First, Happy July Holiday to our American and Canadian (and I daresay U.K.) fellows!

This blurb may have to stand a few days over said holiday due to my engineer Lupes taking a brief holiday himself…

Meanwhile, we have the mysterious matter of Ike Taylor to attend to…

The rumors out there are mounting that your new starting right cornerback could be the former glue of the Pittsburgh Steelers secondary…

Taylor said on Thursday he wants to be in Pittsburgh, but was very non-committal…. and said he’ll play “wherever”—- and that “both sides need to agree.” You could read into this as Ike’s readying his menu for a big payday (and maybe he is)….It would be a bad negotiation move for him to say Pittsburgh is the only place he will play. I can say this, though, even with my minimal football knowledge:  if Taylor doesn’t come back, the Steelers secondary is going to be a disaster next season. 

CB Ike Taylor (#24), 6-2, 195, 9th year out of Louisiana-Lafayette, may be the surprise FA signing the Eagles end up making when all is said and done in the RCB sweepstakes…

Tribe Live Radio  had a good 30-minute interview on Thursday with Ike Taylor, who is set to become an unrestricted free agent once the lockout ends. The interview was pretty wide-ranging and covered a lot of topics. Some of the more interesting ones:

– Taylor only took a week off after the Super Bowl before he started working out again. His daily workout looks something like this:

1.5 mile trail run (warmup)….
Run through 40-yard sand pit…..
2 sets of resistance training…..
More cardio stuff…..
7 position-specific drills…..

– Taylor said he is specifically working on his hands this offseason. He’s playing lots of ping-pong and doing a bunch of “small things” to improve his hand-eye coordination. 

– He “strongly” believed that the NFL would have a season. He said a season-long lockout would hurt the economy and the fans.

– Taylor said James Farrior is the most underrated linebacker in the league. “If you put his tape on…I like James Farrior over any linebacker in the year.” 

– On which team he will be playing for in 2011: “Wherever I land, I land.”   

(Source= Blitzburgh Blog.com) 

Meanwhile, we have FOOTBALL OUTSIDER tearing it up with this little gem of an analysis:

Formation Analysis: Empty Backfields

by Aaron Schatz

“Time to take a look at another strategy from the 2010 season: the empty backfield. How often did each team run an empty backfield, and how successful was each team?”

“Total use of empty backfields was up in 2010, from 3.8 percent of plays in 2009 to 5.0 percent of plays in 2010. The team that used the most empty backfields was quite a surprise: Buffalo. Yes, the team whose strongest position going into the season was running back used nobody in the backfield more than any other team. They weren’t particularly successful either. In general, empty backfield plays are very successful, with an overall 16.6% DVOA. Buffalo, however, had just -3.7% DVOA. The Bills were also a bit of an aberration because they were the only team that used empty backfields more than eight percent of the time and didn’t make the playoffs.”

“Empty backfield, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean no running backs in the personnel. The Patriots, for example, had Kevin Faulk or Danny Woodhead on the field for nearly all of their empty-backfield plays. The Bills usually had C.J. Spiller or Fred Jackson split out wide, and sometimes both.”

“I’ve ranked teams in Yards per Play and DVOA as long as they used empty backfields on at least 2.5 percent of plays.”

The Philadelphia Eagles ranked 5th in the NFL in most frequent use of the empty backfield formation in 2010 at 8.2% of all offensive play formations, behind Buffalo (15% percentage of all offensive plays), Green Bay (11%), New England (10%), and New Orleans (9.6%)…

Interesting… Right behind the Eagles were the Steelers and the Falcons, at 8%… The NFL average is 5% with many teams falling into the 1% to 3% range.

The Eagles ranked 12th in DVOA efficiency from the empty backfield formation at 14.1%.  To contrast, New England had the highest DVOA rating in the league at 78.3%…Green Bay’s DVOA came in at 29.6%….

Wait a minute, says I… What the heck is “DVOA” ?

DVOA: The main statistic used on Football Outsiders, DVOA breaks down the entire season play-by-play, comparing success on each play to the league average based on a number of variables including down, distance, location on field, current score gap, quarter, and opponent quality. While it can be used as a measure of total team performance, it differs from other power ratings found throughout the Web because it can be broken down to analyze team effectiveness in any number of ways: down, quarter, rushing vs. receiving, location on field, passes to backs vs. passes to receivers, and so on. Read the article METHODS TO THE MADNESS for more information. DVOA stands for Defense-adjusted Value Over Average, although they use the same letters to refer to defensive rankings which are adjusted to take into account the quality of offensive opponents. When not adjusted for opponent, this stat is called VOA.

Dang—teach an old dog new tricks, why don’cha!

Yet if the “DVOA” metric is sound, Philly’s looking pretty good when they go to an empty backfield, it looks like. That is, we go to it a lot more than I thought…and positive results rank in the top third of the  league ‘s offenses. The Eagles averaged 5.5 yards gain on their empty backfield sets last season… good for 13th in the league.

I’ve always thought of “empty backfield” as an effective choice for teams without a power run game in high-leverage situations, but a lot of coaches use it differently. If you’re 3rd and forever, “empty” gets five receivers into routes very quickly— but it telegraphs your protection scheme, which is a bad idea when your QB has to wait for someone to run a 15yd dig. And as we established a while back, if you wanna convert 3rd downs with the pass, you gotta throw the ball past the sticks.

I noticed Green Bay and New Orleans going “empty” quite a bit in the red zone in 2010, which would also jive with Football Outsider’s analysis (high-leverage situation = make the defense cover the entire width of the field).

If you need to go deeper into this, give Football Outsiders a visit. It’s a whole new way of looking at football stats. Gives me a headache, sometimes though… That’s why they make holiday weekends. Enjoy yours! And thanks for being here…