There are 256 regular season games each year, plus 11 postseason games, for a total of 267 NFL games per season. This means there are 534 team games each year, which means 534 different Game Scripts and 534 different pass ratios. Here’s a graph of all pass ratios (on the Y-Axis) from 2017, marked against Game Scripts (on the X-Axis).  As you can see, as a team’s Game Script improves, its pass ratio tends to decrease.

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In 2001, Michael Strahan had 22.5 sacks, the most in a single season since 1982.

In 1987, Reggie White had 21 sacks in just 12 games, the highest per-game average since 1982.

In 1986, Lawrence Taylor won the AP MVP award and had 20.5 sacks.

Those three seasons were all great sack seasons, but I’d argue that DeMarcus Ware in 2008 – when he had 20.0 sacks – was the best sack season of the bunch.

Let’s start by looking at the NFL average sack rates (defined as sacks divided by sacks plus pass attempts) in each season since 1982, when the NFL began tracking sacks for individual defensive players. I have colored in red the ’86, ’87, ’01, and ’08 seasons. [continue reading…]

Brad Oremland is a longtime commenter and a fellow football historian. Brad is also a senior NFL writer at Sports Central. There are few who have given as much thought to the history of quarterbacks and quarterback ranking systems as Brad has over the years. What follows is Brad’s latest work on quarterback statistical production.

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This is part four of a five-part series. It is a supplement to my 2015 series on the greatest quarterbacks of all time, last year’s article on the top-ranked QBs in Total Statistical Production, and last month’s post about QB-TSP in the 2017 season and another way of using TSP. I strongly encourage you to read those pieces if you haven’t done so already. You may also be interested in parts one, two, and three of this series.

In this series, I present the top 100 pro football quarterbacks as ranked by QB-TSP. This is a purely statistical ranking, with all the drawbacks that entails, and in many places it is not reflective of my subjective evaluations. Each week, we’ll examine 20 players, continuing this week with ranks 21-40. [continue reading…]

Yesterday, I looked at the 34 quarterbacks to throw 1,000 passes from 2011 to 2017. In that group, there were four quarterbacks who stood out with low interception rates and high sack rates. All four are black, which is pretty unlikely to happen by random chance given that there were just six black quarterbacks in the study.

But that was a small sample. Today, we expand the group to look at all quarterbacks with at least 1,000 career pass attempts who were active in 2002 or later. For each quarterback, I looked at their INT% and sack% in each season, and measured those rates relative to league average. I have plotted the career grades on the graph below.

On the X-Axis is interception rate relative to league average; it spans from -1.5% (which means 1.5% worse than league average: i.e., really bad) to +1.5% (really good). Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers are the two at just over +1.0%, while Tommy Maddox is at the far left at -1.26% (he has the worst era-adjusted interception rate since the merger). On the Y-Axis is sack rate relative to league average: at the very bottom, of course, is David Carr, at -4.7%; at the very top are Peyton Manning (+3.3%) and … old Bears QB Jim Miller (+3.0%). ^[1]Miller played from ’95 to ’02, so he just makes it into the study. To be clear, if a player was active in ’02, his entire career was included, which is just another reason why we … Continue reading

So for purposes of this chart, you want to be up and to the right, which indicates better than average sack rates and better than average interception rates. There are 22 black quarterbacks who threw 1,000 passes. I have plotted them in red, while all other data points are in blue. Take a look: [continue reading…]

In December 2010, Jason Lisk wrote an interesting piece about whether race still matters when it comes to quarterback play in the NFL. That article has stuck with me over the years — I referenced it last year in a piece questioning whether Colin Kaepernick’s political stance impacted his style of play in 2016 — and the key excerpt is below:

Still, one of the things I have observed is that black quarterbacks, as a group, have tended to be better at avoiding interceptions than their white counterparts. …

Interceptions are highly random, subject to game situation, dependent on deflections, tips, the receiver running the correct route, the defender making a good play and not dropping the ball. They can also be somewhat controlled by the quarterback’s behavior. If you try to fit the ball into tight windows, your chances for both a good play and a bad one increase. There is also no other quarterback action that gets criticized as “stupid” or “dumb” like an interception thrown. I can see how black quarterbacks feel they need to be more cautious when it comes to interceptions, to avoid that criticism. I suspect that the difference in interception numbers is a real effect driven by this external pressure.

So, I think that race matters, because the numbers – as well as direct statements from McNabb and Doug Williams as quoted in Hill’s piece – tell me it matters in affecting how the black quarterbacks play the game as far as avoiding interceptions.

