10-10-2022, 10:56 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-12-2022, 11:48 AM by dude_man. Edited 2 times in total.)
I recently posted a (hastily written) career retrospective on Dante King that spent a bit of time ostensibly discussing his chances of making the ISFL Hall of Fame based on the statistics accumulated by Hall of Fame running backs throughout their careers. It was by no means a rigorous assessment, but it got me thinking - how do we really measure a player’s worthiness to enter the hallowed halls of wherever the ISFL keeps its hall of fame? Which, by the way, is probably some off the beaten path place that no one ever goes to except for people interested in that exhibit, if we’re modeling the league after the NFL and its Canton, Ohio Hall of Fame location. Maybe Yellowknife, Canada?
Just like in real life, there have been several different evolutions of the NSFL/ISFL over the 37 seasons that it’s been in existence. Not only has the sim itself changed, but new understandings of how the sim works have given way to different strategies and optimal player builds, archetype changes have brought variety to player performance, and several rounds of expansion have resulted in the league composition changing significantly over the years. All of this is to say, it’s not always easy to look back at how a season one player performed throughout the course of their career and compare it to a player whose career is the result of a very different league environment. How can we find a way to look at stats that takes these variations in eras into consideration?
Of course, this was no more than a thought until I stumbled upon a very interesting article written by Mike Sando of the Athletic that sought to answer that very question in the real world of the NFL. To date, he’s written two variations of the article - one for running backs and one for wide receivers. Although my ultimate personal curiosity is in how running backs stack up to Hall of Fame production, starting with wide receivers seemed simpler and more straightforward. Ergo, this article.
Sando’s piece reduces a wide receiver’s Hall of Fame resume to one essential bullet point - how many yards a player accumulated compared to their peers in each season of their career. It eschews things like awards, accolades, and milestones in favor of pure statistical production. He describes (and caveats) his method as follows:
For an NFL player, where careers can rise and fall in unpredictable ways as players blow up early, break out late, fall off a cliff unexpectedly, suffer career-altering injuries, or follow myriad other trajectories, he found the eight season mark to be “sufficient to reward longevity without placing unrealistic expectations on elite production” and “exclude from consideration underwhelming seasons when players compiled stats that added to their career totals without performing at Hall of Fame levels.” Contrast this with the ISFL where players follow a more consistent, defined career path - due to the strict limits on player growth based on seasonal TPE earnings and mandatory regression, there are fewer opportunities for players to carve out a highly unique career path (like, say Calvin Johnson’s insane but brief peak or Jerry Rice’s multi decade run of dominance). Players who want to stand out from the pack basically can leverage one of two things: their role on the team (i.e. demanding primary wide receiver role early in their careers or joining teams with low wide receiver depth, or being part of a team that throws the ball at a high rate and/or has a high TPE quarterback), and the longevity of their career (i.e. how long they opt to fight regression and add to their career totals). Still, I thought it would be interesting to apply Sando’s criteria to historical ISFL wide receivers and see what the data showed us. I didn’t have a great intuitive sense for how many seasons to compare, but eight seemed too high. Instead, I calculated an average percentile score for a player’s three highest scores (we’ll call that their “peak” score, even though seasons don’t necessarily have to be consecutive), seven highest scores (let’s call it their “longevity” score even though it doesn’t account for true longevity in regression seasons), and every number of seasons in between. We’ll dive more into each of these later.
