Over the past week, there has been a lot of organizational change within the Browns which has intrigued other teams around the league and football fans everywhere. The Browns have seemingly made a concerted effort to integrate analytics and statistical analysis into their decision making process by promoting Sashi Brown to VP of football operations and hiring Paul Depodesta of Moneyball fame as their chief strategy officer. While I’d argue that they are definitely not the team to do this (New England was first, Jacksonville more recently), it’s rare to see analytics put this much into the forefront of a team’s organizational structure. It’s a move that received a lot of blowback from football traditionalists, but the football analytics community has to be excited to see a team that is truly trying to add analytics into their decision making process in a meaningful way. I know that I am.
For the draft season this year, I wanted to do a ‘shadow offseason’ with a team that of my choosing. With their recent front office changes, I can’t think of a better team to apply my philosophy to than the Cleveland Browns.
A ‘shadow offseason’ will be my modified version of a ‘shadow draft’. A shadow draft is exactly what it sounds like, you (the player) make picks for whatever team you decide to draft for and see how you do in comparison. I’ve seen this done more so in the baseball community, but there are a few people that do NFL ones. I’m expanding to an ‘offseason’ where I select my head coach and sign players for free agency.
First thing that I will be focusing on will be breaking down the roster and finding where the areas of focus should be. I’ll be going most in depth with the quarterbacks(as you may have been able to guess), but I’ll have an article for every position group. These should all be finished by March, so that I can prepare offers for free agents.
On the head coaching search, I’ll just be listing some candidates and giving my reasoning for each. It’s impossible to say whether or not any of them would actually take the job, but it’s an interesting topic that I’d like to write a little about.
Getting into free agency, I’ll be doing different articles on each position group and including ‘formal’ offers to each player that I want to potentially sign. To simplify things, I will be doing only the length of the contract and guaranteed money for that contract. I’ll determine whether I signed the player by comparing the actual guaranteed AAV to what I offered. It’s simple, and isn’t 100% accurate to real life, but I want to have some way of simulating free agency and maneuvering with the salary cap.
Finally, leading up to the draft I will be posting my scouting articles that I’ve been doing for the past few years. For the full breakdowns, I’ll be focusing on guys that I’ll likely want to draft when I’m on the clock. However, I will still push out my model projections, filter results, positional rankings, and big board for every player on my radar even if they don’t get the full breakdown treatment.
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