[continue reading…]

How do you identify who is a rushing quarterback? On the surface, rushing yards per game seems like a pretty simple and easy way to do it.  Michael Vick is the career leader in rushing yards per game by a quarterback, at 42.7. ^[1]Although Spec Sanders would be number one if you were inclined to label him a quarterback. Robert Griffin (39.8), Cam Newton (39.6), Russell Wilson (34.1), and Colin Kaepernick (33.3) are the next five quarterbacks on the career rushing yards/game list after Vick. ^[2]Bob Hoernschemeyer, Tuffy Leemans, and Charley Trippi also all averaged more than 25 passing yards per game and at least 35 rushing yards per game.

That seems to work pretty well, I suppose. But what about Bobby Douglass? He averaged 40.5 rushing yards per game with the Bears in 61 games but only 45 starts; he played in 30 more games the rest of his career that torpedoed his career average to 29.2. Or Greg Landry, who averaged 24.5 rushing yards per game with the Lions, but whose career averaged is only 18.5 because of time spent as a backup.

And here’s the really tricky part. Today’s quarterbacks pass more than ever. If a quarterback runs 6 times and passes 34 times in 2018, does that make him less run-happy than a quarterback who ran 6 times and passed 24 times in 1981? I think it might: the 1981 QB ran on 20% of plays, while the 2018 QB will run on 15% of his plays. But it is not necessarily intuitive (or correct) to identify rushing quarterbacks by how much they rush for relative to their passing.

So that’s what I did today: I calculated both the rushing yards per game and the rushing yards per pass attempt career averages for all quarterbacks with at least 1,000 pass attempts.  Here’s how to read the table below (which shows the top 100 rushing quarterbacks by this metric), using Bobby Douglass as an example. Douglass rushed 410 times in his career for 2,654 yards, a 6.47 YPC average. He played in 91 games, meaning he averaged 29.2 yards per game. He threw only 1,178 passes, however; as a result, Douglass averaged an incredible 2.25 rushing yards for every pass attempt in his career. That’s the best in NFL history, and Vick is the only one who is even close. [continue reading…]

You probably don’t think too much about Vince Young these days. The former Texas Longhorn star and Tennessee Titans disappointment last played in an NFL game back in 2011. But when I ran some queries recently, Young shocked me in a couple of stats. Let’s start with one you probably didn’t expect.

Young had a really good sack rate, particularly in 2009. But what makes Young’s sack rate really impressive is his sack rate relative to his rushing ability. In 2009, Young rushed 55 times and was sacked just 9 times. Among players with at least 200 pass attempts in a season, Young 2009 is the only instance where a player had at least 6 times as many rushing attempts as sacks; even if you drop the ratio to 5 times, only two other seasons are included.

And because Young had an insanely low average sack yards that year — he averaged just four yards lost per sack — he set another “record” that year. Young rushed 55 times and lost 36 yards on sacks; no other player has ever had more rushing attempts than sack yards lost, much less than 1.5:1 ratio that Young had that would hold up until you drop the pass attempt minimum below 120.

For his career, the numbers are similar, though obviously less extreme. Young had 282 career rushing attempts and just 83 sacks; that ratio of 3.40 rush attempts per sack is the highest among all players since 1970 (among the top 200 leaders in pass attempts). If you look at rushing yards compared to sacks, Young was at 17.58-to-1, second only to Michael Vick, who was helped by a remarkable 7.0 yards per carry average that nobody can match.

The table below shows this data for the 200 quarterbacks with the most attempts since 1970. When it comes to being a rushing quarterback and avoiding sacks, nobody can beat Vince Young: [continue reading…]

Today we are going to look at the Game Scripts from the 11 games in the 2017 playoffs. There were two big blowouts in the postseason: the Eagles over the Vikings in the NFCCG and the Patriots over the Titans in the division round. Both teams won by over 20 points and had Game Scripts of over +10. But there were two other games that were very close but with blowout Game Scripts: in other words, two games that almost saw miraculous comebacks.

The Jaguars beat the Steelers with a Game Script of +10.6. Jacksonville led 21-0 early in the 2nd quarter and 28-7 late in the first half. But Pittsburgh scored 5 touchdowns on the team’s final 7 drives of the game, ultimately falling 45-42.

The Vikings led the Saints 17-0 just 20 minutes into the division round game, and that score held with just 17 minutes left in the game. From there, New Orleans staged a furious comeback, scoring 24 points in 16-minute stretch to take a 24-23 lead. This was one of the most miraculous comebacks in playoff history, but it was upstaged by an even more miraculous comeback by the Vikings just seconds later.

