Davante Adams was the best wide receiver in the NFL in 2020, and by a very large margin. Unless you want to assign a heavy penalty on him for playing with the MVP quarterback, Adams had otherworldly numbers. He played in just 14 games, but still gained 1,374 yards, 73 first downs, and caught 18 touchdowns. This came in just 461 pass attempts during those 14 games, making that even more impressive.

When measuring receiver performance, it’s important to recognize that some wide receivers play on pass-heavy teams while some play on run-heavy teams. Targets are often mistakenly viewed as a measure of opportunity, when really targets are a form of production; a player who gets a target on a play is doing something positive. The best measure of opportunity is routes run, and team pass attempts serves as a good proxy for that.

Let’s skip Adams, who again blows away the field. Let’s instead look at Titans wide receiver A.J. Brown, who is often the lead horse for the great efficiency numbers that Ryan Tannehill has produced since joining the Titans. Brown missed two games this year, but in those 14 games, he gained 1,075 receiving yards, 55 first downs and 11 touchdowns. Most impressively, this came with only 424 pass attempts (excluding sacks) in those games. Brown picked up a first down on 13% of all Titans pass attempts in the games he played, the fourth-best mark in the NFL; he caught a touchdown on 2.6% of all Tennessee pass plays during those 14 games, the third-highest mark in the league. A receiver can only produce on passing plays, and Brown was a huge reason for the Titans success last year.

For each receiver last year, I calculated how many Adjusted Catch Yards they gained, which is simply receiving yards with a 9-yard bonus for each first down and a 20-yard bonus for each touchdown. ^[1]Without duplication, so a touchdown only gets 11 additional yards, since each touchdown is always a first down. For Brown, that means he gained 1691 adjusted catch yards; in the 14 games he played, he averaged 3.99 ACY per team pass attempt, the second-best rate in the NFL. Here are the top 100 receivers by this metric: [continue reading…]

While most (all?) other organizations and publications reserve their all pro selections for the regular season alone, I like to include the playoffs when handing out my awards and honors. This means I publish them way after anyone else publishes theirs, and certainly well past the point people who aren’t die-hard NFL degenerates still care about such things. Writing about things no one cares about is my specialty, so I figured I’d break my long writing hiatus to present some useless information to the good readers of Football Perspective. ^[1]People have asked me about finishing the Grand List, as well as other topics. While the plan was to finish the top 1000 prior to the start of the 2020 season, new life realities made that more … Continue reading

While most all pro teams have preset slots to fill, mine are more amorphous. In a season with several standouts at a position and few at another, I may allow for more players at the deep position and fewer at the shallow. Last year, my offense featured two backs, three wide receivers, and two tight ends. This year, it didn’t make much sense to have more than one back or tight end. Question my rationale if you like, but it’s my team, and I’ll do as I please. (Also, unlike the AP/SN/PFWA teams, players don’t have bonuses tied to my squad, and this ultimately doesn’t really matter). Enough with the expository applesauce. On to the picks. [continue reading…]

On paper, the Buccaneers added a lot of big names in the offseason. Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski from the Patriots, a former top-5 pick at running back in Leonard Fournette, and an All-Pro wide receiver in Antonio Brown. Tampa Bay also hit home runs with its first two draft picks, offensive tackle Tristan Wirfs and cornerback Antoine Winfield Jr..

But the Buccaneers did not have a particularly large amount of turnover compared to recent Super Bowl champions. In fact, by one measure, each of the five previous Super Bowl champions had bigger turnover than Tampa Bay. Other than Brady, most of the big names didn’t have a big impact for Tampa Bay, at least until the Super Bowl. Leonard Fournette had just 367 rushing yards during the regular season; Brown had just 483 receiving yards in 8 games; Gronk averaged 39 yards per game, the lowest mark in his career other than during his rookie season (in ’19, O.J. Howard averaged 33 yards per game for Tampa Bay). Of course, in Super Bowl LV it was a different story: our lasting image of the 2020 Bucs will be Gronkowski scoring 2 touchdowns, Brown catching a touchdown, and Fournette picking up 135 total yards and a touchdown.

How do we compare one team to its squad from the prior year? Great question! It’s tricky: we want to compare not just roster turnover, but the value of those players. The Chiefs added both Brady and LeSean McCoy, but that should not count as equal moves. Similarly, you have to look at how the player was used in the prior season. For example, Kurt Warner was on both the ’98 Rams and the ’99 Rams, but it would be poor analysis to say that the ’99 Rams had the same quarterback as they did the prior year.

