Friend of the program Bryan Frye is back for another guest post. As regular readers know, Bryan operates his own fantastic site, http://www.thegridfe.com. You can view all of Bryan’s guest posts here, and follow him on twitter @LaverneusDingle.

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The 2015 regular season is in the books, and all the relevant stats are at our disposal to poke and prod as our hearts desire. Chase already discussed the fact that, statistically, this has been the best passing season in NFL history. League and team passing records fell on a seemingly regular basis, and a few receiving records were in serious jeopardy by season’s end. ^[1]We probably all know by now that Julio Jones and Antonio Brown became just the third and fourth receivers ever to break the 1,800 yards mark in a single season. It’s also pretty common knowledge … Continue reading

At the consummation of such a grand regular season, it is fitting to take a look back at the performance of the individual quarterbacks who helped make it possible. I’ll start with a quick look at Total Adjusted Yards per Play before introducing a modified version of that stat. If you follow me on Twitter, you’re probably plenty familiar with TAY/P. If not, here’s a brief rundown: ^[2]Note that that bonus for touchdowns is 11 instead of 20 because that lets us skip the step of subtracting touchdowns out of the first down total, since touchdowns are counted as first downs. Also … Continue reading

Total Adjusted Yards (TAY) = [Yards + Touchdowns*11 – Interceptions*45 – Fumbles*25 + First Downs*9] / Plays, where

Yards = pass yards + rush yards – sack yards – yards lost on kneels

Touchdowns = pass touchdowns + rush touchdowns

First Downs = pass first downs + rush first downs

Plays = pass attempts + sacks + rush attempts – spikes – kneels

Rather than clog your screen with yet another table, I’ll simply link you to this page, which has all the input stats. The table below is sorted by TAY over average. Read it thus: Carson Palmer had 565 action plays and produced 6,425 Total Adjusted Yards, giving him 11.37 TAY/P for the season. He was 2.88 TAY/P above the rest of the league, giving him 1,625 marginal TAY. The table below is fully searchable and sortable: it lists all 73 quarterbacks from this season, although defaults to just showing 10 players for ease of browsing. [Update: Per a request, I have modified the table by adding a column to show whether a quarterback had enough total plays to qualify. The ranks have been updated as well: a quarterback who did not have enough attempts to qualify will have the same rank as the quarterback above him, so if you type in “qual” in the search box you can then sort by whatever stat you like among only qualified quarterbacks.]

Statistically, Palmer has been the most outstanding quarterback in the league this year. His TAY/P is significantly greater than second place Andy Dalton’s; in fact, it ranks as the seventh highest TAY/P since 1992 (minimum 300 action plays). ^[3]TAY/P only goes back to 1992 because that’s the earliest season for which I have all the data necessary to produce these numbers. In fact, I still don’t have concrete spike or kneel data prior to … Continue reading Before we get carried away on the Palmer train, allow me to point out that his marginal TAY/P of 2.88 ranks only twentieth since 1992. That’s essentially tied with Steve McNair’s MVP bout but nowhere some of the historic Peyton Manning/Steve Young/Tom Brady seasons. Palmer’s 1,625 marginal TAY easily outpaces the rest of the league this year, but I’ll reiterate that it isn’t exactly a historically dominant performance. ^[4]For comparison’s sake, Peyton Manning once produced 2,548 marginal TAY in 41 fewer plays.

Of course, the way marginal TAY is calculated makes it a double edged sword (in a similar way that Chase’s RANY is). Palmer’s incredible efficiency has given him rate stats well above the rest of the league, but it has also led to him not having to pass very often and, thus, not artificially inflating his volume stats. Given the success his team has had this year, I think he’d be okay with that.

At one point in the season, Tom Brady leapfrogged Palmer for the league’s highest marginal TAY. Then the plagues against the rest of his offense stopped just short of killing their firstborn children, with injuries to his uber-talented receivers and about seventeen linemen. After that, Brady’s numbers dropped significantly, as you might expect. Still, he’s Brady, and a significant decline in stats means he only had the fourth highest TAY/P in the NFL over a large enough volume to leave him second in value over average.

Media heartthrob and MVP favorite Cam Newton often receives his biggest criticisms from “statheads,” but he actually fares pretty well here. On a per play basis, he has been about as efficient as Ben Roethlisberger, and he has done it on 151 more plays. His late season boom shot him up the list alongside more traditional passers Brady and Drew Brees.

Russell Wilson had a strong finish to his own season, including arguably the best four game stretch by a quarterback in NFL history (without adjusting for era). ^[5]I received heavy criticism from both Seattle and San Francisco fans when I pointed out that Wilson’s incredible stretch was statistically similar to Joe Montana’s performances in his four Super … Continue reading That stretch helped him finish third in both TAY/P and total value.

On the other end of the spectrum are two quarterbacks traded for one another this year. After completing one of the most efficient passing seasons in history in 2013, Nick Foles finished dead last in TAY/P and value over average. In a season where seemingly every player and every team were closer to the middle than usual, Foles didn’t stand out as historically bad; indeed, his -2.20 marginal TAY/P is only the 26^th worst since 1992 and doesn’t hold a candle to Jimmy Clausen’s -3.83 in 2010, nor does his negative value come close to approaching David Carr’s -1,525 in 2002.

Traded for Foles in an attempt to exploit inefficiencies in the injury market, Sam Bradford did not impress in the City of Brotherly Love. He was the fifth lowest rated quarterback on a per play basis, and third lowest in total value (among qualifying passers; the fact that Matt Cassel and Zach Mettenberger produced more negative value in significantly fewer plays speaks volumes about their deficiencies as quarterbacks).

