Weekly Commentary & Review #3

Why the "The Process" isn't an NFL thing, running back value discourse off the rails, and Lamar Jackson rising

This post looks at a handful of relevant articles, analyses and podcasts from the week that provide useful insight to be absorbed, or have missing context to be added. I’ll add my takes on the material, while heavily quoting the relevant passages.

“THE PROCESS” COMING TO WASHINGTON?

On the eve of the now-completed approval of Josh Harris’ bid to acquire the Washington Commanders, The Athletic’s Ben Standig wrote about the owner’s experience with the Philadelphia 76ers, specifically green-lighting the rebuild under Sam Hinkie dubbed “The Process”.

The imminent new owner has not spoken publicly since striking a deal with Snyder. What path will he choose after completing the purchase?

Given that uncertainty and the long shadow of The Process, Harris’ blueprint will carry a sweeping influence on the future of the Commanders, and perhaps even how NFL teams use analytics.

I’ll detail later why rebuilding in the NFL is different than the NBA, but let’s run with the analogy for now.

We know Harris has the courage for a teardown. After becoming the Sixers’ primary owner in 2011, he took the rebuild/reload debate to the extreme.

In 2013, with the team stuck in mediocrity, Harris hired general manager Sam Hinkie, who introduced The Process. Hinkie stripped the roster bare while prioritizing draft position over winning. The 76ers went 47-199 over three seasons. That included a dreadful 10-72 record in 2015-16, which “spooked” league officials and had commentators decrying organizational malpractice. After the season, while facing pressure from the league, Harris pulled the plug and forced Hinkie to resign.

Important to note that here was a two-year gap between Harris becoming primary owner and hiring Hinkie. I think Harris, like most new owners, will largely leave things in place for this season and not introduce radical change, despite the “generational” prospects available at quarterback in the 2024 draft, including USC’s Caleb Williams and North Carolina’s Drake Maye.

Starting Sam Howell this season, a fifth round second-year quarterback who only had 23 dropbacks as a rookie smells like a tanking move, but this was already the plan before Harris came into the picture. Washington could very well fall from 8-8-1 in 2022 to a position to draft a top quarterback even without making any moves to weaken the roster.

The success of “The Process” in Philadelphia has been debated endlessly, but I agree with the assessment that it can’t be called a failure.

While many have declared The Process dead or a failure, the Sixers — despite an almost comical series of blunders that included poor draft picks and trades, players forgetting how to shoot and a burner cellphone scandal — are enjoying their best stretch in two decades. As The Athletic’s John Hollinger wrote months before Morey’s hiring in 2020:

To say The Process was a mistake because of the current status of the Sixers is to entirely miss the point. In fact, the opposite is true: That the Sixers could remain a playoff team despite the profusion of own-goals shows the value of the original plan. The truth is that the trade-acquired assets and high lottery picks from four years of suckitude loaded the dice so heavily in Philadelphia’s favor that nobody could possibly screw it up, no matter how many times they shot themselves in the foot.

Don’t expect that the 76ers’ approach will come with Harris down I-95 to the Commanders. But don’t assume he is embarrassed by it, either.

The bolded text hints at one of my bigger annoyances with Process discourse: the idea that anyone can do it, so it’s not impressive. Yes, strategies for gaining a competitive edge shouldn’t require unique or extraordinary talents to implement, or else what’s the point? A plan of, “be better than everyone else at the highly competitive task of evaluating talent,” adds no value beyond what every front office is trying to accomplish.

The Process in Philadelphia, like truly valuable strategies, are more idiot-proof, simultaneously raising the ceiling the floor, by making acquiring lots of talent easier for anyone to accomplish. The Sixers didn’t hit their ceiling, but a floor of being a title contender (top-8 pre-season odds) the last five years straight is very high.

The NBA changed its rules to discourage such blatant tanking, as has the NHL. In the NFL, similar approaches have been exceedingly rare — but not entirely absent.

“I would hope (Harris) learned from it,” said Randy Mueller, the former Dolphins and Saints GM and 2000 NFL Executive of the Year who now writes for The Athletic, “because I don’t know too many GMs who would sign up for that (Process) deal in the NFL. That sounds unbelievable to me.”

One who did sign up for that was Sashi Brown. Four years after acquiring the Cleveland Browns in 2012, Jimmy Haslam hired Brown and Paul DePodesta (of MLB “Moneyball” fame) to follow a Process-like blueprint: Sell off parts via trades, acquire draft capital and improve draft position by losing.

Now my chance to get into Sashi apologist mode. Those who have followed me know that I was and am a fan of what Brown did in Cleveland. It’s not that I think he didn’t make mistakes, but that his strategy wasn’t judged fairly. I think there are similarities between what Hinkie was trying to accomplish in Philadelphia and Brown in Cleveland, yet some big differences in the NBA and NFL.

