For all you D Hall lovers

[GTripp0012]

Originally Posted by BigHairedAristocrat

What do you define as not panning out? How will hall singlehandedly cost us wins for many years in the future? you use the term win and year in the plural sense, which seems to imply Hall somehow has the ability to singlehandely lose more than one game per year for us, for atleast 3 years. Please spell this out for me because i dont see how Hall, even if he ends up playing at a lowly fred smoot level (which is HIGHLY unlikely), would singlehandedly result in us losing multiple games over a course of several years? it seems to be a ridiculous, outlandish statement, and i would really like to know what youre basing it on.

Why is him playing at Smoot's level highly unlikely? For his entire Atlanta career, he played at about the same level Smoot did.

Stats I have go back to 2005:

2005 Smoot 7.2 YPA, SR 52%
2005 Hall 7.4 YPA, SR 52%

2006 Smoot 6.7 YPA, SR 58%
2006 Hall 8.5 YPA, SR 46%

2007 Smoot 5.3 YPA, SR 43%
2007 Hall 7.2 YPA, SR 48%

All courtesy Pro Football Prospectus 2006, 2007, and 2008 respectively.

Hall was like 11 YPA in Oakland this year and like 5ish in Washington. Unquestionably, this was the famed "career (half) year". His early production doesn't suggest we would be wrong to average the results. It suggests that any advantage a young DeAngelo Hall had over a in-his-prime Fred Smoot is based on something besides his ability to cover.

Notice the bold type: I pointed out last year that Smoot's production was totally out of line with that of the rest of his career, and told everyone here that I thought he was a real candidate to decline. I had no idea that Smoot would be as bad as he was. No idea. I did know that he's probably not a starting caliber corner in most years.

Based on Hall's first five years, we'd have to say the same thing. Except that he's only 25, so he's got plenty of time left to improve. If he did improve though, we'd be more likely to see it in slow small incriments (at least statistically), than in one big jump, especially over only seven games.

The seven games here for Hall represent a statistical fluke. If DeSean Jackson catches both deep balls over his shoulder, the Redskins win only one game in Hall's tenure here, people see our defense as some crappy, declining unit, and Hall's numbers here are right in line with his career averages. That's obviously why I don't trust his small sample success.

I think that if you pair Rogers with Hall and treat Hall like a second CB, he'll do some developing here and he'll be able to play our Springs role. Rogers, in my opinion, is key to Hall's development. Hall, in pretty much everyone's opinion, has a very long road to NFL success ahead.

Why should we pay the best case scenario potential?