Miyerkules, Mayo 3, 2023

Smile For the Camera: Breaking down the general happiness of each team and position using ESPN NFL headshots

Hello all.

I am a fan and infrequent /r/NFL commenter who, when browsing ESPN rosters and stats this week, began to think solely on one thing: official player headshots. I like when I click on a player page and they're beaming at me, as I enjoy the thought of a 6'3, 230-pound superhuman comprised of all muscle with the capability of smashing me into a pulp feeling and expressing a jovialness similar to when you and I witness them accomplish great feats on the field.

However, there are a number of solemn, straight-faced or even menacing-looking headshots out there for some of these players, which, while not necessarily a bad thing, does not spark as much joy for me. And it ultimately got me thinking: what sort of interesting info can I possibly glean from this variety? Do better teams have more smiley players because they're happy to play for a great team, or do they have the more intimidating ones, imposing fear in their opponents on the gridiron? Do certain positions have a correlation with official headshot facial expression, and where on the field regardless of team may we find the happiest folks?

So, I looked into it.

Methodology

I spent a few hours and cataloged all of the players that as of May 2, 2023 meet the following criteria:

  • Listed on a team roster on ESPN.
  • Has an official NFL headshot on their player profile (sorry brand new signees/draftees, I'm not using your college photo).

This amounted to a total of 2,113 players that meet this criteria, an average of about exactly 66 per team, with the numbers for each team ranging from 44 (Rams... sort of a statistical outlier here honestly) to 75 (Giants). I haven't figured out the median, but you can assume it's in the mid-60s.

I then went through and gave either 0, 0.5, or 1 point for each player with a headshot on each team. It's fairly straightforward: a score of 0 indicates a completely straight face/frown/stern look, a score of 0.5 indicates a slight smile/smile with no teeth shown/smirk (see Lions safety Kerby Joseph as an example), and a score of 1 indicates any smile showing teeth.

These scores were added up and categorized by both team and position, and then divided by the total number of players in that team or position (then multiplied by 100) to create an overall score, which going forward I will refer to as Smile+. For example, two full smiles, a half smile, and a straight face would be (1+1+0.5+0)/4*100 = 62.5 Smile+.

It's very simple and there's probably a lot wrong with it, but it's what I'm going with.

Declarations of Possible Bias/Error

Before going into the results I'm going to give a few disclaimers below:

  1. Determining what a 0.5 point-level smile is is fairly subjective, and I may have not even remained terribly consistent throughout my perusing. For example, see Colts guard Will Fries here. You can argue this is a straight face, you can argue it's a slight smile. To me, there is enough intent to smile here to give it the 0.5 points, so that was my determination. This process was full of these decisions that I had to make rather quickly or else bog down the process.
  2. Along a similar vein, the "showing teeth" rule I established was more of a headache than expected. See Texans punter Cameron Johnston. Is he showing teeth? Yes. Is he smiling? ..... Yes? I'm not sure, it looks like he's attempting to smile, but just very bad at it. In order to remain consistent, grey areas like this received the full 1 point.
  3. I spent the first 10-20 minutes of this perusing of rosters opening up the full profile of any player that I felt like I needed a better look at. I soon realized this was going to possibly double my time spent on this so I stopped, and proceeded to go with my gut based on the (zoomed-in) thumbnail.
  4. It wasn't until after I had already done the "team" portion of this that I decided I wanted to do positions as well. Therefore, I did the entire process twice. There are probably some inconsistent scores among grey-area players between the two different sections, but I would estimate the difference is negligible.

Based on all that, on a different day it's entirely possible the Lions and Bears wouldn't be perfectly tied (same exact number of points with the same exact number of available headshots). But that's how they ended up here. So, without further ado, let's get into the results.

Smile+ by Team

I'm going to give you the data right up front, in these handy little tables, and you can see the results for the entire NFL here.

I know I got the title of the AFC West graph wrong pls ignore

AFC NFC
East East
North North
South South
West West
Top 5 Bottom 5
BAL: 78.81 WAS: 48.65
NO: 76.12 DET: 54.69
DEN: 75.68 CHI: 54.69
SF: 74.63 LAC: 57.94
PHI: 74.29 LAR: 57.95

Average Smile+:

Division Smile+
AFC East 68.02
AFC North 68.74
AFC South 68.91
AFC West 69.72
NFC East 63.34
NFC North 60.49
NFC South 66.31
NFC West 62.95

The average Smile+ for the AFC is 68.81, the NFC is 63.27, and the NFL average is 66.04. These numbers are not normalized to the number of players on each team.

Analysis

The AFC is clearly much more smiley and consistently so than the NFC, with each of the divisions higher on the scale than every NFC division, and boasts some of the happiest teams in all of the NFL including the Ravens, Broncos, Texans, and Patriots. However, the NFC is represented similarly up top with the Saints, Eagles, and 49ers all in the top 5 and the Packers not far behind. The problem is, the NFC sports some of the worst-scoring squads, including four of the bottom five featuring the laughably-poor Commanders, which despite the friendly and beaming smile of Benning Potoa'e are not only the only team below the next-closest Bears and Lions (also in the NFC), they are the only team to score below a 50 in Smile+. There is a greater distance in Smile+ between them and the tandem-second-to-last Lions and Bears than there is between those two teams and the 9th worst Cardinals. I'm not sure what they're cooking over in D.C., but I'm not sure I want any of it (crazy enough, the Commanders score a perfect 5/5 at the guard position, which is a fun bit you'll understand more a bit further down).