The full Game Scripts data from the playoffs, below: [continue reading…]

The end of 2017 was a pretty busy time for me, so I stopped the game scripts data after week 15. Under the philosophy of late than never… [continue reading…]

Brad Oremland is a longtime commenter and a fellow football historian. Brad is also a senior NFL writer at Sports Central. There are few who have given as much thought to the history of quarterbacks and quarterback ranking systems as Brad has over the years. What follows is Brad’s latest work on quarterback statistical production.

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This is part three of a seven-part series. It is a supplement to my 2015 series on the greatest quarterbacks of all time, last year’s article on the top-ranked QBs in Total Statistical Production, and last month’s post about QB-TSP in the 2017 season and another way of using TSP. I strongly encourage you to read those pieces if you haven’t done so already. You may also be interested in parts one and two of this series.

In this series, I present the top 100 pro football quarterbacks as ranked by QB-TSP. This is a purely statistical ranking, with all the drawbacks that entails, and in many places it is not reflective of my subjective evaluations. Each week, we’ll examine 20 players, continuing this week with ranks 41-60. [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back for another guest post. You can view all of Adam’s posts here. As always, we thank him for contributing.

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Earlier this month, I introduced a new stat called Surplus Yards and applied it to the 2017 season. If you haven’t read that post, consider that required background reading.

Since then, I calculated and archived every 40+ yard completion since 1994. The chart below shows the league average Surplus % for each of the last 24 seasons:

[continue reading…]

Nobody questions how valuable Rob Gronkowski has been to the Patriots and to Tom Brady. The future Hall of Fame tight end is a dominant force when healthy, and Brady’s numbers with and without Gronk reflect that. With the PFR game play finder, we can easily look at Brady’s career numbers in the regular season on passes to Gronkowski and to everyone else.

[Note: I still am not a fan of using per-target statistics to judge wide receivers, but I find them an interesting — but certainly not definitive — part of the puzzle when looking at quarterback production. Also note: all statistics in this post are from the PFR game play finder, so they may differ slightly from official numbers.]

Here are a few stats to consider:

• Gronk has seen 8.2% of Brady’s career targets, but is responsible for 10.7% of his career passing yards (+2.6%).
• On passes to Gronk, Brady has averaged 9.95 yards per attempt; on passes to all other Patriots, Brady has averaged 7.36 yards per attempt, a whopping 2.59 yards/attempt lower.
• Thought of another way, Gronkowski has elevated Brady’s yards per attempt by 0.21, as Brady has a career yards / attempt average of 7.57.

So yes, Gronk has been great.  ^[1]And note that using yards is not even the best way to show how valuable Gronk has been.  He’s responsible for 15.3% (!) of Brady’s career touchdowns.; But so has Jordy Nelson, who has been a critical part of the success that Aaron Rodgers has had in Green Bay.  Let’s look at those same numbers:

• Nelson has seen 14.6% of Rodgers’ career passes, but he is responsible for 18.0% (+3.3%) of his career passing yards.
• On passes to Nelson, Rodgers has averaged 9.81 yards per attempt; on passes to all other Packers, Rodgers has averaged 7.67 yards per attempt, 2.14 yards/attempt lower.
• Nelson has elevated Rodgers’ career yards per attempt average by 0.31, as Rodgers has a career Y/A average of 7.98.

Gronkowski being +2.59 Y/A better than all other Patriots is a remarkable figure, and Nelson being at “just” +2.14 doesn’t quite compare.  But due to volume, Nelson has actually raised his quarterback’s career average by a much larger degree.

I used the PFR game play finder to look at the passing breakdown of Brady, Rodgers, and also Drew Brees and Peyton Manning. Some nuggets:

• Marvin Harrison was responsible for 16.6% of Manning’s targets, the highest in the bunch. Brady is the only quarterback of the bunch who didn’t throw even 9% of his targets to one player; Rodgers, meanwhile, has seen four different receivers (Nelson, Randall Cobb, Greg Jennings, and James Jones) on the receiving end of at least 9% of his passes. This is in part because Rodgers has had a shorter career, and also the general lack of roster turnover in Green Bay.
• More than any other quarterback, Brees has made a living off of secondary weapons. Kenny Stills (11.82 yards/target, 133 targets), Robert Meachem (10.74, 251), and Devery Henderson (10.27, 384) were the only three players to average over 10 yards per target on at least 100 targets.
• Brees throws a ton to running backs, and they also kill his average. Among players for these four quarterbacks who were responsible for at least 2.5% of their quarterback’s targets, Brees has the three players with the lowest average gains: LaDainian Tomlinson, Reggie Bush, and Mark Ingram.
• Nothing stands out immediately to me about Manning: as you would suspect, Reggie Wayne, Harrison, and Demaryius Thomas are the three who have helped him the most, but not to a particularly noteworthy degree. Harrison had the most targets, Wayne bumped his average up the most (+0.16), and Thomas had the best average gain (9.32).