But before we jump into the data, let’s have a quick primer on the state of the wide receiver position in the ISFL Hall of Fame. To date, there are thirteen players who have been inducted into the Hall who primarily played WR throughout their career:
Bradley Westfield
Seasons: S1-S10
Inducted: S12
Team(s): OCO
Career receptions: 776 (19th all time)
Career receiving yards: 13457 (6th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 109 (2nd all time)
Alexandre LeClair
Seasons: S1-S11
Inducted: S15
Team(s): YKW, LVL, BAL, NOLA
Career receptions: 716 (28th all time)
Career receiving yards: 11718 (11th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 89 (8th all time)
Josh Garden
Seasons: S1-S11
Inducted: S15
Team(s): YKW, AZ, PHI, OCO
Career receptions: 757 (21st all time)
Career receiving yards: 11643 (12th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 84 (11th all time)
Trey Willie
Seasons: S2-S14
Inducted: S18
Team(s): OCO, BAL, AZ
Career receptions: 880 (9th all time)
Career receiving yards: 14421 (4th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 118 (1st all time)
Carlito Crush
Seasons: S5-S15
Inducted: S19
Team(s): COL, OCO, NOLA
Career receptions: 728 (26th all time)
Career receiving yards: 10583 (22nd all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 70 (26th all time)
Vinny Valentine
Seasons: S10-S19
Inducted: S23
Team(s): BAL, OCO, AZ, NOLA
Career receptions: 621 (60th all time)
Career receiving yards: 10943 (19th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 75 (16th all time)
Kazimir Oles
Seasons: S10-S20
Inducted: S24
Team(s): SJS, CHI, AZ, OCO
Career receptions: 645 (52nd all time)
Career receiving yards: 11254 (17th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 71 (23rd all time)
Vladimir Fyodorovich
Seasons: S7-S19
Inducted: S24
Team(s): OCO, NOLA
Career receptions: 598 (68th all time)
Career receiving yards: 10002 (32nd all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 53 (58th all time)
Errol Maddox
Seasons: S11-S22
Inducted: S26
Team(s): BAL
Career receptions: 594 (70th all time)
Career receiving yards: 10728 (21st all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 92 (7th all time)
James Bishop
Seasons: S12-S23
Inducted: S27
Team(s): COL
Career receptions: 698 (32nd all time)
Career receiving yards: 11469 (14th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 72 (21st all time)
Nate Swift
Seasons: S14-S25
Inducted: S29
Team(s): YKW, SJS
Career receptions: 719 (28th all time)
Career receiving yards: 10574 (23rd all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 69 (28th all time)
Saba Donut
Seasons: S18-S28
Inducted: S34
Team(s): AZ
Career receptions: 624 (57th all time)
Career receiving yards: 10302 (29th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 77 (15th all time)
William Lim
Seasons: S22-S32
Inducted: S36
Team(s): COL
Career receptions: 977 (6th all time)
Career receiving yards: 14692 (3rd all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 106 (3rd all time)
It’s interesting to note that the number of Hall of Fame receivers who started their career in the first or second season of the league’s existence (4) is the same as the number of receivers inducted in the last decade’s worth of HOF classes. Are receivers getting worse? Is the Hall getting stricter? Let’s take a look.
Before we dive in, a couple of caveats to acknowledge:
As mentioned before, this is purely receiving yard based production. No touchdowns, as they’re a) relatively fluky compared to yards and b) small enough numbers that they don’t provide significant percentile distinction between players.
A player’s score is based on their rank in terms of yards compared to the number of WRs who caught a pass in the league that season, not pure total. That means that whether a player was behind the receiver in front of him by one or two hundred yards, he received the same score. Seems like a bit of a miss to me, but not one I care enough to try to rectify.
As the number of teams has changed significantly over the years, the number of receivers has also changed (obviously) and provided more granularity to the available percentiles. Does this artificially inflate or deflate players from different eras? I hope not but maybe.
There are a good number of incredible recent WRs who have not yet gone on the ballot for the Hall of Fame and will almost certainly get in. We’ll discuss them below.
So with all that in mind, let’s take a look at the production scores of various receivers across ISFL history. For the purposes of downselection, I examined every WR with over 6,000 career receiving yards - 87 of them, to be exact. This was a nice, round albeit arbitrary distinction that seemed to work out ok.
First up, here’s each of the 87 players ranked by career receiving yardage totals. Players currently in the Hall of Fame are designated and bold, and currently active (at least currently available in the TPE tracker tool) are italicized. #NUM just means they haven’t played enough seasons to fill that cell and I’m too lazy to deal with it.
You’ll notice that each player currently in the Hall ranks in the top 31 in career yards, with the majority in the top 22 and only recent players who are likely HOF locks unbolded in the top 15 or so. One other cool note: only eight players have led the league in yards twice or more in their careers, as noted by having multiple 1.000 scores.