It appears to the naked eye based on these results there may be a hint of a correlation with Smile+ to recent team success and positive organizational culture. Several of the teams at the top have had reasons to be happy of late, whether for on-field success or organizational progress, while some at the bottom have reason for the opposite sentiment. Just eye-balling it, I do think there may be something there, though I'm not exactly sure what.

Unfortunately, I don't have the wherewithal nor feel confident in my statistical ability to make such a connection, however loose it may be. Someone more willing to dig into this than me may be able to find some correlations between on-field success/organizational progress and Smile+, so I invite you to do so if you're so inclined. Beyond just that, it is interesting to see the variation among teams and the, in my opinion, not-insignificant difference between the two conferences.

Here is where, for me, things get more interesting in ways that some of you may expect.

Analysis By Position

Once again, I'll provide the relevant graphs up front:

Smile+ by:

Additionally, since this varies much more greatly than the teams data, I'll present the sample size of each position:

Position n
QB 85
RB 135
WR 274
TE 138
FB 18
OT 178
G 137
C 68
DT 161
DE 133
LB 291
S 154
CB 247
K 35
P 32
LS 31

From here we see a clear pattern emerge. By far and away the order of operations of happiness (according to official ESPN headshots) is:

  1. Special teams
  2. Offensive skill players
  3. Defensive skill players
  4. Linebackers
  5. Linemen

So, let's talk about this a bit.

Fullbacks Are Just Happy To Be Here

With a Smile+ of 77.78, fullbacks are the second highest scoring overall position outside of special teams, which despite the small sample size indicates to me that in an NFL where the fullback position has been phased out of relevance for some time, these guys are just happy that some teams still value their skillset enough to give them a paycheck.

The fullback position is the only one considered here which is not currently rostered on each NFL team (aside from the fact that, weirdly, the Cardinals appear to not have a center as newly-signed OG Hjalte Froholdt seems to have a chokehold on the C depth chart at the moment... good luck with that!). In fact, you can't even filter by FB on the ESPN NFL players search page. Is it a wonder that the likes of Atlanta's Keith Smith beam so brightly? We love a guy excited for gainful employment!

Give Your Local Lineman a Hug (Especially if He's a Guard)

The lineman positions are, across the board, sifting through the rubble of these rankings, whether on the offensive or defensive side of the ball. OT, DT, G, C, and DE all comprise the bottom five positions in Smile+, and while some may posit some alternative theories as to why such as wanting to be appear intimidating, or maybe their overall muscle mass needs to focus on other things throughout their bodies that are more important than something as trivial than smiling.

But my belief is that they simply need a hug. So, please, whenever you come across your local NFL lineman out and about, whether it's buying your favorite crab dip at Kroger that you're going to devour alone on a Wednesday night or you see them in the same state forest hunting for seasonal mushroom varieties, stop what you're doing and give them a loving embrace. Only then can we ever hope to get these Smile+ numbers up.

After all that, let's just take a moment to appreciate the fact that the Commanders are the only team that scored lower than the guard position, yet the team itself scored a 5/5 at the guard position. Don't believe me? Take a look for yourself.

NFL Quarterbacks Are Very Happy

I'm not going to say much more about this. Of course they are. Moving on.

The Elephant in the Room

More so than even quarterbacks, NFL special teams players are extremely happy. In fact, it's not even close. With an average special teams Smile+ of 89.80 compared to the average offense and defense numbers of 67.04 and 62.74, respectively, it's a landslide. Despite the much smaller sample size (98 for ST vs. 1,030 and 985 for offense and defense) that does not make this difference insignificant to me. These guys are happy. And why shouldn't they be? They rarely need to make a tackle, or be tackled themselves. They rarely need to sprint along the sidelines or condition themselves to make superhuman plays. Sure, they are put in high-leverage situations for which they often take the blame if it goes awry (whether deserved or not) and they may have to do some blocking here and there, particularly in the case of the long snapper, or they may need to execute a trick play to throw the defense off or in a desperate situation.

But they, more than any other player on an NFL roster, are paid for a singular, very specialized skill that is integral to the game of football that they hone absolutely better than just about anyone. And despite their more replaceable nature than most positions, they are extremely delighted to be rostered in the NFL, raking in more cash than they could have dreamed of as one of three scholarship punters at Local State University.

Of the 98 special teams players included in this analysis, there are just eight of them that didn't so much as crack a smile in their ESPN headshot, and I will name and shame them:

What is the matter with you? Just think, you could have been an offensive guard.

Conclusion

I'm not sure what else to put here other than that this took up a huge chunk of my day and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed putting it together. I do hope someone takes up the prompt to see if there's any correlation between Smile+ and team success (I think geography would be an interesting one too). I doubt I'll expand this much further as my data collection methods didn't yield themselves to any other purpose though I can perhaps fiddle more with the numbers I do have.

Thanks to anyone who actually read this far and once again hope this was fun!



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