Improving draft position by losing is really not a thing in the NFL, at least not until maybe the last week of the season. The moves that Brown and Paul DePodesta made in the 2016 offseason to strip the Browns roster reflected how bad the players were from the 2015 team. The Browns released Donte Whitner and Karlos Dansby, but didn’t trade away any veterans.

There was no talent to sell other than Joe Thomas, who the Browns probably could have gotten a Day-2 pick for, but held him and he retired after the 2017 season. Brown could have made a better effort to re-sign Mitchell Schwartz, but doing so would have cancelled out the third round compensatory pick they got with Alex Mack chose to void his remaining contract and leave. The larger point is that Sashi didn’t strip the roster bare as much as allow its sorry state to be fully exposed.

The bigger focus on what the Browns did that offseason was trading away the No. 2 overall pick to the Philadelphia Eagles, who selected Carson Wentz. That is a move that looks smart now, but appeared awful late in the 2017 season, when Wentz was performing like an MVP candidate. That coincided with Sashi getting fired in December.

The move to trade back from a potential game-changer like a top quarterback prospect comes in direct opposition from what Hinkie was trying to accomplish. It’s less the case now, but for most of NBA history, it’s been very high picks that have dominated the landscape, so losing games and getting the best chance of a higher pick was a big part of the Process formula. The same isn’t true in the NFL, where many of the top quarterbacks are high selections, but not as concentrated in the top-3 as was the case in the NBA.

Think about the combined titles for No. 1 picks in the NBA from 1980 to 2010 (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Hakeem Olajuwon, David Robinson, Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan and LeBron James) with Larry Bird the No. 2 pick in the same draft as Johnson, and Michael Jordan No. 3 in the same draft as Olajuwon. Every NBA champion from 1980 to 2008 had at least one top-5 pick on the roster, mostly in the top-3.

Despite the success of John Elway and Peyton Manning, even they only won a combined four titles. There’s not as much value for a top prospect in the NFL, which is much more about a collection of talent. It’s also more difficult in football to prospect college players who depend more heavily on teammates for success. The main reason that tanking isn’t really a thing in the NFL is because the incentives really aren’t there: ALWAYS FOLLOW THE INCENTIVES! You don’t need multiple shots at top-5 picks to build a championship roster, so sucking for multiple seasons isn’t a good strategy.

Much like Harris, Haslam aborted the plan as losses piled up. Amid a historically poor 1-31 stretch from 2016 to 2017, he fired Brown and hired former Chiefs GM John Dorsey. Reared in traditional scouting, Dorsey returned the Browns to standard operating procedure and entered the 2018 draft with the haul of picks that his predecessor’s choices fostered, including the No. 1 pick, which Cleveland used on Baker Mayfield.

I think the contrast between Sashi’s rebuild plan and what was implemented by Dorsey is overstated. Again, you don’t want to lose and tank for years in the NFL. The Browns started acquiring talent using draft capital before the first rebuild season even concluded, sending a third-round draft pick to the Patriots for Jamie Collins.

The Browns were in full building mode during the 2017 offseason, only one year removed from the start of their rebuild. They were praised for their activity in free agency, signing interior offensive linemen Kevin Zeitler and J.C. Tretter to top contracts at their positions, re-signing the recently acquired Collins and bringing in free agent receiver Kenny Britt. They also reportedly had the highest bid for free agent safety Tony Jefferson, who chose to go to the Ravens instead.

In the draft, the Browns weren’t delaying gratification and pushing more picks into the future. According to most draft valuation charts, the Browns spent nearly 50% more draft capital in 2017 than any other team. They did trade out of the No. 12 pick and the chance to take Deshaun Watson, but that - like the trade out of the Wentz pick the year prior - was probably a player evaluation issue more than a rigid plan to move backwards. I have it seen reported and have some of my own sources that the Browns would have taken, or at least highly considered taking, Jared Goff in 2016 and Patrick Mahomes in 2017, if those players fell to their pick. The Browns were seen by the consensus as having one of the best drafts in 2017.

The main reason we see the Browns under Sashi as implementing a multi-year, Process-esque tankfest are the results, which were admittedly awful. The Browns only won one game in 2016 and 2017 combined. A confluence of events led to going 1-31, but we’ll start with the fundamentals. According to Pythagorean wins, which uses point-differential to estimate a better measure of team strength, the Browns played well enough to win 6-7 games over that stretch. It’s still an embarrassing total, but a lot better than a single game.

In 2017, when the team was not trying to tank, they caught the awful side of variance with the performance of second-round rookie DeShone Kizer, whose -75.2 total EPA was the fourth worst season for any quarterback in the last 10 years (among 306 seasons with 300-plus dropbacks).