[continue reading…]

Antonio Brown is one of the best players in the NFL, and is on his way to becoming a Hall of Fame wide receiver. Over his last 88 games, regular and post-season combined, he’s averaging over 100 yards per game. He’s been an AP first-team All-Pro selection for four straight seasons, and has led the NFL in receiving yards since he entered the league in 2010.

He also was the 195th pick in the draft, meaning he’ll likely become the 3rd player in the 195-199th draft slot range to make it to Canton. And just like Tom Brady and Terrell Davis, Brown’s success was unexpected and unique.

Don Hutson may have been the greatest receiver in league history and wasn’t drafted, but there’s a reason for that: Hutson entered the league in ’35, and — not coincidentally — the NFL didn’t institute the draft until the following season. There are only five other undrafted wide receivers to ever average at least 80 receiving yards per game over a three-year period, with a minimum of 30 games played. Charley Hennigan and Lionel Taylor did it in the early days of the AFL. George Sauer pulled off the same trick with the Jets, operating as the perfect possession receiver for Joe Namath (to the extent such a thing existed) and opposite the great Don Maynard. Later, Rod Smith did it with the Broncos, and of course Wes Welker got there with the Patriots.

Only one player drafted later than Brown has averaged 80 receiving yards per game over a three year stretch: Raymond Berry, the dominant possession receiver of his era, who teamed with Johnny Unitas.

Brown plays with Ben Roethlisberger, of course, and that obviously helps. But what makes Brown’s success noteworthy isn’t that he was a low draft pick and has averaged 80+ receiving yards per game, but that he was a low draft pick and averaged over 100+ receiving yards per game! [continue reading…]

Five years ago, I posted one of my favorite graphs, which shows how passing has changed in the NFL since 1950. A picture is worth at least 1,000 words in this case. I have updated the graph for the last few years of data and also to include first downs.

With one chart, you can see what has happened, on average, on each pass play (sacks plus pass attempts) for each season in pro football history. The graph below shows the number of interceptions per dropback (red), sacks per dropback (purple), non-INT incomplete passes per dropback (in yellow), non-first down completions per dropback (green), and then first downs on completed passes per dropback (blue). Of course, a dropback is simply a pass attempt or a sack. The information is stacked on top of each other for ease of viewing.

Pretty fun!

On June 15, 2012, Football Perspective was born. Since that day, Football Perspective has published at least one new article every single day. This is the site’s 2,363rd post: You can view every article ever written at FP here, and at the top of each page on this site is a link to the Historical Archive, which is also updated after each post is published.

At some point, The Streak will end, and that’s okay. You guys have already made this site way more successful than it ever should have been. It is never lost on me how lucky I am to have a community where people are willing to take time out of their busy lives to check Football Perspective. And in an era where civility is moving in inverse relationship to interception rate, it’s inspiring the way you conduct yourselves. The comments sections on the internet are known for being awful and trending downward, but you go out of your way to be civil to others and to provide thoughtful, intelligent, helpful, and meaningful responses. There really is a Football Perspective community, and it’s a very cool thing. Getting to know you, getting help from you, and just learning and enjoying football with you is an awesome experience.

It’s also important to pay it forward, and a few years ago, I chronicled my history as a football writer. I hope that article is inspiring to young and old writers across the football universe, or at least not too demoralizing. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 16 years as a pro football writer, it’s that you are the sum of your connections. And nobody is more fortunate than me in that regard.

I have been influenced by some of the best people — and minds — in our football world: David Dodds and Joe Bryant at Footballguys.com, Sean Forman, Neil Paine, and Mike Kania at Sports-Reference.com, and the incomparable Doug Drinen at both sites. Without each of those six people actively and continuously supporting me, my life would be materially worse, and oh yeah this website wouldn’t exist.

Writers like Bob Henry, Sigmund Bloom, Matt Waldman, Maurile Tremblay, Jason Wood, and many others at Football Guys have been great friends and sounding boards over the years. Jason Lisk, Chris Brown, Scott Kacsmar, Sharon Katz, Mike Clay, and Stephanie Stradley have been really smart, thought-provoking individuals who have helped shape my thoughts, both inside and outside of football.

Brian Burke, Aaron Schatz, and Bill Barnwell all could have been competitors, but have instead gone out of their way to promote me and my little site. Bill in particular has been kind enough to use his large platform to frequently drive traffic to this site and has become a good friend in the process. I met him after starting this site. How neat is that?