Really we want to look at two things: how much was the player a part of the Super Bowl team (to avoid overemphasizing the McCoys of the world) and for players on the team, how much was that player a part of the team the prior year (to avoid the Warner problem). To measure how valuable a player was, I am going to use PFR’s AV, which does as good a job as any other metric to compare the value of players across positions and eras. For each player on each Super Bowl team, I will measure how much AV they produced as a percentage of the team’s total AV. I will also do that the year before, and then take the lower of those two values.

Let’s use a few examples. The 2020 Buccaneers had 243 points of AV, and Brady had 15 of them; therefore, he was responsible for about 6% of the team’s value. He was not on the team in 2019, of course, so Brady gets a 0 when we calculate how much of the 2019 Bucs were on the 2020 Bucs. That’s a big deal, because there is only 94% of the AV left to allocate. McCoy had just 1 point of AV, or 0.4% of the team’s AV; he also gets a zero since he wasn’t on Tampa Bay in 2019, but that has a much smaller impact. Donovan Smith had about 4% of the AV on the 2019 Bucs and 4% of the AV on the 2020 Bucs; therefore, taking the minimum doesn’t change things; he gets assigned 4%.

If we do this for every player on the 2020 roster, and take the minimum value between the percentage of AV they had for the ’20 Bucs and the percentage of AV they had for the ’19 Bucs, and then sum the results, we get a value of 60%. This may not mean a ton to you in the abstract — it wouldn’t be quite right to say that 40% of the roster turned over — but it is very helpful if we are comparing teams. [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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With the 2020 NFL playoffs having just concluded, now seems like a great time to tackle a question I’ve had for years: How strongly does quarterback performance correlate with team success in the postseason?

First, we need to measure quarterback performance. I graded each playoff start on a 0-4 scale, with zero being terrible and four being dominant. I chose this because it matches the academic GPA scale we’re all familiar with. The grade is based on performance while adjusting for era, opponent, weather, and other contextual factors.

Now you may be wondering why I don’t just use stats to grade games. Well, for the tiny sample of a single game stats can be very misleading, especially given the opponent and weather extremes we tend to see in the playoffs. I also prefer a rough instrument for this study so parsing all games into five buckets is ideal.

I included all quarterbacks with six or more playoff starts, giving us a sample of 69 players and 745 graded games. We’ll look at individual quarterbacks later, but for now let’s evaluate the big picture: [continue reading…]

In the modern NFL, the passing game — and the passing offense — is king.  With completion percentages, passing yards, and passing touchdowns continuing to hit all-time highs, and interceptions reaching all-time lows, it’s easy to only focus on each team’s passing game.  But you may have missed not one, but two of the greatest defensive record-breaking seasons of all time.

The NFL record by a defensive player for interceptions in a season is 14, set by Dick “Night Train” Lane in 1952.   A bad faith argument sometimes notes how remarkable it was that Lane did that in a 12-game season, ignoring the fact that interceptions were more than three times more likely per pass attempt back in the early ’50s.  And while pass attempts are going up, because the interception rate has dropped so significantly, the amount of interceptions in each game has significantly decreased over time:

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Clyde Edwards-Helaire has had a really good 13 months. He’s gone 13-1 as a starter for the 2020 Chiefs, including a win in the AFC Championship Game. This is a nice continuation of his time at LSU, where Edwards-Helaire went 15-0 as the leading rusher for the Tigers. Since January 1, 2019, Edwards-Helaire has gone 29-1 in his 30 games.

CEH is on the verge of winning the national championship and the Super Bowl in back to back seasons, a pretty rare feat. There have been 14 players to win a national championship and an NFL championship in back to back seasons. ^[1]The NFL qualifier excludes two other seasons. In 1947, when Frank Kosikowski was on Notre Dame’s back-to-back champions in 1946 and 1947; as a rookie, he played in the AAFC with the Cleveland … Continue reading [continue reading…]

The 2014 Patriots were not very reliant on the ground team. Jonas Gray led the team in rushing yards with just 412 in 8 games, while Shane Vereen was second with 391 over the full season. Stevan Ridley had 340 in 6 games, while LeGarrette Blount had 281 in five appearances. Even as a team, New England only ranked 18th in rushing yards. And while Blount ran all over the Colts (30/148/3) in the AFC Championship Game, he was held to just 40 yards on 14 carries in the Super Bowl, which still managed to lead the team.

