Author Page for Scott Lemieux

Regression to the Mean and the Marginal Value of Running Backs

Bill Barnwell, as part of an article on the decline of several star running backs, says about Adrian Peterson’s off year:

I wrote about Peterson’s likely decline before the season, and he’s hitting a lot of those boxes this year. The big plays are down. The average play is down. He’s beginning to deal with nagging injuries, notably a groin injury that Peterson admitted was slowing him down this past week. (Peterson also had to cope with the tragic death of his child last month.) The quarterback play hasn’t helped, given that the Vikings have played musical chairs under center this year, but their passing attack wasn’t all that great during the second half of the 2012 season, either. That was with Christian Ponder throwing to a group of receivers without Percy Harvin (or 2013 arrivals Greg Jennings and Cordarrelle Patterson), and Peterson still put together the greatest half-season a running back has ever managed. Last year, Peterson ran through nine men in the box and still picked up big plays. This year, nine men in the box have slowed Peterson down. There’s no shame in that. They call them career years for a reason.

We’ve been through this with Marshawn Lynch, but (especially with Peterson’s performance having recovered a bit over the last two weeks) it’s not hard to see what’s going on with him:

Year YPC
2007 5.6
2008 4.8
2009 4.4
2010 4.6
2011 4.7
2012 6.0
2013 4.6

Peterson is having a fairly typical Peterson year, in other words — 2012, much more than 2013, is the outlier. This isn’t a knock on Peterson — a back you can count on being well above-average every year is a very rare commodity. But it also illustrates the compressed range of performance for running backs. If you win the lottery and get Peterson, you get a guy who will be nearly a yard a carry better than an easily available back in his typical year and two yards better in his peak seasons. That has real value, but it’s not a huge impact. If 2012 were typical for Lynch and Peterson — if great running backs could be counted on for 6 yards a carry and good ones for 5 — then running backs would be worth big contracts and top 5 picks with reasonable frequency. But in fact the typical performances are pegged about a yard lower than that, and when you combine that with running backs generally being more inconsistent and having shorter shelf lives than other skill position players…this is why no competent organization would draft a running back in the top 5 (let alone trade up to do so) unless they were very confident they had another Barry Sanders-level historical great on their hands. And if you think a guy who was only a starter for one year because he was playing behind…Mark Ingram as a sophomore had any serious chance to be the next Barry Sanders, well, you probably also think that a pushing-30 Brandon Weeden had potential as a franchise QB, and you’re probably also no longer employed.

All of which brings us to one of this blog’s longest standing pastimes, making fun of Gregg Easterbrook. The Browns somehow getting a first round pick for Trent Richardson might be the biggest heist pulled off by a North American sports GM since the Blue Jays somehow got Mike Napoli in exchange for letting the Angels pay Vernon Wells an elite salary for sub-replacement level performance. Getting this trade right at the time is a fairly elementary test for an NFL analyst. Easterbrook’s reaction was predictably hilarious:

In my AFC preview, I noted of the new Cleveland management team, “Rob Chudzinski at coach and Michael Lombardi at general manager traded away fourth- and fifth-round picks to bank extra selections for 2014. Strong teams bank draft choices; for a weak team to bank draft choices is a head-scratcher.” Scratch your heads anew over last week’s decision by Chudzinski and Lombardi to trade the team’s young star, Trent Richardson, to Indianapolis in order to bank another pick for April 2014. The Colts are likely to have a winning season: giving a high 2012 first-round pick for a low 2014 first-round pick is a bad deal unless Richardson is a bust. If he’s not a bust and churns out yards for Indianapolis, Cleveland faithful will be hit over the head yet again.

First of all, I don’t understand why it’s a “head scratcher” for a weak team to bank draft choices. But the real marvel is Easterbrook describing Richardson as a “young star.” Not even “promising,” but after 17 games of extremely expensive sub-replacement level performance, as a “star.” And it’s not even a question of a disagreement between advanced and conventional metrics: his conventional stats were terrible, his advanced stats were terrible, he looked like a highly unimpressive plodder — there was as of the time he was traded no evidence that he was a good running back, let alone a “star,” apart from the tautological assumption that if an already-deservedly-fired Mike Holmgren thought Richardson was worth trading up to draft at #3 he must be onto something. Would anyone have described JaMarcus Russell or Vernon Gholston as a “young star” after 17 lousy games and suggested that a team that managed to unload their contract and get a first rounder in exchange probably blundered? But certain ground-and-pound nostalgiacs evaluate running backs the way Joel Seigel and Peter Travers evaluate Hollywood moves — almost everyone’s a star!