I’ve been lucky to get to know a number of people who work in the NFL, and they are much kinder, smarter, and interesting than you would think. It’s fascinating to get a glimpse into what’s going on behind the curtain, and I thank all of them for that.

Without my guest writers, the Streak would have died long ago. A sincere thank you to Bryan Frye, who has always been willing to help and is a brilliant football mind. It’s incredible having people like Bryan, Brad Oremland, and Adam Harstad — three guys who know as much about football as anybody — constantly contributing to this site. There have been many great guest posts at Football Perspective over the years (yes, that link will let you see all of them), and I thank all of them for their hard work.

I’ve also been happy to see some of my former guest writers move on to bigger and better things, from working at larger sites to having success in other football industries to working in the league. What’s cooler than that?

Your contributions to Football Perspective is what makes this a website and not a diary. A special thanks to all of you. Every day, I consider myself lucky to be able to participate in a community where people willingly take time out of their busy lives to check this little site. But today, I consider myself just that much luckier.

In the ’60s and ’70s, interceptions didn’t have nearly the negative stigma attached to them that they do now. Part of this was because interceptions were just an accepted part of the high variance strategy known as throwing the ball. Today, with offenses being more efficient, the opportunity cost of throwing an interception is greater. And, while I don’t have data to prove this claim, I am confident that interceptions on average happen closer to the line of scrimmage now than they used to, meaning the defense will be getting the ball in better field position. So it seems as though interceptions should be more highly correlated with losing than they used to be.

On the other hand, interceptions are pretty rare events now. Last year, a team threw zero interceptions in 46.3% of team games (counting each game as two individual games; one for the home team and one for the road team). That set a new record, breaking the old record of 45.7% set in… 2016. That broke the record of 44.0%, set back in… 2015. Okay, you get the point: teams are throwing fewer interceptions.

On the other hand, teams throwing zero interceptions won only 64% of games last season, which is the second-lowest mark (it was at 63% in 1994). By way of comparison, in 1981, teams threw zero interceptions in just 25.5% of games, but won 80% of those games. Of course, this is misleading in that it is not an apples-to-apples comparison. In 2017, when teams threw zero interceptions, their opponents averaged 0.92 interceptions per game, also the lowest mark ever. In 1981, teams that threw zero interceptions saw their opponents average 1.65 interceptions per game, so a zero interception game “should have” been more valuable back then because it meant you were winning the INT battle by +1.65 rather than just +0.92.

So perhaps we should look at net interceptions. Last year happened to be a pretty odd one. Teams that won the interception battle by exactly one interception won 65% of their games, which is pretty low. But over the ten prior years, teams that won the INT battle by 1 had a 72% winning percentage, up over the general historical average.

[continue reading…]

Brad Oremland is a longtime commenter and a fellow football historian. Brad is also a senior NFL writer at Sports Central. There are few who have given as much thought to the history of quarterbacks and quarterback ranking systems as Brad has over the years. What follows is Brad’s latest work on quarterback statistical production.

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Top 100 QBs: 61-80

This is part two of a seven-part series. It is a supplement to my series on the greatest quarterbacks of all time, last year’s article on the top-ranked QBs in Total Statistical Production, and last month’s post about QB-TSP in the 2017 season and another way of using TSP. I strongly encourage you to read those pieces if you haven’t done so already. You might also be interested in part one of this series, published last week.

In this series, I’ll present the top 100 pro football quarterbacks as ranked by QB-TSP. This is a purely statistical ranking, with all the drawbacks that entails, and in many places it is not reflective of my subjective evaluations. Each week, we’ll examine 20 players, continuing this week with ranks 61-80. As a quick refresher/update, here are rough explanations of single-season TSP: [continue reading…]

What a spicy hot take of a headline, I know.  Continuing on yesterday’s theme, let’s talk more about at Joe Flacco’s career with the Ravens. He has a career Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt average of 5.64, which is not very good. In fact, it’s pretty bad: the average ANY/A over the last 10 years was 5.94, when you weight the average in each season by the percentage of Flacco’s career attempts that came in that season.  Flacco, therefore, has a career Relative ANY/A of -0.29 (difference due to rounding), which you can see below:

Here’s the other interesting thing about this: Flacco has 5,608 pass attempts/sacks with the Ravens, the 12th-most dropbacks of any quarterback with one team since 1970. And as you can probably guess, Flacco is the only one with a negative RANY/A. You have to go to Drew Bledsoe with the Patriots (4780 dropbacks, -0.02 RANY/A) to find the next quarterback with a negative RANY/A with one team and a lot of playing time. And after Bledsoe — who barely qualifies — you have to go down to Randall Cunningham with the Eagles, who had 3784 dropbacks and a -0.37 RANY/A. [continue reading…]

My favorite measure of quarterback play is Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt. For new readers, ANY/A is simply yards per attempt, but it includes sacks (both in the denominator and with those yards lost deducted from the numerator) and adjustments for touchdowns (20-yard bonus) and interceptions (45-yard penalty).

