Abstract
In recent years, the game of football has made a shift towards being more quantitative. With the advent of charting and tracking data, player evaluation is able to be studied from several different angles. In this paper, we build and refine two novel metrics: Bite Distance Under Expected (BDUE) and Ground Covered Over Expected (GCOE) for the evaluation of linebackers in the National Football League (NFL). Here, we show that these metrics are heavily correlated with each other, which demonstrates the trade-off linebackers have to make between being aggressive against the run and being effective when the opposing offense is using play-action. We also show that these metrics are more stable than those in the public space. Finally, we show how these metrics measure deception by opposing offenses.
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank SumerSports and PFF for their support during this research, and the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference Research Paper Competition for their feedback on an early version of the BDUE metric and for funding for Tej Seth’s trip to the conference in 2022. The authors would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, the editors, and associated editors for their constructive feedback on the initial submission, as well as Shawn Syed for his comments on the writing of the manuscript.
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Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.
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Research funding: None declared.
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Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.
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