Fare thee well to the former Falcons lineman." />Skip to main contentclockmenumore-arrownoyesHorizontal - In or Sign UpLog InSign UpFanpostsFanshotsLibraryFalconsOddsAboutMastheadCommunity GuidelinesStubHubMoreAll 322 blogs on Horizontal - WhiteFanposts Fanshots Library FalcFans Podcast on The FalcoholicContact The FalcoholicFalcons StoriesScheduleRosterStatsYahoo Falcons NewsYahoo Falcons Team PageYahoo Falcons ReportYahoo Falcons Depth ChartYahoo Falcons TransactionsYahoo Falcons PhotosOdds About Masthead Community Guidelines StubHub ✕Guard Zane Beadles set to retire after spending final season with Falcons Fare thee well to the former Falcons lineman. EDTShareTweetShareShareGuard Zane Beadles set to retire after spending final season with Falcons Timothy T. Ludwig-USA TODAY SportsIt seems that the Falcons will not be re-signing guard Zane Beadles. Well Stitched Julio Jones Jersey , nobody will be re-signing Beadles. On Monday, he announced he will retire after nine years in the league. The news isn’t going to affect the Falcons in any major, major way, especially after the team selected Chris Lindstrom with the No. 14 overall pick and brought in Jamon Brown and James Carpenter in free agency. For the league, it’s a farewell to one of the better guards of the early decade who just couldn’t ever quite live up to the burden placed on earning a major contract extension. Beadles was a mauler in Denver and helped those early Peyton Manning/Broncos offenses find their potency. He left for a major windfall in Jacksonville soon after that, but took on journeyman status when the cap hit didn’t meet on-field production. In Atlanta, he did a decent job filling in at tackle and guard later in the season when the team chose to tinker with its OL. Him returning wouldn’t have been a surprise or an issue, which would also have applied to him not returning. He was a good depth guy who could start and play decently when you needed him, and y’know, there’s value in a player like that. Football is only a small part of the grander scheme, so we wish Beadles all the best as he pursues a new mode in life. He was a pretty good Falcon when the team needed him last fall, so we tip our hat and send him off with good salutations for the future. 1. I hate strength of schedule arguments, partly because of the contradiction. Let me explain.In my work with advanced stats — the S&P+ ratings and so forth — I field certain insults frequently. Here are two of the most common:“Watch the games, nerd!” The insinuation: if you’d get your nose out of the spreadsheets, dork, you’d see that Team A is better than Team B.“Team A ain’t played nobody!” The insinuation: How could Team A be any good when they haven’t played a team that clears someone’s arbitrary bar of goodness? “You saw what happened in the games I watched, right?” the first one says. The second says to watch one particular game and ignore the others.2. Football’s going to have a sample size issue no matter what, so we should milk meaning out of every game. Arguing about strength of schedule the wrong way means limiting the sample even further and acting like we can’t learn from every play of every game.We can. Honest.Strength of schedule is at the heart of virtually every argument between October and January. Hell, it’s a point of debate for every college sport. The schedules are too varied and not comprehensive enough.At the pro level, there are strong and weak divisions, but schedules are infinitely more balanced. In the MLB, everybody plays everybody in their league at least a few times Baby Julio Jones Jersey , with some cross-league games. In the NBA and NHL, everybody plays everybody at least once. With 130 FBS teams and 12 games, that isn’t an option for college football. So we play who we play, and we yell about whom our rivals ain’t played.3. Strength of schedule determines the national champion, sort of.College football’s national title is more directly affected by strength of schedule than that of any other major sport. It’s baked into the Playoff selection process.It is decreed that the committee takes strength of schedule into account, but it doesn’t say how. It frowns on advanced analytics and gives no alternative guidance. So the committee goes with things like “wins over top-25 teams” and “assuring there’s no way in hell a team from a Group of 5 conference will get in.” 4. By now, though, some are figuring out how strength of schedule is taken into account.ESPN’s stats team has created both forward- and backward-looking measures to assess the difference between the “best” teams and those determined most deserving of a title shot. As it turns out, the Strength of Record backward view — or judging your team by whom you’ve beaten, not by how good you are — is effective at mirroring committee action. The committee insists it is looking for the “best” team. It is not. Kirby Hocutt, former chairman of the CFP committee, conflated “best” and “most deserving” on a number of occasions. An example:They do not. And that’s fine, I guess.5. Two major problems: a one-point win is not a 24-point win, and you don’t have to wait ‘til someone plays a good team to start learning.Take these two old articles as an example.Here I am in Oct. 2013, writing about how that year’s Florida State had long been elite, despite a weaker schedule.Here I am a year later writing the opposite, about how 2014 FSU was probably doomed despite wins over good teams.The 2013 team that hadn’t played nobody, but that was destroying its opponents, won the national title.The 2014 team that was winning, but not impressing the numbers, eked out a Playoff bid and got embarrassed. (To its credit, the CFP committee did dock FSU a bit for its lackluster performance.)These two FSU teams are examples for this simple truism:6. You can learn something from every game Best Julio Jones Jersey , if you try.That’s the point of using advanced stats, be it S&P+ or any other. You set the baseline