Midway through the 2016 season, I looked at Joe Flacco’s ANY/A average in every game of his career.  I want to update that post today.  The graph below shows Flacco’s trailing ten game ANY/A over each ten-game block of his career (excluding the postseason).  His best stretch was from games 4 through 13 of the 2013 season, where his average ANY/A over those ten games (taking an average of the averages) was 7.92.   His worst T10G ANY/A was 3.74, covering the final three games of 2016 and the first seven games of 2017.

Perhaps most importantly, I included a black line representing the league average for each of these trailing ten games.  The black line represents the NFL average ANY/A for that season, but it combines averages when crossing seasons (so the T10G ANY/A at week 5 of 2017 is 50% of the NFL 2017 ANY/A average and 50% of the NFL 2016 ANY/A average).

Okay, that’s a lot of fine print.  In short: the purple line is how good Flacco’s been over a stretch of ten games; the black line is average.  He’s below-average a lot lately: [continue reading…]

We don’t spend a lot of time looking at the bottom of leaderboard. When it comes to efficiency stats, you need to have a minimum threshold of quantity to qualify for such title. When it comes to passer rating, that minimum is 14 attempts per team game. Last year, DeShone Kizer had the worst passer rating in the NFL. In the last 11 years, the Jets have had three different quarterbacks with the worst passer rating in the NFL (Ryan Fitzpatrick, Geno Smith, and Kellen Clemens), while the entire NFC has just one (Jimmy Clausen).

The table below shows the quarterback with the worst passer rating in every year since the merger (along with their era-adjusted passer ratings), an update of this post from three years ago.

What you might notice in addition to a few Super Bowl winning quarterbacks on the list, is that Vinny Testaverde is the only one on there twice. [Editor’s note: Jeff Kemp actually finished with the worst passer rating of any QB in 1991.] Testaverde has 38 points of bad Gray Ink — i.e., if you assign 10 points to a last-place finish, 9 points to a second-to-last place finish, 8 points to a third-from-the-bottom spot, and so on. He ranked last in ’88 (10 points), second-to-last in ’91 (9 points), 5th-from-the-bottom in ’89 (+6), 7th from last in ’00 (+4), 8th from the bottom in ’04 and ’94 (+6), 9th from the bottom in ’92 (+2), and 10th from last in ’01 (+1), for a total of 39 points.

That’s the most of any quarterback since 1970, narrowly edging out well, a few other names that I doubt will surprise you.

What stands out to you?

On Thursday, I posted a methodology to determine which wide receivers played on the most pass-happy teams, and yesterday, I posted another method of examining the same concept. Today, we will use the same approach to measure which receivers played in the most efficient passing offenses.

Efficiency is defined using Relative ANY/A, which is Team ANY/A minus League Average ANY/A. Let’s use Jerry Rice as an example. You will not be surprised to see that he generally played on very efficient passing offenses.  In 1995, Rice had 1,848 receiving yards, which was 8.1% of his career receiving yardage.  The 1995 49ers had a Relative ANY/A of +1.19 which means 8.1% of Rice’s career RANY/A grade is going to have a weight of +1.19.  Do this calculation for every season of his career, and you see that Rice had a career RANY/A of +1.57.

The table below shows the career RANY/A grades for all receivers with at least 5,000 receiving yards:

None of the Hall of Fame receivers have negative RANY/A grades, although Larry Fitzgerald and Calvin Johnson will probably change that.

Here’s a look at the 23 receivers with 8,000 career receiving yards and played on below-average passing teams:

You will not be surprised to see Joey Galloway on there at -0.45, at least not if you have been paying attention.

Yesterday, I posted a methodology to determine which wide receivers played on the most pass-happy teams. For example, Calvin Johnson played on teams that averaged 39.5 pass attempts per game, when you place more weight on Johnson’s best seasons.  But as Bryan pointed out in the comments yesterday, another good way to look at the numbers is to see how pass-happy each team was relative to league average, something I did three years ago.  By way of comparison, Megatron’s teams passed 115.2% of league average during his career, again weighted for his best seasons.

