I put together a "peer" group that included Larry Fitzgerald, Calvin
Johnson, Andre Johnson, Brandon Marshall, Percy Harvin, Dwayne Bowe,
Vincent Jackson and Hakeem Nicks. From a financial standpoint, the first
7 of those guys are no-brainers as they are very literally his
financial peers in terms of money being made. The final guy Hakeem Nicks
is from the same draft class as Wallace and I think he's going to break
the bank just as much.
I think naturally the more times in a game you go to a guy the less he's
going to average in terms of yards per attempt. Therefore it's
unsurprising to see a -8% correlation between the two stats in the peer
group. But with Mike Wallace you have a much higher negative correlation
at -26%. The more he gets the ball, the worse he does. His yards per
attempt goes from 11.95 in games where he was thrown the ball 5 times or
less, to 9.25 in games where he's thrown the ball 6 to 10 times, to
7.96 in games where he's thrown the ball 11+ times. The peer group
actually goes from 9.16 on games where they get thrown the ball up to 5
times to 9.18 on games where they're thrown to 6 to 10 times. Then they
tail off to 8.53 on games where they're thrown to 11+ times.
The thing that worries me here is that nearly half (31 of 67, 46%) of
Mike Wallace's games fit into that category where he was thrown the
football 5 times or less in the game. And hell if you just bump the
threshold up 1 tick to 6 attempts or fewer, that covers nearly 2/3rds of
his games (41 of 67, 61%). With the peer group, only 20% of their games
fall into the category of being thrown the football 5 times or less
(and that only jumps to 28% if you bump the threshold up to 6 attempts
or less).
The answer for everyone seems to be that's OK because we can just use
Mike Wallace the same way he was used in Pittsburgh. We'll not use him
like a real #1, we'll just throw him the ball sparingly and deep at the
right moments. I just don't see that working, once you pay him $13
million a year. You have to imagine how it's going to be if the Dolphins
sit there and lose a football game 21-17 and they only threw the
football at Mike Wallace maybe 5 times in the game. You know,
statistically speaking if 3 of those throws were deep balls, between
Ryan Tannehill missing the throw (which happens to every QB) and Mike
Wallace dropping it (which happens to every receiver), only 1 of those 3
will be complete. That's just reality for you. The average catch from
among that peer group will gain you about 36 yards with a 1 in 3 chance
that it ends up a touchdown.
So you come out of a game with the stat line for your $13 million a year
wide receiver that looks like 3 catches for 61 yards. And that would be
about half of his games. Do you really see that happening? I don't. I
think if he's a $13 million a year guy he's going to be targeted a lot.
There's going to be pressure to target him a bunch.