In fairness, Easterbrook does hedge his bets. If Vernon Wells wasn’t a bust, Blue Jays fans would have been hit over the head yet again…

It Wasn’t An Accident

On Sunday, the RNC tweeted “Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in ending racism,” producing much-deserved mockery. Ann Althouse is OUTRAGED:

Can you see why this is worth scoffing at, other than that it’s a tweet from the Republican National Committee?

First, you have to be enough of a douchebag to act like you don’t see that “ending racism” is a process and that a person might have a role in that process even though that role didn’t go so far as to entirely complete the process.

The answer to what she thinks is a rhetorical question is that, of course, is that the idea that racism is a thing of the past that we once had to worry about but no longer have to is a very real and very pernicious feature of American political discourse and practice. And while yes, there are some cases (like the War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs) in which Both Sides in fact Do It, this lie is much more embedded within the Republican Party. The Supreme Court making up extraconstitutional limits on the congressional power to enforce the 15th Amendment because racism just isn’t the issue it used to be is a rather powerful example. And Republicans wanted the green light for a reason: to enact vote suppression measures that aren’t even nominally connected to imaginary “vote fraud” but are solely means of making it more difficult for African-Americans to vote. The embrace of vote suppression is an almost exclusively Republican phenomenon and the RNC’s tweet accurately reflects the ethos.

So there’s perfectly good reason why the RNC’s tweet attracted attention. The idea that racism ended permanently when a few heroic individuals who conservatives can now support decades after the fact in highly sanitized versions — so that the only remaining racism is liberal opposition to racism — is a fundamental principle of the contemporary Republican Party.

Yikes

Having ridden the Metro North from Poughkeepsie many times, that picture is particularly scary. Hopefully everybody injured will be OK, and condolences to the families of the deceased.

Obligatory Thanksgiving Post

Welcome to the one day a year where the market is wrong about the ineluctable blandness of turkey! (Djw and the Lemieux family did in fact celebrate early with an appetizer of tagliatelle carbonara last night.)

Whether you’re lucking out by getting salmon like us, are having turkey, or are more ethical, happy Thanksgiving (belatedly, in the case of our Canadian readers.) And remember the people who should be getting pardoned instead of the turkey.

On Tomorrow’s Roberts Court Atrocity Today

The Supreme Court granted cert in two of the specious legal challenges to the ACA’s contraceptive mandate, and I’m not particularly optimistic.

One point I want to emphasize is that contraceptive coverage is earned, not “free”:

One argument that has been made again and again by supporters of the legal challenges is that the religious consciences of employers are being burdened so that employees can get “free” contraception. But this is an erroneous argument that misapprehends the basic concept of employer-provided health insurance. Contraception provided by health insurance isn’t “free,” it’s earned. Companies get substantial taxpayer subsidies for partly paying employees in health insurance instead of cash. In exchange, this insurance has to be comprehensive enough to provide value to the employee. Women getting basic health-care needs covered by insurance they’re receiving as compensation are not receiving any kind of free ride.

This point underscores just how weak the legal challenge to the mandate is. The employers in question are claiming that there’s a major religious freedom issue at stake depending on whether employees obtain contraception through direct wages or through the insurance employers get tax benefits for paying employees with instead. But there isn’t. The “burden” imposed by the mandate is utterly trivial, and the argument that it violates RFRA should be rejected by the Supreme Court.

Well, Somebody’s Unprincipled Here

Shorter Lambert: That Paul Krugman is such an unprincipled hack. Everyone knows that Hillary Clinton’s health care reform plan is acceptable only when it’s proposed by Hillary Clinton. And he’s so ill-informed about American politics he doesn’t understand that Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, and the many other staunch liberals in the Senate were desperate to support single payer, and Obama DIDN’T. EVEN. TRY!

Wingnuttery Without Strategery

Julia Ioffe’s article about Heritage Action is fascinating reading. As IB notes in comments, it’s not that Heritage was ever non-hackish, but “[w]hat has changed, however, is the organization’s ability to think strategically and act effectively. It’s gone from being an extremely effective hackish pressure group to becoming a much less effective one.” Their contempt for strategic thought, shared by crucial members of Congress, is dumbfounding:

After months of furious lobbying, Needham sold, at most, 20 members of the House on his plan of attack. In the end, this was enough to cement the party line—and lead the GOP to a spectacular, deafening loss.

Sorting through the wreckage, Washington conservatives can barely contain their anger at Needham for his ideological inflexibility and aggressive, zero-sum tactics. “Their strategic sense isn’t very strong,” griped a prominent Republican lobbyist. “They’ve repeatedly been wrong about how to handle this.” Says a senior House Republican aide, “Mike Needham played a large role in defeating ideas that would have worked out better.”

