My immediate reaction:
- Holt too high
- Jimmy Smith too high
- Rod Smith too high
- Pleased to see Largent as high as you have him
Chase, thinking back to your ANY/A stat for QBs, and seeing you say above that you aren't including targets, are you using or have you considered using ypr in any way?
ETA: Also, are you using postseason numbers or just regular season numbers?
I've since made a new list.Holt is now 17th (and not 4th). Rod Smith is 21st (and not 12th). Largent moved up to 6th.
But Jimmy Smith is actually now 9th. And, I think, with good reason. Here's why Jimmy Smith shouldn't be in the HOF -- he's not better than Randy Moss, Marvin Harrison or Terrell Owens. But if that's the standard, then the HOF should just be those three guys, Jerry Rice and Don Hutson.
Smith was fantastic in '99. He was great in '01, and really really good in '00 and '97. He has played on some run first offenses which hurts his raw stats, but he was really good for ten years in Jacksonville. He's ranked in the top five in receiving yards in six seasons. Do you know how good that is?
Cris Carter - zero top five seasons.
Tim Brown - five.
Holt - four times, but he's been in a pass heavy offense.
Bruce - " " " "
Art Monk - two
Largent - four
I get Smith's problem. He's in the pass happy era and he doesn't have huge career totals. That's because he only started 150 games. Among non-active players with 100 starts, only Rice, Alworth, Irvin and Sterling Sharpe (112 games) have averaged more receiving yards per game, and that includes a bunch of years when Smith was not a starter. He's also played for rather low-octane pass offenses. There aren't five WRs since the merger better than Smith, besides Rice/Harrison/Owens/Moss. Considering that's 40 years of football, I think we can be okay with five to to ten WRs in the HOF from that era. He's not a tier 1 HOFer but I'd argue he's better than half of the WRs currently in the HOF. That's always a good standard for induction. Consider me on the 'wagon.
Post-season data is not going to be included this time around but will be the next. As usual, there will be a full explanation at some point but I like to get some reaction to the lists first and tweak the formula before I go public.
As much as I'd enjoy turning this into a thread about Jimmy Smith, I don't want to hijack it too much out of respect for the interesting work here. There was a thread about
Jimmy Smith and the Hall of Fame when he retired. A couple quick quotes that support the OP:CB
Deion Sanders
“Jimmy might not have the national recognition of Jerry Rice at the WR position, but every defensive back that has played in the 1990's to current, and every defensive coach in the league knows exactly who he is. He will go down in history as one of the best.”
CB
Chris McAlister
“We nicknamed him “J-Smooth” because he made everything look so easy. Jimmy is clearly one of the best receivers to touch the field.
CB
Samari Rolle
“Jimmy has no weaknesses. He can play anyway he needs to. He can play the physical game. He can play the finesse game. Or he can run by you. That's why I think he's the best receiver in the league.”
WR
Isaac Bruce
“Jimmy Smith is one of the most unheralded wide receivers ever to play in the National Football League. He is one of the best route runners that I have ever seen. He is very explosive. Truly, truly a Hall of Famer.”
WR
Marvin Harrison
“Jimmy Smith is the ultimate receiver with the perfect personality to complement it. You look at Jimmy Smith and no other receiver does what he does. He has it all, size, strength, speed and hands..... He's the ultimate, point blank.”
Tony Dungy
“A tremendous receiver, a competitor. He has the great speed and acceleration out of the cuts. He catches the deep ball well. He's physically a tough guy. He just has what you look for in a receiver. And now he's at the point where he still has the physical skills, but he has a great deal of experience and he knows what he's doing out there. He's just one of the best receivers that's played in this era.”
All that aside, 70% voted that Jimmy Smith was not a Hall of Famer. So it looks like you are going to have a tough sell promoting him as one of the best with your stats, Chase Stuart. But I for one, wish you luck.
I'm sure Jimmy Smith was thoroughly covered in an old Jimmy Smith HOF thread. I see these problems for him getting into the HOF:1. His career TDs are very low relative to his receptions and yardage. He is currently #12 in receptions and #15 in receiving yards, but only #36 in receiving TDs.
2. He never made 1st Team All Pro or won any other significant honor as far as I know. (Note: He made the Pro Bowl 5 times, but I don't consider that a significant honor.) He was 2nd Team All Pro 2 times.
