Sunday, July 15, 2007

D.J. Hall: Record Breaker

Anyone who knows anything about football can tell you that D.J. Hall is a great receiver. In 2006, he broke just about every Alabama single season receiving record, and if he stays even remotely healthy in 2007, he'll own essentially every receiving record in Alabama football history.

All of the mainstream statistics for the receiver position, however, are all cumulative, and thus can be inflated by increased opportunities. In short, a receiver can put up big numbers and still not have a particularly good year, with the reason for the big numbers being so many passes were thrown his way. Considering John Parker Wilson set the Alabama record for single season passing attempts in 2007 with 393 attempts, I wondered if that could have possibly been the real underlying reason to Hall's successes in 2007.

So, I applied the usual analysis, I broke down every pass thrown to Hall this season in the eight conference games.

Long story short, the pass attempts didn't inflate Hall's numbers, he was just that good.

All told, in the eight conference games, 78 passes were thrown to D.J. Hall. Of those 78 passes, Hall caught 47 of them, which gives him a catch rate (percentage of passes thrown to a particular receiver that were actually caught by that receiver) of 60.26%, which is a very high number, especially considering the quality of competition faced in SEC play. Hall went up against opposing team's best cornerback, and often times faced double coverage, but yet he still had a Catch Rate of over 60%, a truly impressive number. To give the number some context, generally speaking, the best NFL receivers have a Catch Rate in the sixty-percent range.

And these weren't short throws, either. It wasn't as if Hall was continuously running five yard curl routes, racking up easy receptions. Hall averaged just under 17 yards per catch on those 47 receptions, so his receptions were generally downfield, more difficult, catches.

Hall's catch rate is even more impressive when you put it context with what surrounded him. The quarterback throwing him the ball, John Parker Wilson, was a first year starter, and Wilson was constantly under pressure due to a poor pass blocking offensive line. Moreover, teams keyed on the pass all year long due the complete ineffectiveness of our rushing attack. Beyond that, Hall largely lacked a legitimate receiving threat to compliment his abilities. Keith Brown was hurt in the Ole Miss game, and never really recovered, and no legitimate receiving threat appeared the rest of the year (aside from Stover in the Iron Bowl).

At bottom, opposing teams knew that Hall was all we had, and they put all of their emphasis on stopping him. We threw to Hall 12 times against Tennessee, 17 times against Mississippi State, and 14 times against LSU. Again, opposing defenses knew he was our only real threat down the stretch, but even so they simply could not stop him.

Beyond that, though, the breakdown showed that we didn't exactly throw to Hall in ideal situations. We threw to him a lot on 1st down (36 times), but when we threw to Hall it was almost always in situations where lots of yardage was needed. Granted, that shouldn't be too surprising -- after all, long yardage situations is why you are throwing in the first place -- but it would have been nice if he could have been utilized better. The underlying idea to play-calling is that you should pass when other teams expect a run, and run when the opposing defense expects a pass, and Shula and co. failed miserably at that in 2006 in relation to Hall. Generally speaking, when you have a play-maker wide receiver, you would like to throw him the ball in situations where the opposing defense expects the run, which should free up man-to-man coverage on the outside for your play-maker receiver. We didn't do that at all in 2006. Of the 78 passes to Hall in 2006, only seven of them came with five yards or less needed for a first down. Unfortunately -- another sign of poor play-calling -- we largely threw the ball to Hall when it was obvious we needed to pass.

Beyond all of the foregoing, we must keep in mind one other thing. Hall played almost all of the 2006 season with a serious left shoulder injury, and injury that was severe enough to require off-season shoulder surgery.

Despite all that he had going against him, Hall caught just about everything that was thrown in his general direction. Actually, the play-by-play data at RollTide.com does not list Hall with dropping a single pass that was thrown his way in conference play in 2006, and, moreover, a large chunk of his incompleted passes were desperation throws late in games that were effectively over.

There are no two ways about it. When you break down Hall's performance using advanced statistics, he really was just that good in 2006, and assuming he can stay healthy in 2007, he's going to likely have an even better year, and break essentially every Alabama receiving record.

Hall's big performance is enough to make the case that he is quite possibly the greatest pure wide receiver we've ever had at Alabama.

2 comments:

ty webb said...

I agree that DJ is pretty darn good, but how about Don Hutson for best ever maybe?

Troutcreekpass said...

Agreed -- Hall is probably the best of the modern era (main competition would be David Palmer or Ozzie (if he is considered a WR) but Hutson is considered by many the best WR to ever play the pro game so Hall is probably playing for 2nd best. That's not too bad.