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Speed is both illegal and required in the NFL.
The drug is on the banned substances list. The physical measurement is becoming more prevalent in the game than ever. It's the simple way to describe the time in which an object goes from point A to point B. It isn't directly related to acceleration, one half of Newton's Second Law, which, when multiplied with mass shows the amount of force at which an object hits.
Hitting has never been a problem in Pittsburgh. Getting to the spot necessary to impose will on an opponent is the issue, not the actions of that imposition. Speed, and more generally speaking, athleticism, is rarer now than active steel mills in Steel City.
The team's general lack of speed, both from a physical standpoint as well as a mental one, was apparent throughout the 2013 season. Watching Terrelle Pryor go untouched on a record-setting 93-yard touchdown run on the first play from scrimmage in an eventual 21-18 Week 8 loss to Oakland, it was apparent. Pryor, the Pittsburgh product, had speed. The Pittsburgh Steelers did not.
Minnesota's Adrian Peterson cracked off a 60-yard touchdown run in Minnesota's eventual 31-27 win over the Steelers in London.
In total, the Steelers had eight running plays against them that went for a total of 381 yards. Take those plays away, the Steelers go from allowing an average of 115.6 yards per game, 21st in the NFL (their lowest mark in over a decade) to 91.8, which would have put them behind the Jets for fourth in the NFL - ahead of San Francisco, Cincinnati and Seattle.
For the first time since Dick LeBeau became the Steelers' defensive coordinator in 2004, the opponents of the Steelers gained more yards (5,402) than the Steelers did (5,400). In fact, it was roughly 1,000 yards higher than what the team's defense averaged from 2008-12.
It's been established the sun rises in the east, and Steelers defenses rank in the top 10 in rushing yards allowed. That changed in 2013, and the question became "what are they going to do about it?"
It's easy to say the problem rested with the Steelers' defensive line, a unit crippled with declining ability and inadequate replacements for past stars. That plays a part of it, but under the surface, it's clear the problem was age - but a lack of it as opposed to the presence of it.
The Steelers lost veteran stalwart Larry Foote in Week 1, thrusting rookie Vince Williams into the lineup. Williams, a two-gap banger who steadily improved throughout the season, is an inferior athlete in comparison to his peers. Combining that with a technique-challenged Ziggy Hood and a declining Brett Keisel on the defensive line, the non-athletic holes in the Steelers' front seven can be blamed for those woes.
It wasn't helped on the back end. A usually resourceful Ryan Clark looked a step slower in 2013, and his typically high level of run support suffered as a result. Missed tackles by first-year starter Cortez Allen and a dropoff of production from Ike Taylor against both the run and the pass hurt the team noticeably.
Despite a heroic climb from an 0-4 start to an 8-4 finish, narrowly missing the playoffs, the Steelers went into the offseason needing to transform their defense in a hurry. Sometimes, righting the ship means changing convention. The Steelers as a franchise are not known to use advanced analytics or other such measurements to evaluate their players. Clearly, though, the team needed a spark.
A SPARQ, perhaps.
What is SPARQ Rating?
It stands for Speed, Power, Agility, Reaction and Quickness. It's a formula developed through Nike with the consult of strength and conditioning coaches involved with several sports. The main components comprising the football version of the formula are the 40-yard dash, the kneeling power ball toss, short shuttle, weight and vertical jump.
SPARQ essentially weighs performances in each of these areas together, and based on what makers determined to be outstanding level of performance in those measurements, values each component numerically and creates a rating. That rating can indicate, based on the subjective weight of the scores, a general evaluation of a player's athletic ability as it pertains to the game of football.
The Seattle Seahawks are known as pioneers of the development of this statistic as well as the application of it in their draft evaluation. It's by no means the end-all of the measurement of athletic prowess. Like many statistics today, it simply provides an easy-to-understand number of normalization to show the all-around athletic ability of a player. It is not a metric capturing the player's football abilities, but rather, something showing a combined and weighted score in areas of strong correlation to success on a football field.
