Alex, Jack, and Zack: It was definitely the right choice to focus the project more tightly on football, as I hope you can see now. Your original ideas were just too broad and you would not have been able to do everything you originally wanted to do. But in addition, I was hoping that all of the projects would involve doing some actual analysis of data. You essentially decided just to report the results from the various online sources that you consulted. A lot of that was pretty interesting, so this is a good effort, but it could have been better if you tried to dig a bit deeper. For instance, in our "progress report" meeting, I was trying to get you to think about ways to look at individual player's statistical records and try to identify "change points" between different parts of a career. The NFL-wide averages you were using don't really let you do that because they are averages. That's also the biggest issue I have with some of the graphs you were presenting. The single-season AV graphs by age and year in the league from "Bleacher Report" are somewhat misleading, I think, because they don't give any indication of how many players are involved in each year. You do a pretty good job of identifying what happens at the extreme right end of those graphs in your paper. But I still need to be convinced that those graphs give you a reasonable way to identify different stages in careers. If you're not taking into account the players who have retired before reaching each age shown, I just don't think it really means that much to say things like "QB performance peaks in the 8th or 9th year." It's still pretty "anecdotal" rather than anything you can really back up with the numerical evidence. Specific comments: Page 2: "To begin, one can look at a data set of the variation of different ages quarterbacks begin starting at." Although I think I know what you mean from context this is a rather unclear sentence. Do you mean "... the ages at which quarterbacks attain the starting QB role on their teams"? Page 2: "Then, using Pro Football Reference’s Approximate Value system--a single numerical number that is used to describe a player's overall performance in the league--these data sets can be supported" -- "numerical number" is redundant :) Also, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "the data sets can be supported." Page 3: "This data showed how a quarterback’s AV is very inconsistent when compared to his age, and this shares that age does not actually have a significant effect on the quarterback’s performance." Again, I think I know what you mean, but the way it is stated is not really clear. By the "inconsistency" do you mean that the high and low AV values show a lot of up and down movement? I think there's an easy likely explanation for that, though: The high and low AV values are almost surely a reflection of the fact that individual players had outstandingly good and outstandingly bad seasons and those can and do happen at different ages with no real pattern. But the average AV is actually remarkably consistent as a function of age. Page 5: "In addition to discussing experience and AVs, it is important to look at the effect that physical strength has on years played in the league." In the following discussion you don't really address physical strength. So this topic sentence does not fit the rest of the paragraph very well. You seem to be thinking mainly about the way QB's probably have less physical wear and tear on their bodies due to the practice patterns and game situations they encounter. Page 11: "They are mostly just having to use their hands and upper body to make blocks." I think this probably understates the effects on linemen because they are also pretty frequently colliding heads with opposing players so they also get whiplash and concussion-type neck and head injuries. Page 11: "If we look at the graph, we can see that the number of starting offensive linemen grew exponentially from their first to fourth year in the league." It's better not to use the term "grew exponentially" here because (I don't think) you are using it in the technical sense, and that wouldn't mean very much for a time series with two or three terms. Say "grew rapidly" instead. Page 13: "From this graph we can tell that the average offensive lineman in the NFL performs their very best in their 11th season." Careful, that's *not* what is really going on here. The average AV value is highest for linemen in their 11th year. That is not the same thing as saying that the the average lineman has their best season that year. The average lineman doesn't even have a career that long. Page 14: "We can conclude that linemen typically have shorter careers than quarterbacks, but they tend to have longer careers than running backs." Yes, but from the data you presented in the talk that's not in the main body of the paper, the difference is pretty small. I think it was something like 10.5 years vs. 10.3 years. (I don't remember the actual numbers, but I'm pretty sure it was something like this.) Page 14: "Running backs need to have incredible strength and athleticism, so one can see that gruesome injuries would certainly affect them much more." Avoid using very strong adjectives like "incredible." Overuse tends to reduce their meaning. Also, it would be good to explain more about what you mean here. What is it about their athleticism that leads to more "gruesome" injuries? Do you mean things like a running back trying to evade defenders by jumping into the air, but getting undercut by a block and landing on his head? Final Project: Annotated Bibliography -- 9/10 Presentation -- 33/35 Paper -- 47/55 Total -- 89/100 (letter: B+)