Next, let’s look at the players sorted by their three year “peak” averages:
One thing that jumps to mind when looking at this is the notable un-bolded players at the top of the list: Robert Phelps (S1-S9), who received 5/13 and then 2/13 votes before leaving the ballot, and Howard Miller (S7-S14), who received 2/16 votes in his lone season on the ballot. What’s also interesting to me is current player Johnny Patey, who has led the league in receiving yards a whopping three out of his five career seasons. He’s well on his way to a Hall of Fame career at this rate!
Alexandre LeClair really sticks out like a sore thumb in this regard. He had one season in his career as the #3 yardage accumulator, but failed to crack the top five on any other occasion. This might be a case of lower numbers of receivers in the league skewing the numbers.
Next, let’s look at the players sorted by their seven year “longevity” averages:
It seems like the Hall really, really values players who put up good numbers consistently over a long period of time. Sean O’Leary (S19-S27, 2/9 votes) and Ed Barker (S22-S30, 3/9 votes on his first ballot) are the two players who seem left out based on this metric.
As I’m running out of time to submit this article for double media credit, I’m going to end the piece here with these charts as food for thought (and maybe even discussion in the comments). There is certainly a lot of extra detail to unpack in these numbers as to why some players have made or missed the cut, and I’d love to unpack that in a future article in more depth. For now, I hope you enjoyed a slightly different take on career statistics and would love to hear any feedback you smart statistics people have for the method in the comments (although, once again, it is not really my method and I’m probably not inclined to spend a lot of time updating it.)
If this gets a good reception and/or I have time, I'll probably do a similar piece for other positions. Running backs seem obvious as they have the most straightforward yardage stats (most likely using scrimmage yards instead of pure rushing numbers), but quarterbacks pose a bigger question because their production includes so much more than raw yardage totals, and defensive players seem nearly impossible to tackle. If you're someone who has an idea for how to handle those positions, reach out! Maybe we can make something happen together. Or I'll just wait for my pal Mike Sando to try them out and rip off his approach again. Either way, it should be an interesting look at league history!
Just like in real life, there have been several different evolutions of the NSFL/ISFL over the 37 seasons that it’s been in existence. Not only has the sim itself changed, but new understandings of how the sim works have given way to different strategies and optimal player builds, archetype changes have brought variety to player performance, and several rounds of expansion have resulted in the league composition changing significantly over the years. All of this is to say, it’s not always easy to look back at how a season one player performed throughout the course of their career and compare it to a player whose career is the result of a very different league environment. How can we find a way to look at stats that takes these variations in eras into consideration?
Of course, this was no more than a thought until I stumbled upon a very interesting article written by Mike Sando of the Athletic that sought to answer that very question in the real world of the NFL. To date, he’s written two variations of the article - one for running backs and one for wide receivers. Although my ultimate personal curiosity is in how running backs stack up to Hall of Fame production, starting with wide receivers seemed simpler and more straightforward. Ergo, this article.
Sando’s piece reduces a wide receiver’s Hall of Fame resume to one essential bullet point - how many yards a player accumulated compared to their peers in each season of their career. It eschews things like awards, accolades, and milestones in favor of pure statistical production. He describes (and caveats) his method as follows:
Quote:This is not a pass-fail test for determining who is worthy of the Hall, as factors beyond elite statistical production must be considered. Rather, it’s a way to evaluate production across eras, which might be helpful in evaluating Hall credentials. To evaluate elite production, we calculate where each receiver finished in receiving yards as a percentile of the league leader in each player’s eight best-percentile seasons, then average the results. Anyone leading the league in receiving yards finishes in the 1.0 percentile for that season.