There are likely Hall of Fame players who scored very poorly in this statistic. There are likely SPARQ Rating heroes who failed to make an NFL team. But it's not a stretch to consider players with outstanding performances in the aforementioned areas of measurement, combined with film showing outstanding football skill, have a good chance of becoming NFL players.
Great athletes don't necessarily make great football players, but poor athletes don't have all that great of a chance in their own right. If the Steelers are on the decline in terms of athleticism, maybe that's an area they could address.
Maybe that's exactly what they did.
Steelers 2014 Draft Class
"With the 14th pick in the 2014 NFL Draft, the Chicago Bears select...Kyle Fuller, cornerback, Virginia Tech."
Many, myself included, thought Fuller would be the Steelers' pick at 15. A solid all-around cornerback, maybe some position flexibility (safety), a guy who could see the field in sub packages early in his career. The Steelers had a need at cornerback. They were looking to fill what very well could be a starting position next season, given the strong probability this is Ike Taylor's final year in Pittsburgh, and Cortez Allen is in the last year of his contract.
Fuller was gone. All heads immediately turned to Michigan State cornerback Darqueze Dennard - a solid, savvy player who makes up for a lack of elite-level athleticism with good technique.
We called him a "good player, not a great one." It seemed at this point, Dennard was on the card being handed to the commissioner.
"With the 15th selection in the 2014 NFL Draft, the Pittsburgh Steelers select...Ryan Shazier, linebacker, Ohio State University."
Twitter exploded. So did BTSC. I broke Shazier down in January and absolutely loved him. His speed and explosion were rivaled by few others in the draft. Some might argue inside linebacker wasn't a position of need, certainly not in comparison to cornerback. Having watched Vince Williams' lack of athleticism last season and not having any certainty on Sean Spence's future ability, to me, Shazier was the perfect pick, considering who was there.
Athleticism. What a novel concept.
The Seattle Seahawks out-scheme and out-muscled the offense-heavy Broncos in the Super Bowl. Their success in taking mid-to-late round draft picks and molding them into the kinds of players they want is amazing. Watching the Seahawks' defense fly around the field followed by watching the Steelers' slogging and plodding defense get blown away by Pryor, Peterson, Rob Gronkowski and more is a study in depression for fans.
What the Seahawks have been doing isn't exactly new. Several teams over the years have developed rating systems of some kind in order to target the kinds of players that work well in their respective schemes. The Steelers are known as an old school team. They don't dabble in advanced metrics or the higher ends of technology when it comes to the simple act of scouting players' football abilities and character.
Right?
The formula has since been removed from Nike's web site, creating the speculation someone or some team is using it as proprietary information. Staff members and contributors to SB Nation's Seahawks site, Field Gulls, did the dirtiest of dirty work, figuring out how to reverse-engineer the formula based on past results from high schoolers tested by Nike.
David Hsu and Zach Witman, the two intrepid reporters of Field Gulls behind the regression version of SPARQ, added the broad jump, the 10-second split time and the 3-cone drill, based on comments made by Seahawks general manager John Schneider in regards to the use of this formula in their evaluation of players.
Witman and Hsu call the reverse-engineered version of this formula rSPARQ, and the version with the three additional inputs pSPARQ (created by Whitman).
I'll leave it to them to explain in full detail their methods, but essentially, they substituted the power ball toss for the bench press, and based on the test results from several previous and publicly shared entries, they were able to come up with a version of the formula (rSPARQ) that holds very true to the formula used to generate the scores of those previous subjects.
They made it even better with the inclusion of three drills used as standard measurements in player evaluation. All told, pSPARQ is not an exact mirror of the original SPARQ formula, but a more inclusive version that brings in even more input.
The duo also incorporated what they call "pSPARQ z-score," which establishes an amount of standard deviations from what Whitman described as "an average training camp athlete." He calculated the SPARQ scores across the NFL of all players who were in training camp at the start of the 2013 season, and from that, determined a player with a 1.0 z-score is in the upper 16 percent NFL athlete, 2.0 is upper 2.5 percent, and 3.0 is upper 0.15 percent.