The biggest mistake of the Sashi rebuild was not having a competent veteran quarterback on the roster in 2017 to avoid the floor outcome. The Browns were fooled by decent rookie play in 2016 from third-round pick Cody Kessler to have him as a backup option, but he wasn’t even active early in the season. That went to 2016 fifth-round pick Kevin Hogan. The Browns stuck with Kizer for way too long, perhaps thinking a longer look was better for the future. Or maybe Hue Jackson was delusional enough to think he gave them the best chance to win.

Just to conclude my long-winded point: NFL and NBA rebuilds are not the same, with the former only requiring a short rebuild timeline. Unless you’re in cap hell (see 2021 Falcons), you should be able to clean-up and go full-speed-ahead the next offseason.

There’s a good anecdote in the article about a visit by Professors Richard Thaler and Cade Massey of The Loser’s Curse fame to the old Washington ownership.

After Snyder took an interest in the research, three members of Washington’s front office visited Thaler to learn about his conclusions.

“We had two lessons for (Snyder): Trade down, and loan picks this year for better picks next year,” Thaler recalled in 2015 on the “Your Brain on Sports” podcast. “What do they do? They trade up and they give up a better pick next year to have a better pick this year. We moved on to another team after that.”

(Speaking with The Athletic, the professor could not recall the specific draft, but in 2005, Washington traded up for No. 25 by sending 2006 first- and fourth-round picks to the Broncos.)

“What happened?” Thaler asked a Washington official. The response? “Mr. Snyder wanted to win now.”

This is another example toward the strategies of Process-style rebuilding being easy to implement: they only are in theory. Delaying gratification and avoiding overconfidence in your analysis goes heavily against human nature, and the incentives for job retention.

In the NFL, any plan that doesn’t maximize winning spooks investors, ticket-buyers, football lifers and league officials. Cutting too deeply will lose more than games. It can squander the faith of a locker room in a sport with non-guaranteed contracts and high injury rates.

“Football is one of those games where you put yourself at risk,” said one longtime agent who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “You don’t have to tank in the NFL. That’s not the mentality.”

I think there’s some truth to this, but a bigger reason that multi-year tanks won’t work in the NFL is the noise in the media. You can’t hide in the NFL like a downtrodden NBA team, where going into each each we know only a handful of team are actually competing for a title. In the NFL, unexpected, dramatic swing can happen more often, and fans are intensely tuned into their teams’ fortunes until the are officially played out of contention, then bitter about it to a greater degree the remaining season.

Regardless of the path Harris ends up choosing, there’s lots of evidence he’ll embrace analytical thinking from his time with the Sixers and the New Jersey Devils.

By the time he officially gets the green light, Harris will likely have explored all possible scenarios.

“He’ll have 15 models by Tuesday that are like the perfect way to build a team, leveraging the hard cap, and where you put your money and how you build an organization,” a businessman who knows Harris told The Athletic’s David Aldridge in April. “Do you build offensive line first, then defensive line, then quarterback?

“He’ll have a plan, quickly. He’ll do the research and do the work, and put the data science in place and put the health and wellness people in place. He’s no joke. His people are wicked smart.”

The key will be implementing the right solution, not a one-size-fits-all teardown like we saw with the Browns. The Commanders have a lot more young talent recently extended (Terry McLaurin and Daron Payne, for example) that they should retain and build around, and they shouldn’t be afraid to trade up as early as the 2024 to get the quarterback of the future. Analytical thinking is doing the optimal thing based on the circumstances, not a one-size-fits-all push to tank.

RUNNING BACK DISCUSSION OFF THE RAILS

I don’t want to repeat myself too much: I discussed an excellent running back value article from Bill Barnwell in last week’s commentary, hitting a lot of the reasons for why running backs have been devalued and potential fixes.

The big even this week that sent the discussion off of the rails was the inability of the New York Giants and Saquon Barkley to come to a long-term extension, so he’ll play (I think) on the $10.1 million franchise tag this season.

In last week’s commentary, I discussed the reasons for the devaluation of the position, including a shift in the NFL towards the pass generally, splitting the position by committee, and a recognition that the production at the position is more of a shared responsibility between the rest of the offense at the runner than previously thought.

There are a couple more points to emphasize this week, as the discussion is going further away from being anchored in reality. First, the focus from pundits and players on running backs not getting the money they deserve in free agency misses the point. I think it’s hard to argue that running backs aren’t getting enough in free agency commensurate for what we think they will produce in the future.

If you look at all the big running back free-agent contracts over the past several years, many have been complete disasters. The top cap-adjusted second contracts by APY (according to Over the Cap) for running backs from 2015 to 2019: