Does a "contract year" really affect performance? (1 Viewer)

[Hoss Style]

In another thread the topic of a "contract year" came up for Adrian Peterson and how he might play better because of it. It got me and a few other posters to thinking how reliable that really is. One of the guys mentioned about how he thought he saw an article about it here a while back. I searched and couldn't find it so I hit Google.

After a little while I finally found a pretty good article. Since our discussion was buried deep in the AP thread I thought I'd post it here on it's own. I figured some others might be interested in it as well.

It's pretty math heavy but from what I've seen here in my short time that's right up the alley of many of you.

It's a few years old but still a good read:

Contract Years and Player Performance

Hope you find it as interesting as I did.

 

[Hipple Long Ware & Peete]

In another thread the topic of a "contract year" came up for Adrian Peterson and how he might play better because of it. It got me and a few other posters to thinking how reliable that really is. One of the guys mentioned about how he thought he saw an article about it here a while back. I searched and couldn't find it so I hit Google.After a little while I finally found a pretty good article. Since our discussion was buried deep in the AP thread I thought I'd post it here on it's own. I figured some others might be interested in it as well.It's pretty math heavy but from what I've seen here in my short time that's right up the alley of many of you.It's a few years old but still a good read:Contract Years and Player PerformanceHope you find it as interesting as I did.

what say stats guys to the 1st comment?

Re: Show Them The Money?

by Danny Tuccitto :: Mon, 11/02/2009 - 2:27pmTotally respect the thorough attempt to address this question. I totally agree that the contract year is likely a myth in football, and get annoyed when it's thrown out there by pundits as if it's statistical fact...

However, I think there's a fundamental flaw in this particular analysis. Namely, we don't care about knowing whether soon-to-be free agents IN THE AGGREGATE perform better than non-free-agents in the aggregate. Rather, we want to know whether a SPECIFIC soon-to-be free agent performs better in HIS free agency year as compared to HIS non-free-agency years, and whether that same soon-to-be free agent performs worse in the year after HE signs the new contract as compared to HIS non-new-contract years.

The problem with OLS regression in the current application is that it's a between-player method analyzing data that aggregates the between-player AND within-player contributions to performance variation. Hierarchical linear modeling is the more appropriate statistical method because the data set is multilevel in nature, and the point of the question -- as I said above -- is really to examine predictors of WITHIN-PLAYER performance variation (i.e., motivation and shirking effects) independent of BETWEEN-PLAYER performance variation. Essentially, it very well could be that there's no between-player effect (as has been found here), but there nevertheless DOES remain a within-player effect, and the within-player effect is actually the research question that we're interested in answering.

See the work of Bryk & Raudenbush, along with many, many others for a discussion of the perils associated with ignoring the multilevel nature of a data set.

 

[Dr. Awesome]

It has no effect on how a player performs. There have been a few threads/articles in the SP from years past.