depending on the opponent(s), and you compare actual output to that adjusted expectation.It fills in what your eyes are missing. (And with 800-plus college football games in a season, your eyes are always missing something.)Your record does matter. Even as an advanced stats loyalist, I’m not going to call for a three-loss team to get a CFP spot, even if said team was unlucky in every loss and ranks first in S&P+. Wins and losses aren’t particularly predictive in and of themselves, but they have to mean something.The best team shouldn’t get in, if it’s not high on the most-deserving list.7. So what if we tried to combine the two? What if we used a “best” measure to approximate what “most deserving” means?What if we took the Strength of Record idea and added an extra level of team quality? Let’s reintroduce R茅sum茅 S&P+, which made its debut here in 2017.Below are each FBS team’s rankings in three categories:S&P+, an overall team efficiency rating system you can read more about here. It can be used to predict wins and losses going forward.Strength of Schedule (SOS), which amounts to how well the average top-five team (according to S&P+) would fare, in terms of win percentage, against your schedule. The lower the number, the harder the schedule. Why top-five? Because we’re using the Playoff’s four-team field as a target, and usually only about five teams have solid playoff cases.R茅sum茅 S&P+, which looks at a team’s season scoring margin* and compares it to what the average top-five team’s scoring margin would’ve likely been against that schedule. If the number is positive, that team is faring better then the typical top-five team would be. Instead of advanced stats or win probability info, I’m adhering to actual margins.* While I think we care far too much about scoring margins, I still install a cap — if either a team’s scoring margin or the top-five projected scoring margin is above 50 points, we’ll simply use 50. That creates plenty of space for dominance, but it assures that, for instance Adult Julio Jones Jersey , Fresno State doesn’t get too much credit for beating Idaho by 66 points.8. With 10 weeks’ worth of 2018 data, let’s check out what R茅sum茅 S&P+ can tell us. Let’s look at Alabama, the top team in both S&P+ and the AP poll, as an example.Alabama is an easy 10-0 so far, having won its games by an average margin of 35.9 points (35.4 with a 50-point cap on each game). Have the Crimson Tide played a rigorous schedule? Not really. If the average top-five team — by which, I mean literally the average of Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, Michigan, and Oklahoma, the top five teams per S&P+ — played Alabama’s 10 opponents a countless number of times, it would have won about 89 percent of those games. That’s a strength of schedule that ranks 45th — not amazing but almost harder than that of any of the other unbeatens.SOS rankings for college football’s unbeaten teams:45. Alabama (0.887)59. Notre Dame (0.900)83. Clemson (0.920)104. UCF (0.940)Three months into the season, nobody’s played anybody, I guess. Or at least, the teams that have, have lost. The teams ranked in the top 16 in strength of schedule are a combined 81-79. Of those teams, only LSU (8-2) and Penn State (7-3) are better than 6-4.Regardless, Bama continues to have done more with its ain’t-played-nobody schedule than anyone else. Even with the 50-point cap, the Crimson Tide have still defeated their opponents by an average scoring margin that is 12.6 points per game higher than the nameless, faceless top-fiver would expect.9. Here are R茅sum茅 S&P+ and strength of schedule ratings for everyone.(This is a wide table, because it has to be; if it’s not showing well on your phone, consider taking a look on another device later.)2018 Resume S&P+ rankings through 11 weeksTeamRecS&P+RkSOSRkResume S&P+RkTeamRecS&P+RkSOSRkResume S&P+RkBecause both Alabama and Clemson have separated themselves from the pack a bit Limited Calvin Ridley Jersey , the bar for what constitutes a top-five team is pretty high, and only three teams clear it: Alabama (plus-12.6 points per game), Clemson (plus-4.2), and Michigan (plus-1.1). Georgia (minus-1.6) and Oklahoma (minus-5.3) round out the R茅sum茅 S&P+ top five.The No. 6 team is kind of interesting. West Virginia ranks a solid 12th in overall S&P+, having fully rebounded from the humbling loss to Iowa State. When the Mountaineers look good, they look great — they beat Kansas State by 29, Baylor by 42, and, this past weekend, TCU by 37. They’ve also survived tough road trips to Texas Tech and Texas.Add that up, and you’ve got an increasingly impressive r茅sum茅. (The loss to Iowa State doesn’t exactly look embarrassing either.) The dominance of TCU drove the Mountaineers to within 2.1 points per game of Oklahoma in R茅sum茅 S&P+. They’re also only one spot behind the Sooners in the AP rankings. There’s a little more separation in the College Football Playoff rankings (they were ninth last week, while OU was sixth), but maybe there shouldn’t be.The general impression seems to be that OU is in great shape for a CFP bid if it wins out. (The Sooners could be considered the first runner-up at the moment assuming Alabama beats Georgia.) But a 12-1 West Virginia could have an equally strong r茅sum茅 and should probably be getting a bit more respect from the committee than it has so far. Maybe that changes this week.9. To those who want to moan about incentivizing running up the score in this measure (since we’re using scoring margins), suck it up.Margin of victory is infinitely more informative than “did they win?” It just is. Besides, it’s odd to suddenly care about hurt feelings when I’m pretty sure telling half of FBS they don’t have a shot at the national title, no matter how well they play, is more hurtful to those feelings than winning 49-0 instead of 38-0.10. Best versus most deserving. How you’ve played versus who you’ve played.Maybe there’s a way to tie together these worlds after all.