Peyton Manning falls into the category of “simultaneously surprising and unsurprising.” I’m sure we all felt he would have a noticeable dropoff in production since last year, but I don’t know many people who thought it would look like this. After posting some of the most statistically dominant seasons in history, Manning turned in the fourth least valuable season of any QB. I’d love to see him redeem himself and ride into the sunset with another title, but I doubt that happens unless he gets his hands on a flux capacitor pronto.

I could go on with the discussion, but I’d like to introduce something new for the esteemed FP readership to review. I call it New Total Adjusted Yards per Play (NTAY/P), and it is aimed at rewarding quarterbacks for making the “tougher” throws. To find NTAY/P, you simply remove half of a QB’s yards from receiving YAC when calculating Total Adjusted Yards. This benefits QBs who throw the ball downfield, such as Roethlisberger who gained 62.7% of his passing yards in the air. Conversely, it works to the detriment of someone like Foles, who gained a mere 38.3% of his yards in the air.

I will admit that choosing to halve the YAC is rather arbitrary. Brian Burke has argued against giving full credit to QBs for YAC when evaluating passing stats, and the statistical analysis he applied is convincing. However, I doubt Bill Walsh would have cared so much about ball placement if it didn’t have an effect on a receiver’s ability to run after the catch. I imagine Reggie Wayne feels the same way. Rather than eliminate it altogether or count all of it, I figured I’d simply take the happy medium and divide YAC by two. ^[6]Note that Burke never actually said not to count YAC at all, but rather that receivers are primarily responsible for it. You can debate how you would treat air yards and YAC in the comments. For now, let’s look at the results. You can read the table thus: Carson Palmer turned 565 plays into 6,425 Total Adjusted Yards, but 1,774 of those came from YAC. So his New TAY is 5,538, which gives him 9.80 NTAY/P. That number is 2.80 better than the rest of the league, giving him a total value of 1,580.

By increasing the importance of air yards, this metric makes Palmer’s season stand out as a bit more remarkable. Since 1992, his NTAY/P of 9.80 ranks fifth among qualifying quarterbacks, ^[7]Behind Manning 2004, Manning 2006, Rodgers 2011, and Brady 2007. and his marginal NTAY/P ranks twelfth. ^[8]Behind Manning 2004, Manning 2006, Young 1992, Brady 2007, Manning 2005, Cunningham 1998, Rodgers 2011, McNair 2003, Young 1994, Manning 2013, and Foles 2013. This is based, in large part, on the fact that Palmer has been playing in Bruce Arians’s high variance attack and almost never seeing the pendulum swing the wrong direction (by this metric, he only had one below average game all year). ^[9]Unfortunately for his MVP aspirations, it was a memorable blowout in the final game of the season. Palmer has gained 62.0 percent of his passing yards through the air at an incredible 5.46 air yards per attempt.

If you want an “advanced” stat that makes a case for Newton to take home the MVP trophy, this is your lucky day. He ranks second in NTAY/P and total value by this metric, and the driving factor behind that is the 61.8 percent of his passing yards coming through the air. In general, mobile quarterbacks scramble rather than dump passes off to backs or other checkdown receivers, thereby decreasing YAC as a percentage of overall passing yards. Newton fit into this trope in 2015, but he happened to do it at a much more efficient level than any other such QB since Steve Young. ^[10]Steve McNair played at a very high level in 2003, but he only rushed 38 times for 138 yards that year.

Brady slips a little in the rankings when emphasis on air yards is increased, as Wilson has relied less heavily on YAC. Many writers have belabored the point that the future Hall of Famer has made his career off of easy throws. I’ll leave that for others to argue about. For now, I’ll just contend that his game has always been more about his brain than his arm and that he doesn’t need to throw a beautiful deep out when he can pick a defense apart with painful precision.

Brady’s media-contrived nemesis, Peyton Manning, owns four of the top ten seasons (since 1992) in marginal NTAY/P. This season, he ranks below everyone except Foles. As a fan of no team in particular, who just enjoys seeing incredible players play incredibly, this season has been a sad swan song to a stellar career.

A few other observations:

• The other greatest quarterback of the 2000s, Drew Brees, is still going strong. He ranked seventh in total value and was efficient, despite running more than 600 action plays for the ninth time in his career and coming off five consecutive seasons of 700+ plays. He has more action plays than anyone not named Brett Favre, Peyton Manning, or Dan Marino, and he was a high volume passer in college. How much longer can his arm last?
• Tyrod Taylor and Kirk Cousins both came out of nowhere to have remarkable seasons. Taylor thrived on deep passes and had long rushes offset his numerous sacks, while Cousins was a completion rate monster who avoided sacks well and cut down on the boneheaded interceptions that haunted the early part of his season. In the end, their two disparate styles left them with very similar cumulative results.
• Jameis Winston produced a value of 514, which is very good for a rookie quarterback. Compare that with some other memorable rookie years of recent vintage: He rates higher than Mark Sanchez (-529), ^[11]Sorry, Chase. Joe Flacco (-223), Peyton Manning (-156), Andrew Luck (51), Michael Vick (56), and Jeff Garcia (451); he rates lower than Cam Newton (568), Russell Wilson (609), Matt Ryan (688), Ben Roethlisberger (749), and Robert Griffin (886).
• Brian Hoyer rates much higher than you’d think when you actually watch him play. Much of that stems from the fact that many of his passes were jump balls to DeAndre Hopkins that gave the receiver little chance to run after the catch. Like any stat-based rating system, NTAY/P has names that make you scratch your head. Hoyer is one of them. Note that this was written before Hoyer had the fourth worst passing performance in playoff history.

I could talk about this for hours, but I’d rather leave the comments up to the loyal readers and guests of the site. What sticks out to you?