Today’s guest post/contest comes from Thomas McDermott, a licensed land surveyor in the State of California, a music theory instructor at Loyola Marymount University, and an NFL history enthusiast. As always, we thank him for his hard work. You can view all of his work at Football Perspective here.

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I wrote this article last year, when I generated the statistics and then ranked all starting quarterbacks in 2015 based on how well they played in “clutch” ^[1]Note that throughout this post, anything that happens within this situation is termed “clutch”; as in “clutch yards”, “clutch plays”, “clutch touchdown”, etc. situations. I used a simple definition: if it occurred in the 4^th quarter or overtime, when the game was tied or the quarterback’s team was trailing by as much as one score (8 points), then it was a clutch situation.

The main metric used was Bryan Frye’s Total Adjusted Yards per Play, and today we’ll use the same methodology ^[2]In my post last year, I included a 2-point conversion bonus of 15 yards which I’m going to leave out for now. Besides not really adding much to the study, when I started collecting the data for the … Continue reading to find the 2016 Clutch Value Leader as well as the single season leaders since 1994. Here’s Bryan’s TAY/P formula, which Chase supports as an all-encompassing basic measure of quarterback performance:

(passing & rushing yards + (touchdowns * 20) – (interceptions * 45) – (fumbles lost * 25) – ( sack yards)) / (pass attempts + rush attempts + sacks) ^[3]Note that Bryan uses a 25-yard penalty for all fumbles (lost or recovered) while this study uses that penalty for lost fumbles only (which are the only ones being counted here).

The other change I’m making from the previous post, is that I’ll be using a 3-year rolling league average, as opposed to a single year league average, when adjusting for era. Thanks to Bryan (through his great website GridFe) for providing me with that information.

So let’s get to it. Below are the quarterbacks in 2016 who had at least 30 clutch action plays, ^[4]For 2015, I used 24 actions plays as the cutoff, after looking at the numbers more when doing the single-season rankings, 30 seemed more appropriate. and here’s how to read the table:

Derek Carr had 9 games where he and the Oakland offense found themselves in our defined clutch situation; in those situations, he had 49 completions in 92 attempts for 826 yards, 9 passing touchdowns, 0 interceptions, and was sacked twice for 11 yards. He had 4 carries for 22 yards and zero rushing touchdowns, and didn’t lose a fumble. This makes for 1017 Total Adjusted Yards in 98 action plays, giving Carr 10.4 TAY/P. If we take his TAY/P and compare it to the 3-year (2-year in this case, 2016 and 2015) league average of 5.89 yards, Carr’s performance is 4.5 yards above average; multiplying that by 98 action plays gives him 439 yards of Clutch Value, the most for 2016.

There is no doubt that Carr had a fantastic season when it came to clutch-time performance. Not only do the numbers show it – 9 touchdowns, 826 yards and zero interceptions in 96 pass attempts – Oakland benefited from his great play in those 9 games by winning 7 of them, resulting in Carr getting seven 4^th quarter comebacks (4QC) and seven game-winning drives (GWD). He actually would have been tied for first place all-time in this category had it not been for another QB who also played well in the clutch, Matt Stafford, who now holds the record with eight 4QC’s/GWDs. ^[5]It’s probably noteworthy that Stafford also had three more opportunities, too. He paced the league with 12 games involving clutch situations.

It’s important to note that this is just a presentation of the 2016 data; the sample sizes are undoubtedly small, and this doesn’t take into account a quarterback’s career play, or provide a prediction for how they will play going forward in clutch (or non-clutch) situations. But from a retrodictive, backwards-looking perspective, you might find this pretty useful. Carr received significant MVP consideration despite having essentially the same ANY/A as Marcus Mariota; the fact that Carr ranked 1st and Mariota ranked 26th would help explain why there was never any Mariota-for-MVP hype among sportswriters (or, thought of differently, the fact that Carr ranked 1st and Mariota ranked 26th explains why Oakland made the playoffs and Tennessee did not).

How good was Carr’s season historically? Pretty darn good. Below is a table showing the single season clutch performances since 1994, Carr is at the top of the list, beating out the 2011 clutch dynamic duo of Eli Manning and Tony Romo:

There’s a lot here that I find interesting, but I’ll leave it to the readers to comment. The one thing I’d like to point out is that the intention of putting this stat together isn’t to define clutch QB play (if that’s even possible), or to show that one QB is “more clutch” than another. Rather, I see these numbers as a part of that discussion, in the same way that 4QC’s/GWD’s and Win Probability are. If we’re even going to approach the idea of defining how a QB plays “in the clutch”, it seems to me that a great way to start is defining a clutch situation and seeing how that QB played in it.

Thanks for reading, would love to hear your thoughts.