Pro Bowl Cheat Sheet

Each year the Pro Bowl roster comes out and each year I lose a few brain cells smacking my head against the table.

To be honest that is how stupid some of the picks are.

I really can’t put it any other way. Now I know the PFF staff and I have an advantage. We have a system designed to capture more than stats, and that can (in our opinions) compare players at the same positions. As a benefit to spending about 24 man hours (spread amongst three people) per game, you also actually watch a lot of football and really see what’s going on all over the field. Not just the ball.

It’s why we love giving out praise. Great players deserve recognition, so the Pro Bowl should be something to be celebrated. Instead, it’s a joke. Because if some of the players mentioned in this article can get selected then quite frankly the idea of a Pro Bowl at some positions, is worthless since it’s got nothing to do with what happens on the field, and everything to do with reputation, hearsay and how much someone is earning.
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So here it is, the one the players really want to see. No hype, no bias, just a simple acknowledgement that–on the field of play, for the first 14 games of 2011–they were among the best at their position. It’s not based on highlight reels and you get as much credit for playing well early as you do late (during the regular season, winning the first game counts the same in the standings as winning the last).

We absolutely don’t lean towards players from teams that have the best records. It’s the ultimate capitulation to the power of hype when a coach says “yes he played well, but for him to get any recognition we have to play better as a team”. Why? This is about selecting the best players, not about the laziness of people who can’t be bothered to watch or research teams that are playing poorly.

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Hot on the heels of our AFC selections, we’ve of course got a roster of the year’s best for the NFC too. Again, selecting not based on hype or exposure, but simply on on-field performance, this team of stars represents the best we’ve seen from this conference in 2011.

If you haven’t read about the AFC squad, be sure to catch up, otherwise … for your consideration, here are our NFC selections:

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The NFL has become a league based on highlights. As the line between fantasy and real football continues to blur in many peoples eyes a couple of highlight plays in a big game, or a single sentence from a respected commentator can mean the difference between being in Hawaii or not. Last year, DeAngelo Hall picked off Jay Cutler four times in a game and it was “pack your bags” right there and then. Who cares during the season he allowed more touchdowns than picks he made, and who cares only Mike Jenkins gave up more yards?

I have a view that if you give me ANY regular NFL starter, I can choose ten plays from this season’s body of work that will make him look like a Pro Bowler. Conversely, for the same player, I could choose ten plays that will make him look like benching material. The point is that it’s not those plays that matter. It’s the thousand in between that count for substantially more than the 20 on the perimeter.

Let’s look at who deserves recognition when we take every play into consideration.

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OK, OK, I know. It’s far too early to start with all this stuff but the NFL doesn’t, and has started to allow voting for the Pro Bowls.

I’m one of those guys who loves the idea of an All-Star team so much (not the game you understand, just the voting and recognition bit) I’m always mortified by how little effort is made to keep the whole thing from turning into a crass debacle.

Call this my personal crusade to bring some sort of credence to player selection by providing a list of players you absolutely shouldn’t be embarrassed to vote for; these are the good guys, the ones who actually deserve it and aren’t just a product of hype or conventional wisdom.

Welcome to my monthly Pro Bowl Cheat Sheet.

(As a note, some players with great grades have been ruled out due to lack of snaps like Andre Johnson, Trent Cole or James Harrison.  They may well return and, once the snaps are above our minimum for the position, be included if their performance still merits it.

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It’s Pro Bowl week, also known as the 24th or 25th best weekend of the National Football League season!

What better way than to kick off the festivities than a look at our PFF choices for the Pro Bowl spots. Since it’s only a theory, we don’t have to worry about injuries, surgeries, replacements or other commitments — just the men that should make up the official team.

We’ve already given you the NFC; next up, the AFC.
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It’s easy enough to make a list of great football players that didn’t get their due in the annual Pro Bowl semi-mockery. But we’re going to go one step further and tell you which guys shouldn’t have gotten a sniff — the 10 most undeserving Pro Bowlers of 2010.

None of the players on this list are completely without merit, but clearly they are also NOT Pro Bowlers either.

So, with hopes that no angry football players track me down and treat me like a tackling dummy …

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Yes, voting for the Pro Bowl ends today at NFL.com, and our Neil Hornsby spent the better part of his weekend working on his final appeal for the right guys to take their trip to Hawaii this season.

Among the most preposterous fan favorites, he takes special exception to the appearance of several Steeler offensive linemen: “I’ve always found Steeler fans to be among the most knowledgeable around … what possessed them to vote for almost every man on probably the second-worst offensive line in the NFL?”

He has praise, too, for underappreciated guys like Jason Witten, two Panther offensive linemen and Bart Scott. He finds room for only three rookies (two on special teams), and neither is named Ndamukong Suh.

Read Neil’s picks in the AFC here.

Read Neil’s picks in the NFC here.

Just three more weeks to be considered in the Pro Bowl voting or, to put it another way, we now have nearly 80% of the possible information to hand. Therefore we guess this is the business end of the deal.

When we saw the fan voting so far for guards we genuinely thought they had sent the spreadsheet for the worst 5 guys (it included Trai Essex, Mike Pollak and Eric Steinbach).

We have to do better – you have to do better – it can’t be that guys who have played brilliantly are excluded because some teams website organized a campaign to get every player on their roster elected regardless of performance.

Here’s a list of deserving candidates you absolutely cannot go wrong with:

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Two pieces of good news; all the teams have now played an identical number of games and we at least have the majority of the schedule analyzed.

It’s not enough to make the best decision but it’s getting better as the voting officially stops after week 15 concludes anyway.

With NFL.com putting players like Mark Sanchez and Jerod Mayo in their Pro Bowl graphics this week, it’s all the more important to get out some good information. With 9 of a possible 14 games in the database who are the top players so far this year?

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