Carson Wentz named the most valuable Philadelphia Eagle over the past decade

Carson Wentz named the most valuable Eagle over the past decade

Analytics in sports has created a brand new way to judge and grade players at every level of competition. The model and framework for determining how those grades are figured out sometimes drives fans and critics crazy.

Pro Football Focus does a great job of evaluating player performance but their grading system has caused many an argument about how the analytical site comes to their conclusions.

In a recent ranking of Philadelphia Eagles’ most valuable overall players, PFF, using their WAR model, determined that Carson Wentz was the most valuable over the past decade, ahead of some familiar names.

According to Pro Football Focus, WAR is broken down into this context:

Determine how good a given player was during a period of time (generally a season) using PFF grades;
Map a player’s production to a “wins” value for his team using the relative importance of each facet of play;
Simulate a team’s expected performance with a player of interest and with an average player participating identically in his place. Take the difference in expected wins (e.g., Wins Above Average);
Determine the average player with a given participation profile’s wins above replacement player, assuming a team of replacement-level players is a 3-13 team;
Add the terms in the last two calculations to get that player’s WAR.

Foles of course started and won the Super Bowl for the Eagles, so that section of fans will have no parts of this ranking, regardless of what the numbers say.

Those numbers do speak volumes for Wentz and over the past three seasons, he’s been pretty good despite the injuries.

Since 2006, only one quarterback has a higher overall grade in their first three seasons than Wentz’s 82.7.

During Wentz’s 2017 season when he was a legitimate MVP candidate, Carson led all quarterbacks in passing grade (93.3), big-time throws (15), yards per attempt (9.5), and passer rating (123.7) on third downs per PFF.

You can point to his penchant for fumbling and still not winning a playoff game yet, but you can’t deny how good the Eagles starting quarterback has been over his first four seasons.

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