The drug is on the banned substances list. The physical measurement is becoming more prevalent in the game than ever. It's the simple way to describe the time in which an object goes from point A to point B. It isn't directly related to acceleration, one half of Newton's Second Law, which, when multiplied with mass shows the amount of force at which an object hits.
Hitting has never been a problem in Pittsburgh. Getting to the spot necessary to impose will on an opponent is the issue, not the actions of that imposition. Speed, and more generally speaking, athleticism, is rarer now than active steel mills in Steel City.
The team's general lack of speed, both from a physical standpoint as well as a mental one, was apparent throughout the 2013 season. Watching Terrelle Pryor go untouched on a record-setting 93-yard touchdown run on the first play from scrimmage in an eventual 21-18 Week 8 loss to Oakland, it was apparent. Pryor, the Pittsburgh product, had speed. The Pittsburgh Steelers did not.
Minnesota's Adrian Peterson cracked off a 60-yard touchdown run in Minnesota's eventual 31-27 win over the Steelers in London.
In total, the Steelers had eight running plays against them that went for a total of 381 yards. Take those plays away, the Steelers go from allowing an average of 115.6 yards per game, 21st in the NFL (their lowest mark in over a decade) to 91.8, which would have put them behind the Jets for fourth in the NFL - ahead of San Francisco, Cincinnati and Seattle.
For the first time since Dick LeBeau became the Steelers' defensive coordinator in 2004, the opponents of the Steelers gained more yards (5,402) than the Steelers did (5,400). In fact, it was roughly 1,000 yards higher than what the team's defense averaged from 2008-12.
It's been established the sun rises in the east, and Steelers defenses rank in the top 10 in rushing yards allowed. That changed in 2013, and the question became "what are they going to do about it?"
It's easy to say the problem rested with the Steelers' defensive line, a unit crippled with declining ability and inadequate replacements for past stars. That plays a part of it, but under the surface, it's clear the problem was age - but a lack of it as opposed to the presence of it.
The Steelers lost veteran stalwart Larry Foote in Week 1, thrusting rookie Vince Williams into the lineup. Williams, a two-gap banger who steadily improved throughout the season, is an inferior athlete in comparison to his peers. Combining that with a technique-challenged Ziggy Hood and a declining Brett Keisel on the defensive line, the non-athletic holes in the Steelers' front seven can be blamed for those woes.
It wasn't helped on the back end. A usually resourceful Ryan Clark looked a step slower in 2013, and his typically high level of run support suffered as a result. Missed tackles by first-year starter Cortez Allen and a dropoff of production from Ike Taylor against both the run and the pass hurt the team noticeably.
Despite a heroic climb from an 0-4 start to an 8-4 finish, narrowly missing the playoffs, the Steelers went into the offseason needing to transform their defense in a hurry. Sometimes, righting the ship means changing convention. The Steelers as a franchise are not known to use advanced analytics or other such measurements to evaluate their players. Clearly, though, the team needed a spark.
A SPARQ, perhaps.
What is SPARQ Rating?
It stands for Speed, Power, Agility, Reaction and Quickness. It's a formula developed through Nike with the consult of strength and conditioning coaches involved with several sports. The main components comprising the football version of the formula are the 40-yard dash, the kneeling power ball toss, short shuttle, weight and vertical jump.
SPARQ essentially weighs performances in each of these areas together, and based on what makers determined to be outstanding level of performance in those measurements, values each component numerically and creates a rating. That rating can indicate, based on the subjective weight of the scores, a general evaluation of a player's athletic ability as it pertains to the game of football.
The Seattle Seahawks are known as pioneers of the development of this statistic as well as the application of it in their draft evaluation. It's by no means the end-all of the measurement of athletic prowess. Like many statistics today, it simply provides an easy-to-understand number of normalization to show the all-around athletic ability of a player. It is not a metric capturing the player's football abilities, but rather, something showing a combined and weighted score in areas of strong correlation to success on a football field.
