STL, 2009, Pick 2, Av/Yr = 1.00)
5. Andre Smith (CIN, 2009, Pick 6, Av/Yr = 1.00)

From this list, we see that 2 of the 5 non-full-time starters haven't even been in the league 3 years, and another carved out a decent, albeit below average, career for himself after going to a different team. So, ignoring these 3 picks in our outright-bust probability, we arrive at the reality that 73 of 75, or 97.3%, of 1st-round OL picks start by Year 3.

The specific draft history of the 49ers tells a similar tale. Despite perhaps a conventional wisdom to the contrary, SF has selected only 2 OLs in the 1st round since 1994: Kwame Harris (ugh!) with Pick 26 in 2003 and Joey Staley with Pick 28 in 2007. Harris had a well-below average career (AV/Yr = 3.50), whereas Staley has played just slightly below average for Ts thus far in his career (AV/Yr = 5.33). And yet, despite the disparity in performance, they both were full-time starters by Year 3 (Harris = Year 3, Staley = Year 1).

Finally, one other way to approach the question, "What can we expect from Davis and Iupati?" is to look at the average performance of 1st-round OLs by pick number. Here's said info:

The sample sizes for each individual pick number here are pretty small (e.g., no OLs taken #9), so there's quite a bit of statistical noise in the chart. However, the white line is the trendline, and it shows what you'd expect: The higher the pick, the better the career. In fact, the correlation of pick and AVyr = -.410, which indicates a clear, albeit weak, trend. So, extrapolating the stats in the chart to Davis's and Iupati's potential, we might expect a career for Davis like that of, say, Tra Thomas (PHI, 1998; AV/Yr = 7.08); for Iupati, let's say a career like -- bingo -- Ruben Brown.

DESCRIBING THE TEAMS WHO DRAFTED THE OLs

For all of the analysis about the potential impact of Davis and Iupati, one thing I've noticed has been curiously absent from mention is the fact that we're talking about the impact of 2 OLs, not 1. Why this omission is important for the discussion is because it's unbelievably rare for the same team to draft 2 OLs in the same 1st round. Indeed, from 1994-2009, it happened only 1 time. Can you name that team? .................................Answer: The 2006 New York Jets took T D'Brickashaw Ferguson with the 4th pick of the draft and C Nick Mangold with Pick 29. In a later section of this post, I'll talk about what specifically happened to the Jets, but suffice it to say that, as difficult as it is to project how adding one 1st-round OL might impact a team, we're basically entering uncharted waters trying to project the impact of two.

Another interesting overlooked aspect of teams who drafted OLs from 1994-2009 is the fact that about half of the league drafted 2 or fewer OLs in that 16-year span! So, as much as the media seems to focus on OL in the 1st round, half of the league has basically ignored it for almost a generation. In fact, 3 teams -- the Cowboys, Chargers, and Oilers/Titans -- actually have ignored it. Overall, here's the list of NFL teams by how many OLs they took in the 1st round from 1994-2009:

• 5 OLs (2 teams) -- Lions, Seahawks
• 4 OLs (3 teams) -- Chiefs, Eagles, Rams
• 3 OLs (12 teams) -- Cardinals, Ravens (CLE/BAL), Bills, Panthers, Bengals, Browns, Packers, Dolphins, Vikings, Saints, Raiders, Steelers
• 2 OLs (8 teams) -- Bears, Broncos, Jaguars, Patriots, Jets, 49ers, Buccaneers, Redskins
• 1 OL (4 teams) -- Falcons, Texans, Colts, Giants
• 0 OLs (3 teams) -- Cowboys, Chargers, Titans (HOU/TEN)

If you must know, 5 of the 6 groups above all averaged about 8 wins per season from 1994-2009, so the stats do back up the point that 1st-round OLs aren't a panacea (See Detroit Lions). But, as I said before, I'm not presenting this info to discuss strategy. Rather, I'm simply making the point that, when half the league hasn't drafted more than two 1st-round OL in 16 years, trying to project the impact of drafting 2 OL in the same year is like trying to play cricket with 1 dart and only knowing where half of the numbers are.

Although it's usually discussed in the context of QBs, another important thing to know about the teams who drafted 1st-round OLs is how good they were. In other words, what kind of team environments were these OLs walking into when they signed their contracts? Conventional wisdom might say that a 1st-round OL would be better off going to a good team than a bad team, but, as we saw earlier, OLs picked towards the end of the 1st round (aka went to good teams) have tended to have worse careers than those picked towards the top of the draft. Of course, on the other hand, conventional wisdom might say that good teams already have a good OL, so they don't need to draft linemen in the 1st round. Ah, the beauty of conventional wisdom. Well, here are the stats (Remember: we're talking about 77 teams who drafted 1st-rd OLs since 1994):