This method will make most receivers appear to have played on more pass-happy teams, since most receivers have their best years on teams that pass the most (and this method gives more weight to best seasons).  But that should effect all receivers, so I’m not too worried about that.  Here is the same table as yesterday, but with percentage of league average as the key variable rather than pass attempts per game: [continue reading…]

Which receivers played on the most pass-happy teams? It’s a bit tricky to measure that: if a receiver played on run-heavy teams most of his career, but plays a couple of final seasons for teams that throw for 600+ attempts while he is a reserve, that would skew his average. So we need to adjust for a player’s best seasons when measuring how pass-happy his teams were.

Let’s use Calvin Johnson as an example. He played for the Lions in each season of his career, and Detroit has been very pass-happy throughout his career.  In 2015, he had 1,214 receiving yards, which was 10.4% of his career receiving yards.  That year, the Lions threw 632 times, or 39.5 times per game.  So for Johnson’s career pass-happy grade, 10.4% of it will be based off of an average of 39.5 attempts per game.  In 2012, Johnson had 16.9% of his career receiving total, so 16.9% of his pass-happy grade will be based off of the 740 attempts the Lions had that year.  Perform that analysis for every season, and Johnson has an adjusted average of teams throwing 39.5 times per game, as per the table below.

I did this calculation for every receiver in NFL history with at least 5,000 pass attempts. The table below is fully sortable and searchable, but it is initially sorted by career receiving yards. [continue reading…]

Brad Oremland is a longtime commenter and a fellow football historian. Brad is also a senior NFL writer at Sports Central. There are few who have given as much thought to the history of quarterbacks and quarterback ranking systems as Brad has over the years. What follows is Brad’s latest work on quarterback statistical production.

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This is part one of a seven-part series. It is a supplement to my 2015 series on the greatest quarterbacks of all time, last year’s article on the top-ranked QBs in Total Statistical Production, and last week’s post about QB-TSP in the 2017 season and another way of using TSP. I strongly encourage you to read those pieces if you haven’t done so previously.

In this series, I’ll present the top 100 pro football quarterbacks as ranked by QB-TSP. This is a purely statistical ranking, with all the drawbacks that entails, and in many places it is not reflective of my subjective evaluations. For each of the next five Wednesdays, we’ll examine 20 players, starting this week with ranks 81-100. For each player, you’ll find data presented in this form:

[rank]. Player Name — Adjusted TSP — Career Value — Top 10s – Top 10 Points – Year-Points

These statistical categories are explained in the links above; again, if you haven’t read them recently, I’d encourage you to do so. TSP and Career Value are calculated the same way as I indicated last year, except that I have indeed switched to a ^1.85 modifier, which reduces the impact of exceptional seasons and blunts the ranking of one-year wonders. As a quick refresher/update, here are rough explanations of single-season TSP: [continue reading…]

Two years ago, I looked at running back heat maps for the 2015 season; that was a fun article, so let’s update those numbers for 2017. This builds off of yesterday’s post about yards per carry.

Last season, Steelers running back Le’Veon Bell led the NFL in rushing attempts.  How did Bell fare? Well, he had a slightly below-average 4.02 yards per carry average, but that was due to a lack of big plays.  You may be as shocked as I was to learn that Bell didn’t have a single rush go for even 30 yards; his long of the year was a 27-yard rush against the Chiefs.  It’s hard to stand out in yards per carry without big runs, and Bell is a good example of how you can still be an effective runner without big gains.

Bell rushed for positive yards on 85% of his carries; that’s very good, because the average among all running backs with at least 100 carries was 80%.  In fact, Bell was 5% or 6% above average at gaining at least 1, 2, or 3 yards on all of his carries last year, and he was above average at gaining at lest 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 yards.  And Bell gained at least 15+ yards on 4% of his carries, matching the league average. But Bell gained at least 20 yards on only 1% of his carries (and, of course, at least 30+ yards on 0% of his carries), compared to the league average of 2%.  That’s the only reason Bell comes in with a below-average YPC number from 2017.

In the picture below, I’ve listed all running backs with at least 100 carries. I have then shown how they fared at rushing for at least 1 yard, at least 2 yards, at least 3 yards,… at least 10 yards, at least 15+ yards, and at least 20+ yards. A blue shading is good: that means a player gained yards at a higher clip than average. A red shading is bad, even though this is a heat map, since I think it makes more sense to associate red with bad (if you don’t like the way my brain works, you can let me know in the comments). [continue reading…]

Three years ago, I wrote this post titled “Take Away His X Best Carries and He’s Average.”  I did the same thing last year, too. The idea was simple: Suppose you sort each running back’s carries in descending order by yards gained. How many carries would we need to take away from him to drop his production to at or below average?