It’s not that this inability to think in terms of means and ends is entirely absent from the left; sure, there are people who think that because single-payer is better policy it could have been passed but Obama didn’t even try, or who think that 1. Elect Romney 2. ???? 3. ???? 4. ???? 5. ??? 6. The White House and Congress will be controlled by Scandanavian Social Democrats! is a viable strategy. But, particularly since 2000 discredited irrational spoilerism (and even that was a tiny faction of the left that mattered only because of an unusually close election), this segment of the left has very little influence. On the right, it’s influential enough to actually cause the Republican conference in Congress to run themselves off a cliff again and again.

Their irrationality has even extended to their own influence:

Shortly after this summer’s farm bill debacle (Heritage Action pushed members to rid the bill of its food-stamp half, then still sent out a “no” alert on the revised bill, hanging out to dry members from agricultural districts), the outrage was such that the Heritage Foundation was bannedfrom the weekly lunches of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), a conservative caucus of House Republicans. This was particularly ironic as the RSC and Heritage were once interwoven: In the 1970s, Feulner had been the RSC’s first executive director. “It really speaks volumes about a betrayal of trust,” says the Republican strategist. The House GOP aide puts it more starkly: “There are over two hundred thirty bridges to be burned in the House. Over two hundred of them are burned, and they maybe have about thirty more left.”

The frustration grew in the build up to the budget fight as Heritage Action organized DeMint’s nine-city tour, and Needham blitzed the conservative media—giving constituents the impression that defunding Obamacare in one knockout move was perfectly plausible. In meetings, congressional staffers couldn’t even get Heritage Action to entertain the possibility that the strategy might fail. “They never wanted to discuss anything past defund,” recalls the Republican staffer. “We would ask, ‘What if [Democrats] say no and don’t budge, what do you do then?’ They kept saying: ‘That’s not our role. You figure it out.’ ” In an August interview with CSPAN, Needham was asked a similar question: How can Republicans achieve their goal of defunding Obamacare without control of the Senate or the White House? “I think that, rather than trying to figure out where we’re going to be at the end of September,” Needham said, his underbite jutting contemptuously, “we should actually fight for something.”

I also enjoyed this:

DeMint was known nationally as a warrior for purity, spending more of his time seeking out like-minded candidates for the U.S. Senate rather than passing legislation. But, at Heritage, DeMint found kindred spirits in Saunders and Needham, who created a Heritage Action scorecard to grade Republican members of Congress on their ideological mettle. (The standard is so high that, at this writing, the House Republican caucus gets a paltry 66 percent rating.)

But the whole thing is worth etc.

…see also.

So Many Munichs

If I understand correctly, Europe has been mostly conquered by the Hitler-of-the-week roughly 500 times since Obama took office. Frankly, it’s amazing that the world economy isn’t in worse shape.

No, Really, the Filibuster is Terrible

I spent some time reading terrible arguments — in good faith or otherwise — that Democrats will regret using the nuclear option. I explain why all the forms of this argument are transparently wrong. Of these, the strangest is liberal sentimentalism about the filibuster:

Some liberal writers whose work I respect enormously have an attachment to the idea of the filibuster that I find frankly unfathomable. For example, the eminent legal scholar Geoffrey Stone argues that the nuclear option is “a sad day for America.” But like most such arguments, his defense of the filibuster exists entirely in the abstract, with no attempt to grapple with the actual effect of the filibuster on American politics. In what is always a bad sign, Stone begins by invoking the Frank Capra film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which makes about as much sense as invoking Henry V to argue that monarchy is preferable to democracy. More unfortunate is that Stone does not depart the realm of the Hollywood tear-jearker to consider how the filibuster has been used by the actually existing United States Senate. Stone does not identify any example of the filibuster being used to protect an oppressed minority, presumably because as far as I can tell there aren’t any. Nor does he deal with the frequent use of the filibuster to obstruct federal civil rights legislation, a much more representative use of the filibuster than Jimmy Stewart’s stand for the little guy.

The depiction of the filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is a nearly precise inversion of how the filibuster actually works. Far from protecting the interests of powerless minorities, the filibuster in practice is far more likely to allow powerful, overrepresented minorities like segregationist and business interests to thwart legislation intended to protect oppressed minorities. The Republican blockade of Obama’s judicial and executive nominees is very much consistent with this tradition, which is why the use of the nuclear option was a clear victory for progressives.

