Cowboys cornerback Trevon Diggs has  recorded 11 interceptions through 15 team games this season. That’s already the most in the NFL by any player since 40 years ago, when another Dallas corner — Everson Walls — also had eleven picks.  Last year, I wrote about Xavien Howard and J.C. Jackson, the two AFC East cornerbacks who were doing something pretty remarkable. Both players had absurdly high interception numbers given the context of the modern game, which involves adjusting for era.

While teams throw more often now than they did throughout the history of the game, the frequency of interceptions per pass attempt has dipped at an even more severe rate than the quantity of pass attempts has risen. That’s why, despite more passing, there are fewer interceptions per game in the modern era than there has been at any other time since World War II. The graph below shows interceptions per team game in the NFL from 1945 through week 16 of the 2021 season: [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back to give us his thoughts on this week’s quarterbacks. It’s been fun to follow his progression from hopeful fan to ranting madman over the course of just fifteen weeks.

This is starting to sound like a broken record but we just witnessed yet another week of terrible quarterbacking. Only 9 of 32 qualifiers even cracked a QBR of 50! We can’t even blame this on backup QB’s dragging down the average as the bottom 10 were all regular starters aside from Mike Glennon. If anything, the backups outperformed the starters with Tyler Huntley taking the week 15 crown and Nick Mullens placing eighth. [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back with another quarterback recap. He has a broken arm and a detached retina, and he’s ready to win it.

This may have been the least interesting week of the 2021 season for overall game quality (favorites were 12-2 with some totally noncompetitive matchups), but it was still a fascinating slate for analyzing quarterback performance. [continue reading…]

The Minnesota Vikings have played a lot of close games this season.  In fact, all but one of their games was decided by 8 or fewer points, and the average margin of victory — regardless of who won the game — has been just 5.15 points.

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On Monday Night Football, the Bills and Patriots squared off in a game defined by the elements. The temperature was 36 degrees at kickoff, with heavy winds and some mix of rain and snow. There was a 15-yard punt by the Patriots going into the wind in the 1st quarter, and a 71-yard punt by New England kicking with the wind in the 4th quarter. New England opted for a 2-point conversion try after the team’s only touchdown of the game. But by far the most meaningful impact came in the Patriots pass/run run ratio: New England wound up passing on just three of 49 plays! That’s a 6.1% pass ratio, highlighted by a stretch of 32 consecutive runs in the middle of the game.  Bill Belichick will be remembered as coming up with a great game plan in poor weather, asking almost nothing out of his rookie quarterback Mac Jones.

Since 1950, that made this just the fifth game where a team ran on at least 93% of its plays. Let’s review the the other four now: [continue reading…]

As has been the case for nearly two months now, the steady decline of NFL offenses continued in week 13. Scoring has dropped from 24.8 points per game last year to 22.9 this year. The league is currently averaging 11.0 yards per completion; if this holds it will be the lowest in NFL history. There’s also been a marked shift in touchdown passes vs. interceptions. Early in the season there were 3.5 TD passes for every INT; that ratio is now below 2 to 1. For the first time in several years the NFL has found a nice equilibrium between offense and defense. It’ll be interesting to see if the competition committee devises rule changes to boost offense again in 2022.

Here are the week 13 rankings: [continue reading…]

This week I’m excited to introduce a new data set into my quarterback rankings, courtesy of Pro Football Focus. I’d like to give a helmet knock to our good buddy Bryan Frye for working out some details behind the scenes to make this possible. ^[1]Note from Bryan: all I did was ask.

From this point forward, I will be using two metrics to rate quarterbacks: QBR and PFF offensive grades. This makes me giddy because both systems attempt to isolate the QB’s contribution from that of his teammates. That’s a significant step up from ANY/A, DYAR, and EPA which simply assign team offensive statistics to the QB taking the snaps. I can live with that for historical comparisons where we don’t have anything better, but in today’s world of robust data there’s no reason to settle for such a high degree of entanglement.

As neither QBR nor PFF grades account for workload, I needed to make an adjustment to prevent low usage QB’s from hogging the top of the rankings. After experimenting with a few ideas I settled on adding a z-score for play count (based on qualifiers only) and giving it half weight compared to the z-scores for the two metrics. It’s not perfect but it gets the job done without too many arbitrary decisions.

Let’s see how the new system looks for week 12: [continue reading…]