Tannehill is expected to break out of this pocket.
Okay, snark aside, the Tannehill breakout season never actually happened, despite the predictions of sports journalists everywhere. After a nondescript rookie season in 2012, the breakout didn’t happen in his sophomore season in 2013. That prompted me to ask the question: How long does it take great quarterbacks to break out?
Tannehill began his career with two consecutive seasons of below-average ANY/A, and while some excused his poor numbers due to bad coaching and offensive line play, I wrote that if “Tannehill turns into a star quarterback, he’ll be a very unique case.” That line remains true.
Many expected him to break out in his third year in 2014, but that didn’t happen, either. At that point, I wondered whether Tannehill was ever going to break out, and noted that if a quarterback begins his career with three straight years of below-average play, that’s probably bad sign.
Then, prior to his fourth season in 2015, Jon Gruden said the breakout season was coming, and so did… Tannehill himself. It did not happen, and blame wound up being placed on the head coach.
After four seasons, I asked the satirical question: Where Does Ryan Tannehill rank in the Pantheon of Great QBs? At the time, there had been 88 quarterbacks since 1970 who had taken at least 90% of the same team’s pass attempts in every year in any four-year window. Of those passers, Tannehill had the second worst passing stats of any quarterback and was one of just three that failed to start a single playoff game. So, clearly, Tannehill had to be great to be getting all of these snaps despite both a below-average record and below-average statistics.
At this point, entering his fifth season in 2016, obviously nobody was exp…. well, actually, yes people thought that 2016 might really be his breakout year, in part due to the arrival of Adam Gase. As it turned out, Tannehill in 2016 was… well, it’s a little complicated. He got injured in December 2016. At the time, he was below the league average in ANY/A for the 5th time in his 5-year career, which I tweeted the day of his injury. Tannehill averaged 6.3 ANY/A through 14 weeks, while the NFL average was 6.4. But as is often the case, the NFL average dropped during the final month of the season, and the final 2016 ANY/A average for the NFL was 6.2. Therefore, on a technicality, Tannehill finished the 2016 season as an above-average passer, which is certainly the most Ryan Tannehill way to possibly do so. And while Tannehill was injured, his backup Matt Moore posted better passing numbers than him.
In 2017, Tannehill missed the entire year with a knee injury suffered in training camp, although not before the breakout season predictions were re-emerging. Miami responded by bringing Jay Cutler out of retirement, and that went about as well as you would have expected.
I stopped writing about Tannehill at this point, but that doesn’t mean a Tannehill breakout season wasn’t being discussed for the sixth year in a row in the summer of 2018. It did not happen.
There were some really high highs: Tannehill is the only quarterback to record three games of 15.0+ AY/A since 2015, and that’s even with him missing a year. He went 18/19 for 282 yards and 4 TDs against the 2015 Texans, 17 of 23 for 289 yards and 3 TDs against the 2018 Raiders, and 14/19 for 265 yards and 3 TDs against the 2018 Patriots, three remarkable passing lines (although all of those games had some long touchdowns that didn’t have much to do with the quarterback). Of course, the lows could get really low, too, including his final game with Miami. I am going to guess that Tannehill will be happy to never take another snap on the field in Buffalo.
But the overall theme was mediocre, in large part due to Tannehill’s issue with taking sacks. If you look at the 32 quarterbacks with the most pass attempts since 2012, Tannehill has the 4th-worst sack rate at 7.5%. The only quarterbacks sacked more often were a pair of run-heavy quarterbacks in Colin Kaepernick and Russell Wilson (who take a lot of sacks on scrambles), and a bad quarterback in Josh McCown. Despite playing like a risk-averse quarterback, he ranked in the bottom 12 in both yards per completion and also interception rate, a pretty bad combination: the only other quarterbacks to do so in this sample were Jay Cutler, Blake Bortles, and Eli Manning.
Tannehill was never really awful, which is how he lasted so long in Miami. Just getting to 2,500 pass attempts is a sign of some level of quality — Tannehill is certainly better than the worst starter in the league — but his run with Miami lasted far too long. Of the 100 players with the most pass attempts since 1970, Tannehill is one of just seven with a passing index (ANY/A+) of 94 or lower: he is survived by Trent Dilfer, Blake Bortles, Matt Cassel, Josh McCown, Dan Pastorini, and Sam Bradford.