Another example of an excellent writer with an attachment to the filibuster I find inexplicable is Johnathan Bernstein, whose defense of the practice I missed until after my article went to the editors. One of his points — “Have you actually looked at the House of Representatives lately? Do we really need a second body organized that way?” I address directly in the article. The problems with this argument are that 1)the Senate looking more functional is a historical anomaly, and 2)House dysfunction is not caused by its majoritarian structure. Indeed, if Tea Party House Republicans had an effective veto like they would in the Senate it’s not clear that the planet Earth would exist anymore. Certainly, there would be not only no debt limit extension but no ACA, no repeal of DADT, and no stimulus, among many other things.

On his larger argument, I’m not sure Wendy Davis is any more relevant to the routinized filibuster of the United State Senate than a Frank Capra film is. Reducing the filibuster to a 55-vote threshold wouldn’t reserve the filibuster for unusual, lonely and ultimately futile stands against bad legislation; it would just be a de facto 55-vote supermajority requirement that would have no good reason for existing. And, really, the fact that defenders of the filibuster are unable to come up with the filibuster serving a useful purpose in the Senate itself and have to rely on hypotheticals, other legislative bodies, or Hollywood movies makes my case for me.

I should say that Bernstein does have a good explanation for why the Republicans may have pushed too far — the few remaining moderates were being hung out to dry. I would add that the Cruz faction seems to care more about posturing than actual policy substance, so the counterproductive results from their perspective may not matter too much to them.

I Think You Want to Go With a Different Strawman

I’ll have a piece going up tomorrow [UPDATE: it's here] on some really bad defenses of the filibuster tomorrow. Since I didn’t have space for this particular one, let’s turn to Eric Posner, who as part of a a defense of the filibuster makes a very unfortunate argument:

To provide an extreme example, under a pure system of majority rule 51 percent of the population could pass a law that transferred the wealth of 49 percent of the population to the majority. If at the next election, the other side managed to win, it could expropriate the wealth back. The resulting instability, as different groups took turns expropriating each other’s wealth, would impoverish the country over time. If one group never took a turn winning, then the outcome would be inequitable as well as bad for the public at large. If all of this sounds too implausible to be of concern to you, then remember Jim Crow in the South, and the many decades disenfranchised African-Americans spent as electoral losers.

First of all, the Jim Crow argument misapprehends the general democratic presumption of majority rule. When we say “majority rule,” we mean that the majority is generally entitled to make law if it wins a fair election and follows agreed-upon procedures. Jim Crow and its mass disenfranchisement, to put it mildly, are not “majority rule” in any democratic sense. And it’s worse than that, the filibuster of course was a crucial tool used by segregationists to protect their anti-democratic systems from national majorities.

It’s true, of course, that democracy does not just mean majority rule, and countermajoritarian rules are not always unjustifiable. As Posner does go on to concede, the real argument against the filibuster is that the United States already has plenty of countermajoritarian mechanisms, and in most cases therefore the filibuster can’t be defended. But if one is reduced to citing Jim Crow in defense of the filibuster, it’s not nearly as close a question as Posner makes it out to be.

To State What Should Be Obvious

If you’re going to write an article about something “feminists” believe, it really should not be based on the arguments of a single feminist who is both highly unrepresentative and making an exceedingly unpersuasive argument.

Perlstein On JFK

These two posts by Rick Perlstein make some excellent points about JFK. A few comments:

• The take on the Cuban Missle Crisis seems right to me.  JFK’s actions when the crisis came to a head were admirable, but his actions leading up to the crisis are another story.
• The idea that JFK is some kind of “conservative” is absurd, the same kind of fallacy as the “Nixon and Eisenhower were more liberal than Obama” silliness.  Supporting demand-side tax cuts when the top marginal rate is 90% does not in fact mean you would have supported supply-side Republican upper-class tax cuts.
• What JFK would have done in Vietnam is obviously unknowable, and one advantage JFK’s historical reputation has is that it’s hard to imagine that he could have been worse than Johnson and Nixon.  But I share Perlstein’s skepticism about the “JFK would have pulled out” theory.   If LBJ primary priority had been foreign policy, I might buy it.  But LBJ was Nixon in reverse; he cared about domestic politics, and foreign policy was just something to be dealt with as a means of clearing space for the domestic initiatives he cared about.  What this suggests is that the political pressures within the executive branch, military, and much of the Democratic coalition were strongly pro-escalation.  Would JFK, fundamentally a hawk and very politically risk-averse, have resisted these pressures?  That seems exceedingly implausible to me.
• I think I’ll leave Oliver Stone’s JFK, one of the best American comedies of the last 25 years, to another post.