There were 47 running backs last season who had at least 100 carries in 2017, those players averaged 4.08 yards per carry last season.  The best running back by yards per carry last season, by far, was Alvin Kamara, with a remarkable 6.07 average gain.  Kamara had just 120 carries last year, but he was remarkable at producing big runs. He had 13 carries of 15+ yards last season, an unfathomable (and unsustainable) rate of one 15+ yard run every 9.2 carries.  Kamara’s lofty YPC number wasn’t the result of one big run, which is often the case for a player with a high YPC average on a low number of runs: sure, Kamara had a 74-yard run, but no other run went for more than 25 yards.

In fact, if you removed Kamara’s 12 best runs, he would have still averaged 4.083 YPC, a hair above the 4.078 average among all running backs with 100+ carries.  So in order to bring Kamara’s YPC below-league average, you need to remove his 13 best runs of the season.

The next best player by this metric was Patriots RB Dion Lewis.  You might be surprised that Lewis — who had a 4.98 YPC on 180 carries — would be higher than Chiefs RB Kareem Hunt, who averaged 4.88 YPC on 272 carries.  All else being equal, this metric rewards players with higher averages on a larger number of carries. But that’s what made Lewis’s season so impressive: he averaged 4.98 YPC despite his longest run being just 44 yards, and his second-longest topping out at 31 yards.  Hunt had runs of 69, 58, and 53 yards.  Take away Lewis’s best 5 runs, and his YPC drops to 4.26; take away Hunt’s best five, and he drops below average to 4.04.

The table below shows for each RB how many of their best carries you need to take away to bring their 2017 YPC average below 4.08. [continue reading…]

Yesterday, I noted that the rate of passing touchdowns has been relatively stable throughout NFL history. But that doesn’t mean the type of passing touchdown hasn’t changed.

In the post-World War II era, the average length of touchdown pass was occasionally over 30 yards! Today, the average length of each touchdown pass is below 20 yards, and it’s been
for every season since 2006. Most of the change came in the ’60s and early ’70s, as opposed to the many changes in passing statistics that are the result of the west coast offense.

The graph below shows the average length of touchdown passes in each professional football season (combining the AFL, AAFC, and NFL) since 1940. [continue reading…]

You might be surprised to learn that despite the passing game becoming more productive than ever, the number of passing touchdowns hasn’t gone up very much. In the early 1950s, teams averaged between 1.3 and 1.5 touchdowns per game; that number has gone up and down a bit over the last 70 years, but last season, teams averaged 1.45 passing touchdowns per game, lower than in 1952.

Rushing touchdowns per game, on the other hand, have seen a more steady decline. The graph below shows the number of passing, rushing, defensive, and special teams touchdowns per team game across each NFL season since 1950. Defensive touchdowns have been pretty consistently around 0.15 per team game, while special teams touchdowns were at 0.05 TD/G. That last number, however, has been in a rapid decline: the last two years were at just 0.03 TD/G.

Here’s another way to look at the same data: the percentage of all passing/rushing/defensive/special teams touchdowns per season.

But if you want to know where the biggest change in NFL scoring has been, you have to look at field goals.

What do you think?

Adam Steele is back for another guest post. You can view all of Adam’s posts here. As always, we thank him for contributing.

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Surplus Yards 2017

In response to the Jared Goff post from earlier this month, I wanted to delve into the yardage a QB picks up on long plays. I theorized that Goff’s historical ANY/A leap in 2017 was in part fueled by an unsustainable number of long completions. To measure this, I created a stat called Surplus Passing Yards. Its calculation is quite simple – on any given completion, yardage in excess of 40 is deemed to be surplus. So a 67 yard pass play yields 27 surplus yards. I then add up the surplus yards for all applicable plays during a season. ^[1]You may be wondering why I choose 40 yards as the cutoff for a “normal” play. After digging through years of play-by-play and running some correlations, 40 yards seems to be the inflection point … Continue reading

Having established in the above footnote that surplus yards are random and not indicative of QB skill, let’s take a look at the qualifying quarterbacks from 2017. The chart below shows every  40+ yard completion from each QB along with his total surplus yardage. For example, Alex Smith had 13 long passes of 40+ yards; his longest pass went for 79 yards, his second-longest pass for 78 yards, his third-longest for 75 yards, etc. That means his longest pass had 39 Surplus Yards, his second-longest completion had 38 Surplus Yards, and so on; all told, he had 236 Surplus Yards last season, the most in the NFL. [continue reading…]