3. I guess this explains #2, but his peer competition is just too tough. His peers included Rice, Carter, Brown, Moss, Harrison, Owens, Holt, and Bruce, not to mention other guys like Ward and Rod Smith. Not enough HOF WR spots to go around.
4. While he played pretty well in his 9 postseason games, his team did not make it to the Super Bowl, and he has no particularly notable postseason accomplishments. (I know not making a Super Bowl isn't his fault, but we also know it can help a player's candidacy.)
Chase:
You said you are including a "bunch of years" when Smith wasn't a starter. According to pfr, he started 150 of 178 games played in his career. So he wasn't a starter for less than 2 full seasons. Sounds like you overstated that a bit,
Rather than comparing Smith to current HOFers, why not compare him to the list of players I named above and tell us where you think he ranks among them.
Back on topic, #2 kind of gets at one of the challenges of a system like yours. Does it take into account honors/awards? All Pro selections, MVPs, Super Bowl MVPs, etc. are things that carry a lot of weight with me in terms of judging players.
I have no problem discussing whether or not Jimmy Smith *should* make the HOF. Since he ranks so high in my system, if he *shouldn't* make the HOF that might signal an error in my system (I don't care about the fact that he *won't* make the HOF).Not starting 28 of 178 games is significant when looking at his career yards/game average, but I don't care about that statistic too much -- I was just trying to show a different method of highlighting Smith's success.
No, the system doesn't take subjective things into account. The reason is everyone values subjective things differently. I prefer to look only at objective things and then each person can individually tweak things to their liking (bump Owens down because he's had great QBs, bump Smith down because no All Pros, etc.).
Let's look at those guys:
Rice, Moss, Harrison and Owens are better. No ifs ands or buts. If you want to call Jimmy Smith a rich man's Boomer Esiason (who had to play with Marino, Montana, Young, Kelly, Moon and Elway) that's fine. But I think those four guys are the four best WRs since Don Hutson. And we should have more than four HOF WRs from the modern era.
Carter, Brown, Holt and Bruce all rank behind Smith in my system. Conventional wisdom probably goes the other way on this, so I'll need to make a case. I've got Smith 9th, Brown 12th, Carter 15th and Holt 17th. Let's start with noting something about their teams. After weighting each season of the WR's career for how good of a season it was, Bruce was, on a weighted average, on a team that passed 1.07 times as much as average; Holt 1.13, Carter 1.04, Brown 0.97, and Smith 0.98. So Holt's numbers have been significantly helped by being on a pass heavy team, and to a lesser extent, Bruce and Carter have been helped as well vis-a-vis Brown and Smith.
Jimmy Smith's '99 season ranks as the third best single season of this quintet (Bruce '95, Holt '03). It ranks quite a bit ahead of Cris Carter's terrific 1995 season. Is that appropriate?
Carter put up 122-1371-17 to Smith's 116-1636-6. If you buy the 5 yard weight for receptions and the 20 yard weight for TDs, those seasons are just about equivalent. It's worth remembering that the '99 Jags went 14-2 and ran for the second most TDs in the NFL -- so it's not like Smith hurt his team by not being a big red zone guy. Obviously Carter's 17 TDs look a lot better than Smith's 6 TDs, but Smith also gained 250+ more yards. His numbers were less gaudy but no less impressive, though.
But there's another thing to note -- the '99 Jags passed 535 times and the '95 Vikings passed 642 times. That has to count against Carter in some way. For QBs, we used per attempt numbers and it's obviously the way to go. For receiving, we also need to use per attempt numbers. Just like a QB who throws 620 times will have "inflated" passing numbers until we adjust for attempts, so will his WRs. To have 1636 yards when your team only throws 535 times is terrific.
That's the sort of logic I used going through each season for each WR. I could go on, but it's worth seeing if you "buy" this logic or not. I know it's not typical to use per attempt numbers for WRs but: 1) it's theoretically correct; and 2) the results it produces, except for Jimmy Smith, are very very good. The top five WRs of all time according to this system are Rice, Hutson, Harrison, Owens and Moss. That's pretty good. Smith is definitely an outlier, but that may be because our perception of Smith is wrong. Before doing this I was certainly not in the pro-Smith camp.
it.