Among the now 110 teams to make the Super Bowl, the 2014 Patriots rank last when it comes to rushing yards gained by their leading rusher. The 1998 Broncos, of course, rank first: Terrell Davis rushed for 2,008 yards that season. The graph below shows the rushing yards (pro-rated to 16 game seasons for years with shorter schedules) for the leading rusher on each Super Bowl team: the winners are shown in black, the losers in green, and the Bucs and Chiefs are shown in team colors. [continue reading…]

In 1959, John Unitas led the NFL in pass attempts, completions, passing yards, and passing touchdowns en route to a unanimous MVP award.  In addition, his Baltimore Colts repeated as NFL champions, capping off a brilliant season for the legendary quarterback.

Two years later, in the early days of the AFL, George Blanda was the league’s MVP as he threw for 3,330 yards (no other player had 2,700 yards) and 36 touchdowns (no other quarterback had even 20). Teaming with Bill Groman and Charley Hennigan, Houston had a dominant offense and won the AFL Championship.

But since then — which would include the entirety of the Super Bowl era — no quarterback has won the Super Bowl in the same season where he led the league in passing yards.  A similar but slightly different criteria yields a different result.  Team passing yards, as opposed to individual passing yards, has two major differences: sack yards are deducted at the team but not the individual level, and of course situations where a quarterback does not play a full season will have a much smaller impact on the team level. [continue reading…]

The Chiefs have three superstars leading their dominant offense: TE Travis Kelce was drafted in 2013, WR Tyreek Hill was drafted in 2016, and QB Patrick Mahomes was drafted in 2017. Kansas City’s top three defensive stars — nose tackle Chris Jones, safety Tyrann Mathieu, and edge rusher Frank Clark — were added three different ways.  Jones was second round pick in 2016, Clark was acquired via trade in 2019, and Mathieu was a free agent pickup in 2019.

That 2019 year was a big offseason for Kansas City.  Sure, the team was the #1 seed in 2018, hosted the AFC Championship Game, and only lost in overtime to the eventual Super Bowl champions, but that team was a bit different from this version. Six likely starters in Super Bowl LV — Mathieu, Clark, WR Mecole Hardman, ILB Damien Wilson, G Nick Allegretti, and CB Bashaud Breeland — were added in the 2019 offseason. [continue reading…]

Back in 2008, I wrote a four part series detailing the history of the black quarterback.

Six years ago, I updated that article, just as I did last year. Today, in honor of black history month, let’s revisit the history of black quarterbacks in the NFL. And while for the last 53 of those seasons, at least one black quarterback was in the NFL, the roles and treatment of black quarterbacks have varied greatly throughout the Super Bowl era.

The history of black quarterbacks in professional football is complicated. The New York Giants did not have a black quarterback throw a pass until 2007, when Anthony Wright became the first to do so; 10 years later, Geno Smith became the first and only black quarterback to start a game for the Giants, the last team to finally start a black player at quarterback. But as far back as 1920, Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard was the tailback of the Akron Pros; a year later, he was promoted to player/coach, and became the first black head coach in NFL history. Pollard helped the Pros win the championship in the NFL’s inaugural season. ^[1]At the time, the NFL went by the name the American Professional Football Association. It was not known as the NFL until 1922. The Pros ran the single-wing, and Pollard was the player lined up behind the center who received the snaps. At the time the forward pass was practically outlawed, so Pollard barely resembles the modern quarterback outside of the fact that he threw a few touchdown passes during his career. ^[2]In addition to his NFL exploits, Pollard also achieved a great deal of fame for leading Brown to back-to-back road wins over the powerhouse schools of the time, Yale and Harvard, in 1916. He would … Continue reading And, of course, it was a time of significant discrimination: Pollard and end Bobby Marshall were the first two black players in professional football history.

As told by Sean Lahman, at least one African American played in the NFL in every year from 1920 to 1933; while there were several notable black players, Pollard was the only one ^[3]Well, maybe we can include single-wing tailback Joe Lillard, too.  In 1933, he had more than twice as many passing yards and rushing yards as any of his Cardinals teammates. He would then leave the … Continue reading resembling a quarterback. ^[4]It wasn’t just African Americans that had full access during this era: Jim Thorpe coached and starred in a team composed entirely of Native Americans called the Oorang Indians in 1922 and 1923. Beginning in 1934, that there was an informal ban on black athletes largely championed by Washington Redskins owner George Marshall. It wasn’t until 1946 that black players were re-admitted to the world of professional football, when UCLA’s Kenny Washington ^[5]Who occupied the same backfield with the Bruins as Jackie Robinson. and Woody Strode were signed by the Los Angeles Rams; in the AAFC, Bill Willis and Marion Motley were signed by Paul Brown’s Cleveland Browns that same season.
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