SackSEER is a proprietary statistic developed by Nate Forster of Football Outsiders. Its goal is to predict the performance of collegiate edge rushers entering the NFL. The first version of SackSEER was published in the 2010 Football Outsiders Almanac.
Contents
Methodology
According to its chapter in the 2010 Football Outsiders Almanac, the formula for SackSEER considers four factors:
Although these four factors do not intuitively seem like a complete list of important factors, they were chosen because they turn out to be the most important predictively.
Results
SackSEER is expressed as the number of sacks a player will accrue through his first five professional seasons, which is the average length of an NFL rookie contract. It has an R-squared of .42, which makes it relatively correlative with actual results, considering the capricious nature of NFL prospects. SackSEER has historically been more accurate predicting NFL busts than NFL superstars, but considering that the overall ratio of busts to eventual superstars is extremely high, that should not be totally surprising.
The highest SackSEER scores for prospects drafted from 2000-2009 belong to Aaron Schobel (40.1), Andre Carter (38.6), Mario Williams (38.1), Shawne Merriman (37.1), Bryan Thomas (36.6), Connor Barwin (36.3), DeMarcus Ware (36.0), Terrell Suggs (35.1), Courtney Brown (35.0), Jason Babin (34.5), Manny Lawson (34.3), and Julius Peppers (34.0).
The lowest SackSEER scores for prospects drafted from 2000-2009 belong to Paul Toviessi (12.6), Erasmus James (11.2), David Veikune (11.0), Erik Flowers (10.7), Ikaika Alama-Francis (10.7), Anton Palepoi (10.2), Robert Ayers (9.4), Tony Bryant (8.4), Dan Cody (8.1), Jarvis Moss (7.8), Jerome McDougle (7.0), and Michael Boireau (2.0).