Minshew and Leach at Washington State
You might think this would mean Vegas would have high hopes for Minshew, who starred at Washington State under Mike Leach. Together with Minshew and his mustache, he “led the Cougars to 10 wins for the sixth time in program history.”
You might think that this would mean Vegas would be buying on Minshew today against Houston, but that’s not the case: the Jaguars are 8-point underdogs in Houston. Jason Lisk recently wrote about Minshew in the context of the point spread in games started by non-first round backup quarterbacks.
That made me wonder: what would cause a team starting a “player like Minshew” to be favored? I looked at all quarterbacks since 1978 who:
- Were making their first NFL start
- Were not playing in week 1 (i.e., I don’t want to include starting quarterbacks)
- Were not replacement players in 1987.
As it turns out, there was one instance where a team was a 15.5-point favorite in this situation. That involved the defending Super Bowl champion Bears in 1986, with Mike Tomczak starting in a game against the Eagles. The table below shows the 313 situations from ’78 to ’18 that met the above criteria. It is fully sortable and searchable. For undrafted quarterbacks, I have put their draft pick down as 500 to make the table sort properly.
If you sort by point spread, you’ll see a few teams were underdogs of over two touchdowns. That makes sense: they were starting backup quarterbacks who never started a game before. There were 21 instances where a team was an underdog of 14+ points, and those teams went 1-20. The one upset was led by Joe Webb on the Vikings over the Eagles, in a rare Tuesday night game that was moved due to an impending snow storm in Philadelphia.