There are likely Hall of Fame players who scored very poorly in this statistic. There are likely SPARQ Rating heroes who failed to make an NFL team. But it's not a stretch to consider players with outstanding performances in the aforementioned areas of measurement, combined with film showing outstanding football skill, have a good chance of becoming NFL players.
Great athletes don't necessarily make great football players, but poor athletes don't have all that great of a chance in their own right. If the Steelers are on the decline in terms of athleticism, maybe that's an area they could address.
Maybe that's exactly what they did.
Steelers 2014 Draft Class
"With the 14th pick in the 2014 NFL Draft, the Chicago Bears select...Kyle Fuller, cornerback, Virginia Tech."
Many, myself included, thought Fuller would be the Steelers' pick at 15. A solid all-around cornerback, maybe some position flexibility (safety), a guy who could see the field in sub packages early in his career. The Steelers had a need at cornerback. They were looking to fill what very well could be a starting position next season, given the strong probability this is Ike Taylor's final year in Pittsburgh, and Cortez Allen is in the last year of his contract.
Fuller was gone. All heads immediately turned to Michigan State cornerback Darqueze Dennard - a solid, savvy player who makes up for a lack of elite-level athleticism with good technique.
We called him a "good player, not a great one." It seemed at this point, Dennard was on the card being handed to the commissioner.
"With the 15th selection in the 2014 NFL Draft, the Pittsburgh Steelers select...Ryan Shazier, linebacker, Ohio State University."
Twitter exploded. So did BTSC. I broke Shazier down in January and absolutely loved him. His speed and explosion were rivaled by few others in the draft. Some might argue inside linebacker wasn't a position of need, certainly not in comparison to cornerback. Having watched Vince Williams' lack of athleticism last season and not having any certainty on Sean Spence's future ability, to me, Shazier was the perfect pick, considering who was there.
Athleticism. What a novel concept.
The Seattle Seahawks out-scheme and out-muscled the offense-heavy Broncos in the Super Bowl. Their success in taking mid-to-late round draft picks and molding them into the kinds of players they want is amazing. Watching the Seahawks' defense fly around the field followed by watching the Steelers' slogging and plodding defense get blown away by Pryor, Peterson, Rob Gronkowski and more is a study in depression for fans.
What the Seahawks have been doing isn't exactly new. Several teams over the years have developed rating systems of some kind in order to target the kinds of players that work well in their respective schemes. The Steelers are known as an old school team. They don't dabble in advanced metrics or the higher ends of technology when it comes to the simple act of scouting players' football abilities and character.
Right?
The formula has since been removed from Nike's web site, creating the speculation someone or some team is using it as proprietary information. Staff members and contributors to SB Nation's Seahawks site, Field Gulls, did the dirtiest of dirty work, figuring out how to reverse-engineer the formula based on past results from high schoolers tested by Nike.
David Hsu and Zach Witman, the two intrepid reporters of Field Gulls behind the regression version of SPARQ, added the broad jump, the 10-second split time and the 3-cone drill, based on comments made by Seahawks general manager John Schneider in regards to the use of this formula in their evaluation of players.
Witman and Hsu call the reverse-engineered version of this formula rSPARQ, and the version with the three additional inputs pSPARQ (created by Whitman).
I'll leave it to them to explain in full detail their methods, but essentially, they substituted the power ball toss for the bench press, and based on the test results from several previous and publicly shared entries, they were able to come up with a version of the formula (rSPARQ) that holds very true to the formula used to generate the scores of those previous subjects.
They made it even better with the inclusion of three drills used as standard measurements in player evaluation. All told, pSPARQ is not an exact mirror of the original SPARQ formula, but a more inclusive version that brings in even more input.
The duo also incorporated what they call "pSPARQ z-score," which establishes an amount of standard deviations from what Whitman described as "an average training camp athlete." He calculated the SPARQ scores across the NFL of all players who were in training camp at the start of the 2013 season, and from that, determined a player with a 1.0 z-score is in the upper 16 percent NFL athlete, 2.0 is upper 2.5 percent, and 3.0 is upper 0.15 percent.
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