Clark and the HoF, Part 2

Written by Nate Dunlevy on Saturday, 16 July 2011 09:29.

I want to follow up on yesterday's post on Dallas Clark with more comparisons.

The thrust of the post yesterday, especially the reference to the Pro Bowl, is that Dallas Clark is not statistically on par with Jason Witten, Tony Gonzalez and Antonio Gates. That means he's at best the fourth most productive tight end of the era, and possibly, the fifth best.

Today, I'm going to compare the advanced metrics of DYAR, DVOA, and Catch Rate for Clark, Gates, Witten, Gonzalez and Jeremey Shockey. The wonder of this batch of tight ends is that three of them started in 2003, thus for Clark, Gates and Witten these represent career totals.

2003-2010

	Rec	Yards	Y/R	TD	DYAR	Targets	Catch Rate
Clark	393	4535	11.5	44	983	571	68.8%
Gates	529	7005	13.2	72	1958	807	65.6%
Witten	617	6967	11.3	36	1508	868	71.1%
Gonzalez	672	7732	11.5	51	1648	1026	65.5%
Shockey	436	4794	11.0	31	604	696	62.6%

Note: Shockey's rookie year was 2002. Gonzalez's was 1997.

DVOA can't be calculated cumulatively, but here are the DVOA scores for each man by year:

	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10
Clark	9.5	24.1	30.5	14.4	16.3	19.0	22.6	6.0
Gates	20.2	32.5	22.1	8.4	30.1	15.5	38.4	79.5
Witten	0.6	20.7	31.2	22.9	21.3	19.0	20.1	18.9
Gonzalez	26.7	25.6	14.8	29.2	13.6	16.5	10.6	1.6
Shockey	13.0	5.2	5.9	0.3	2.9	-5.0	23.4	8.7

Looking at these numbers as a whole, it's impossible to rank Clark any higher than 4th. He's clearly better than Shockey on a value basis. He has more DYAR, consistently higher DVOA, and a much better catch rate and yards per reception. Despite trailing in some volume stats, there's little doubt who was the better player.

Clark clearly doesn't benefit from the same number of targets as the top three tigh ends, but their advantages over him are not strictly limited to higher usage. Witten actually has a better catch rate over nearly 300 more targets. Over the 8 seasons both played, Witten had a higher DVOA in 4 of them. There's just no standard by which Clark can be said to be superior to Witten.

As for Gonzalez and Gates, there's almost no comparison. Gates has been TWICE as valuable as Clark over the past 8 years, and Gonzalez (who already had many outstanding seasons not counted here) nearly so. Gates has had the better DVOA five times, including a massive advantage in 2010. Clark did pass Gonzalez in DVOA five times, but a small quality gain is not nearly enough to offset the huge advantage Gonzalez has in usage.

Clark's modest edge in catch rate is nice, but both Gonzalez and Gates have a better yards per reception (Gates much better) which offsets it.

I love Dallas Clark.

He's not a Hall of Fame tight end.

He's at best the fourth best tight end of this era.