For an NFL player, where careers can rise and fall in unpredictable ways as players blow up early, break out late, fall off a cliff unexpectedly, suffer career-altering injuries, or follow myriad other trajectories, he found the eight season mark to be “sufficient to reward longevity without placing unrealistic expectations on elite production” and “exclude from consideration underwhelming seasons when players compiled stats that added to their career totals without performing at Hall of Fame levels.” Contrast this with the ISFL where players follow a more consistent, defined career path - due to the strict limits on player growth based on seasonal TPE earnings and mandatory regression, there are fewer opportunities for players to carve out a highly unique career path (like, say Calvin Johnson’s insane but brief peak or Jerry Rice’s multi decade run of dominance). Players who want to stand out from the pack basically can leverage one of two things: their role on the team (i.e. demanding primary wide receiver role early in their careers or joining teams with low wide receiver depth, or being part of a team that throws the ball at a high rate and/or has a high TPE quarterback), and the longevity of their career (i.e. how long they opt to fight regression and add to their career totals). Still, I thought it would be interesting to apply Sando’s criteria to historical ISFL wide receivers and see what the data showed us. I didn’t have a great intuitive sense for how many seasons to compare, but eight seemed too high. Instead, I calculated an average percentile score for a player’s three highest scores (we’ll call that their “peak” score, even though seasons don’t necessarily have to be consecutive), seven highest scores (let’s call it their “longevity” score even though it doesn’t account for true longevity in regression seasons), and every number of seasons in between. We’ll dive more into each of these later.
But before we jump into the data, let’s have a quick primer on the state of the wide receiver position in the ISFL Hall of Fame. To date, there are thirteen players who have been inducted into the Hall who primarily played WR throughout their career:
Bradley Westfield
Seasons: S1-S10
Inducted: S12
Team(s): OCO
Career receptions: 776 (19th all time)
Career receiving yards: 13457 (6th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 109 (2nd all time)
Alexandre LeClair
Seasons: S1-S11
Inducted: S15
Team(s): YKW, LVL, BAL, NOLA
Career receptions: 716 (28th all time)
Career receiving yards: 11718 (11th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 89 (8th all time)
Josh Garden
Seasons: S1-S11
Inducted: S15
Team(s): YKW, AZ, PHI, OCO
Career receptions: 757 (21st all time)
Career receiving yards: 11643 (12th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 84 (11th all time)
Trey Willie
Seasons: S2-S14
Inducted: S18
Team(s): OCO, BAL, AZ
Career receptions: 880 (9th all time)
Career receiving yards: 14421 (4th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 118 (1st all time)
Carlito Crush
Seasons: S5-S15
Inducted: S19
Team(s): COL, OCO, NOLA
Career receptions: 728 (26th all time)
Career receiving yards: 10583 (22nd all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 70 (26th all time)
Vinny Valentine
Seasons: S10-S19
Inducted: S23
Team(s): BAL, OCO, AZ, NOLA
Career receptions: 621 (60th all time)
Career receiving yards: 10943 (19th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 75 (16th all time)
Kazimir Oles
Seasons: S10-S20
Inducted: S24
Team(s): SJS, CHI, AZ, OCO
Career receptions: 645 (52nd all time)
Career receiving yards: 11254 (17th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 71 (23rd all time)
Vladimir Fyodorovich
Seasons: S7-S19
Inducted: S24
Team(s): OCO, NOLA
Career receptions: 598 (68th all time)
Career receiving yards: 10002 (32nd all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 53 (58th all time)
Errol Maddox
Seasons: S11-S22
Inducted: S26
Team(s): BAL
Career receptions: 594 (70th all time)
Career receiving yards: 10728 (21st all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 92 (7th all time)
James Bishop
Seasons: S12-S23
Inducted: S27
Team(s): COL
Career receptions: 698 (32nd all time)
Career receiving yards: 11469 (14th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 72 (21st all time)
Nate Swift
Seasons: S14-S25
Inducted: S29
Team(s): YKW, SJS
Career receptions: 719 (28th all time)
Career receiving yards: 10574 (23rd all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 69 (28th all time)
Saba Donut
Seasons: S18-S28
Inducted: S34
Team(s): AZ
Career receptions: 624 (57th all time)
Career receiving yards: 10302 (29th all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 77 (15th all time)
William Lim
Seasons: S22-S32
Inducted: S36
Team(s): COL
Career receptions: 977 (6th all time)
Career receiving yards: 14692 (3rd all time)
Career receiving touchdowns: 106 (3rd all time)
It’s interesting to note that the number of Hall of Fame receivers who started their career in the first or second season of the league’s existence (4) is the same as the number of receivers inducted in the last decade’s worth of HOF classes. Are receivers getting worse? Is the Hall getting stricter? Let’s take a look.
