I work in a specialized style of education called “critical literacyâ€, which is essentially just a fancy phrase that means “the ability to challenge nonsense when one is confronted with itâ€.
This skill comes in handy during the National Football League’s Draft, where the ads, the vignettes during pre-draft coverage, and even the commentary during the draft itself slip in little messages and assumptions that you, the fan, are just expected to believe. I was livid to see Tim Hasselbeck make a “women can’t drive†joke at Lindsey Czarniak’s expense during the pre-draft run-up. I was confused when they called Robert Nkemdiche -- he of the major character concerns -- merely “eccentricâ€.
But I was genuinely disappointed that the commentators around the industry on draft night pounded the tables for this narrative that “great running backs help their defensesâ€, in justification of the Dallas Cowboys selecting running back Ezekiel Elliott at fourth overall.
Read Between the Lines
Why can’t we simply be happy with the fact that Ezekiel Elliott could be a great running back behind the Dallas offensive line? Do we need to justify him by saying he could also be so incredible that he somehow affects the defensive side of the ball for the Cowboys too? I’m not sure that even the best players in NFL history could have done that.
Last summer, I looked at a few of these myths about a relationship between time-of-possession and defensive production when discussing the effect of Chip Kelly’s “Blur†offensive strategy on the NFL. The findings of this study indicated that there is little reason to believe that the speed of an offense -- or its ability to run out the clock -- really affects the quality of a defense. Our Editor-in-Chief JJ Zachariason also looked at whether or not defense helps quarterbacks.
But we haven’t looked at how the run game affects a defense yet.
JJ posted an article this morning as well, where he outlined why Elliott was a bad value at fourth overall for the Cowboys. I feel differently, somewhat, but that’s not what I mention it for. In that piece, he uses r-value correlation -- measured on a scale of -1 to 1. The closer the value is to 1 or -1, the more direct of a relationship there is between two variables; the closer it is to 0, the more random the association is -- to prove that there is little-to-no statistical relationship between rushing value and defensive value. According to JJ:
