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NFL

DC Gus Bradley says Chargers will feature Joey Bosa's versatility

SAN DIEGO — One of the team’s foundation players last season, new Los Angeles Chargers defensive coordinator Gus Bradley will have to find a home for second-year pro Joey Bosa.

The former Ohio State star earned Associated Press defensive rookie of the year honors last season, finishing with 10.5 sacks in 12 games. Much was made in the lead-up to last season where Bosa would play in the team’s 3-4 defensive alignment and whether or not he would be a good fit in the scheme.

But Bosa proved effective, moving all across the defensive formations and playing solidly against the run.

With Bosa returning to his more familiar position of a base defensive end in Bradley’s 4-3 scheme, the hope is the Chargers can get even more production from Bosa in his second season.

Bradley said he’s already met with Bosa at Chargers Park. Bosa was a player the Jaguars strongly considered with the team’s No. 5 overall selection before the Chargers picked him at No. 3. Bosa traveled to the team’s facility in Jacksonville for a pre-draft visit.

The Leo defensive end is generally Bradley’s pass-rush specialist. Typically, Bradley is looking for a player that’s 6-3 and 255 pounds to play that position, which more likely fits the skill set of pending unrestricted free agent Melvin Ingram.

After spending his rookie season in a 3-4 base set, Joey Bosa will be a defensive end in new Chargers defensive coordinator Gus Bradley’s 4-3. Orlando Ramirez/USA TODAY Sports

Bosa compared himself to another player Bradley is familiar with last season in Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett. Bradley coached Bennett as the defensive coordinator for the Seahawks.

Like Bennett, Bradley said Bosa is a versatile player who can be effective in a lot of places along the defensive line.

“You have some general ideas of what it should look like, but then there’s always that guy that breaks the mold,” Bradley said. “A Leo [weakside defensive end in Bradley’s scheme] is typically 6-3 or 6-2, has got good length at about 255 pounds and runs a 4.6 [40-yard time].

“Would you say a 6-foot-5, 280-pound guy would be a typical Leo? No, not on the sheet of paper, but this guy’s different — he breaks the mold. Could he [Bosa] play Leo? Yes. It’s going to look a little bit different, but what you’re looking from that position is production. He had 10.5 sacks in 12 games. The whole Leo was designed for guys to get a lot of opportunities to have good rushes. And so you need him to be productive.”

Bradley also went on to say that Bosa also would be a different style of base end than he typically has in his system, with those players typically 6-4 and around 300 pounds.

Bosa played 538 snaps for the Chargers as a rookie. He missed the first four games to a hamstring strain suffered in his first practice after sitting out the first month of training camp in a contract dispute.

According to ESPN Stats & Information, Bosa totaled 6.5 sacks from his traditional left end position, three sacks from the right end and one sack from the right outside linebacker position.

While Bosa’s base spot will be as a defensive end, Bradley plans to use Bosa at other areas on the field as well, as former Chargers defensive coordinator John Pagano did last season.

“Obviously, going through the draft, we had a pretty good feel for him and we really liked him,” Bradley said. “Sometimes it’s hard if you miss camp and you miss some time. So give credit to him and the coaching staff. They did a great job of getting him ready in a short period of time. And obviously he kept his body in great shape and was ready to go.”

Soccer

Sane apologises for ruining £29k bet

Action Images via Reuters / Lee Smith Livepic

A German man was minutes away from hitting the jackpot Tuesday until Leroy Sane’s goal to increase Manchester City’s advantage over AS Monaco cost him £29,000 (€34,000).

Before the goal, the punter was probably in disbelief as his audacious gamble began to materialise in the final minutes of Tuesday’s Champions League fixtures.

Mustafa Celik placed a bet predicting the correct scoreline in both matches, according to The Telegraph’s Callum Davis, with Atletico Madrid’s 4-2 win over Bayer Leverkusen giving him half a chance at winning the ultimate prize.

A go-ahead goal from John Stones to lift Manchester City into a 4-3 lead over AS Monaco put him on course to collect. However, disaster struck five minutes later when Sane got on the end of Sergio Aguero’s pass, sending City fans into a frenzy while ruining Celik’s day.

“You owe me €34,000,” Celik tweeted at Sane with a picture of his betting slip attached.

The Germany international offered a sympathetic message to his compatriot the following day:

Let’s just hope Celik didn’t place money on Claudio Bravo scarfing down a pie on the bench.

Related: Wayne Shaw resigns from Sutton amid pie bet investigation

NFL

Jimmy Garoppolo's edge on the rookie QBs

Patriots backup QB Jimmy Garoppolo is the subject of trade speculation thanks in large part to his very strong performance in two starts early in the 2016 season. But how much do just 63 pass attempts tell us about how good a quarterback he’s likely to be?

Garoppolo averaged 7.9 yards per attempt and posted an 88.7 QBR in 2016, both of which are excellent figures. But it’s such a small sample size that it’s unwise to assume he’ll continue at that pace. On the other hand, he did play well for two starts, so his underlying potential is more likely to be good than if he had been mediocre in the same short span. It’s not much, but there is some information to be gleaned.

To quantify just how much weight we should put on that two-game performance, we can use something called Bayes’ theorem, which allows us to systematically update our beliefs as new information arrives. In this case, we can begin with the belief that Garoppolo is drawn from the distribution of QB talent found in the NFL. Then, with every dropback he makes, we can update our belief about where his talent level lies. This approach not only tells us what our best guess of his underlying talent level should be, but also tells us how much uncertainty there should be around that best guess.

Our starting point is the fact that Garoppolo is drawn somewhere from the pool of QB talent typically found in the NFL. Great QBs like his teammate Tom Brady are rare, as are very poor QBs. Although below-average QBs can be found anywhere, they’re weeded out of the league fairly efficiently. So QBs with near league-average talent levels make up the bulk of the population on NFL rosters. Our belief starts with stating that Garoppolo’s true talent level lies somewhere on that spectrum from poor to great, so we can create a probability distribution that best matches the actual distribution of talent. Without knowing anything else about an NFL QB, this distribution captures our prior belief about how good he is.

Then he makes his first throw and we have the tiniest better idea of how good he is. Then, after another throw, we have an ever so slightly better idea of how good he is. We continue to update our belief until after enough dropbacks that we can be confident that he’s actually as good (or bad) as what we’ve seen so far. For a guy like Garoppolo with only 63 attempts over two starts, and a total of 94 attempts through his three seasons, our uncertainty remains very large.

Using just pass attempts from 2016, our updated best guess of his talent level is 7.0 yards per attempt (YPA), which is much closer to league average than his raw average to date. This result underscores the fact that 63 attempts is far too little information to have any confidence in his underlying talent level. In fact, something called a 95 percent confidence interval, which tells us a range of results we can safely bet on, spans from well below average to superstar levels. It would take 500 attempts averaging 7.9 YPA before we could confidently say a QB is above average, and it would take about 1,000 attempts, or about two full seasons, before we realistically could be confident in what kind of talent level a QB has. (Using all 94 of his career attempts yields about the same results.)

Any team considering a trade for Garoppolo should put very little weight in what we saw in 2016.

Would teams be wiser to target a rookie such as Mitch Trubisky than to trade the store for Garoppolo? Ivan Pierre Aguirre/USA TODAY Sports

Of course, for potential bidders like the Bears, Browns and 49ers, the real question isn’t so simple. It’s not a question of Garoppolo or not, but a question of Garoppolo or their next-best option, which is most likely a first-round draft pick such as Mitch Trubisky (North Carolina) or Deshaun Watson (Clemson). And first-round picks carry their own uncertainty. As a group, since 2000, first-round QBs have a career average of 6.8 YPA, with a range of uncertainty even larger than for a player like Garoppolo with 63 throws in two starts.

As little as we know about how good Garoppolo really is, we know even less about a generic first-rounder, plus our best guess at Garoppolo’s underlying talent is slightly higher. With this method, we can even estimate the probability that Garoppolo would be better than the generic first-round QB, given certain assumptions. With what we’ve seen so far, there’s a 59 percent chance Garoppolo would turn out better. If we repeat the same analysis but instead use a more advanced metric of performance — expected points added — we get very similar results: a 64 percent chance that Garoppolo is better than a generic-first rounder.

To get a more intuitive sense of this analysis, the chart below plots our best estimate of a QB who averages 7.9 YPA after a varying number of attempts. The blue line shows that after only a few attempts, our estimate should be close to league average, but as the number of attempts increases, our estimate should approach his actual average. The green line indicates the average YPA for the generic first-round QB, and the red line is the league average overall. The shaded areas depict the uncertainty we should have about where the true average lies. In this case, the mean will be within the shaded area about 67 percent of the time.

ESPN Analytics

For more from ESPN Analytics, visit the ESPN Analytics Index.

NFL

Steelers' offseason mission: Keep offensive trio intact

PITTSBURGH — The Steelers’ offseason begins in earnest once they slap that franchise tag on Le’Veon Bell. But the franchise’s plan for the next six months won’t look much different from last year: Supplement an already talented roster with wise free-agency moves and deft drafting.

Now, with the NFL combine a week away, the Steelers have the next six months to get better.

Here’s a look at some key themes this offseason:

The Steelers could put the franchise tag on Le’Veon Bell and continue to negotiate a longer-term deal. Charles LeClaire/USA TODAY Sports

Free-agency plans intensify: The team will formulate this soon, probably before arriving in Indianapolis for the combine early next week. Most teams meet with the agents of their in-house free-agent players in this setting. Throughout these talks, the Steelers will prioritize their dozen-plus free agents while simultaneously targeting players on the open market who fit their identity.

Protect this house: Some of the Steelers’ biggest moves will be made with their own players. The team has begun negotiations with Drew Rosenhaus, the agent for Antonio Brown and free-agent linebacker Lawrence Timmons. Brown and Bell will be the priority. The team is on record that they want both in black and gold for the long term. That requires spending. The bad news for the Steelers: Brown will no longer play on the league’s best bargain deal. The good news: Brown probably has three prime years left and should validate any new deal.

The Steelers seem to sense they have a unique window with two top-shelf playmakers in their prime, along with Martavis Bryant if he returns from suspension without issues. Keeping Bell and Brown surrounding Ben Roethlisberger for the next three years is an easy decision, assuming the money isn’t absurd. Both players want to be here. And the wide receiver market is clear-cut, with four players clustered in the $15 million-per-year range. The Steelers can come in just around or below that with most of the guaranteed money tied to the first few years, leaving an escape door if Brown declines in his early 30s.

Bell probably will become the league’s highest-paid back once the Vikings address Adrian Peterson’s enormous contract. The team can use the franchise tag as a placeholder, then work into the summer on a deal that works for both sides.

Early March moves: The three-day window to negotiate with unrestricted free agents begins March 6. Contracts can be finalized starting 4 p.m. ET on March 9. As a build-through-the-draft team, the Steelers often don’t spend exorbitant money in the first week. But last year’s decision to sign tight end Ladarius Green to a four-year, $20-million deal reminds the team feels it’s close to a seventh Super Bowl. If the Steelers see a piece they like, don’t be surprised by an aggressive move once again.

Is there finally clarity on the secondary? The 37-16 loss to the Patriots in the AFC title game was humbling for the Steelers’ secondary, but it’s not indicative of the pass coverage over the past year. Progress was made. Rookies Artie Burns and Sean Davis acquitted themselves well, while veterans Ross Cockrell and Mike Mitchell were consistent players. Still, this team might be one good press-man corner away. Though the team isn’t expected to spend big on Trumaine Johnson or A.J. Bouye, a good second-tier option could be available. Perhaps Morris Claiborne’s length would be attractive to Pittsburgh, though he also might command too steep a price.

Hard decisions loom on contracts: Convincing Timmons and James Harrison to take low-level money after productive seasons will be a hard sell regardless of age. But those negotiations will take place before free agency. The Steelers also must be forward-thinking with left tackle Alejandro Villanueva and defensive end Stephon Tuitt. Both are unrestricted free agents in 2018, with Villanueva an exclusive rights free agent this year. That exclusive rights tender would pay around $600,000-plus, a small number for a 31-game starter on a very good line. Considering Villanueva’s age (28), perhaps both sides could work out a reasonable extension now.

Less contract maneuvering: The Steelers have restructured several contracts over the past few years, including those of Mitchell, Maurkice Pouncey and Marcus Gilbert. But the team also showed restraint in 2016 by not redoing Timmons, who played on a $15.1 million cap hit. With more than $30 million in projected cap space, the Steelers don’t really need to rework Roethlisberger’s $100 million contract, or anyone else’s, at least not out of desperation.

On the draft trail: Coach Mike Tomlin loves the draft process — working out players, talking with coaches, getting to know prospects on a personal level. Expect Tomlin to be an active participant in the high-profile (and some low-profile) pro days. The staff and personnel department will disperse on a mission to comb for talent, as usual. The Steelers are considered one of the best teams in the NFL at this.

Bargain-bin shopping: Every year, veteran players are available on low-cost, high-impact deals in the early or later waves of free agency. Two years ago, the Steelers signed DeAngelo Williams to a two-year, $4 million deal. He gave them 17 regular-season touchdowns in return. Last season, Ricardo Mathews turned a low-end, one-year contract into 14 tackles and five starts. If the Steelers feel they have a need based on what they see in offseason workouts, they’ll summon reinforcements.

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