Before we dive in, a couple of caveats to acknowledge:
As mentioned before, this is purely receiving yard based production. No touchdowns, as they’re a) relatively fluky compared to yards and b) small enough numbers that they don’t provide significant percentile distinction between players.
A player’s score is based on their rank in terms of yards compared to the number of WRs who caught a pass in the league that season, not pure total. That means that whether a player was behind the receiver in front of him by one or two hundred yards, he received the same score. Seems like a bit of a miss to me, but not one I care enough to try to rectify.
As the number of teams has changed significantly over the years, the number of receivers has also changed (obviously) and provided more granularity to the available percentiles. Does this artificially inflate or deflate players from different eras? I hope not but maybe.
There are a good number of incredible recent WRs who have not yet gone on the ballot for the Hall of Fame and will almost certainly get in. We’ll discuss them below.
So with all that in mind, let’s take a look at the production scores of various receivers across ISFL history. For the purposes of downselection, I examined every WR with over 6,000 career receiving yards - 87 of them, to be exact. This was a nice, round albeit arbitrary distinction that seemed to work out ok.
First up, here’s each of the 87 players ranked by career receiving yardage totals. Players currently in the Hall of Fame are designated and bold, and currently active (at least currently available in the TPE tracker tool) are italicized. #NUM just means they haven’t played enough seasons to fill that cell and I’m too lazy to deal with it.
You’ll notice that each player currently in the Hall ranks in the top 31 in career yards, with the majority in the top 22 and only recent players who are likely HOF locks unbolded in the top 15 or so. One other cool note: only eight players have led the league in yards twice or more in their careers, as noted by having multiple 1.000 scores.
Next, let’s look at the players sorted by their three year “peak” averages:
One thing that jumps to mind when looking at this is the notable un-bolded players at the top of the list: Robert Phelps (S1-S9), who received 5/13 and then 2/13 votes before leaving the ballot, and Howard Miller (S7-S14), who received 2/16 votes in his lone season on the ballot. What’s also interesting to me is current player Johnny Patey, who has led the league in receiving yards a whopping three out of his five career seasons. He’s well on his way to a Hall of Fame career at this rate!
Alexandre LeClair really sticks out like a sore thumb in this regard. He had one season in his career as the #3 yardage accumulator, but failed to crack the top five on any other occasion. This might be a case of lower numbers of receivers in the league skewing the numbers.
Next, let’s look at the players sorted by their seven year “longevity” averages:
It seems like the Hall really, really values players who put up good numbers consistently over a long period of time. Sean O’Leary (S19-S27, 2/9 votes) and Ed Barker (S22-S30, 3/9 votes on his first ballot) are the two players who seem left out based on this metric.
As I’m running out of time to submit this article for double media credit, I’m going to end the piece here with these charts as food for thought (and maybe even discussion in the comments). There is certainly a lot of extra detail to unpack in these numbers as to why some players have made or missed the cut, and I’d love to unpack that in a future article in more depth. For now, I hope you enjoyed a slightly different take on career statistics and would love to hear any feedback you smart statistics people have for the method in the comments (although, once again, it is not really my method and I’m probably not inclined to spend a lot of time updating it.)
If this gets a good reception and/or I have time, I'll probably do a similar piece for other positions. Running backs seem obvious as they have the most straightforward yardage stats (most likely using scrimmage yards instead of pure rushing numbers), but quarterbacks pose a bigger question because their production includes so much more than raw yardage totals, and defensive players seem nearly impossible to tackle. If you're someone who has an idea for how to handle those positions, reach out! Maybe we can make something happen together. Or I'll just wait for my pal Mike Sando to try them out and rip off his approach again. Either way, it should be an interesting look at league history!