Last year, I wrote about the distribution of passes across NFL fields, both horizontally (left/middle/right) and vertically (short/deep).

Today I want to do a quick update on two of those 6 boxes: passes to the short left and passes to the short right parts of the field. Historically, passes that are short and to the left side of the field have been slightly more effective for teams. Despite that, teams throw slightly more passes to the short right side of the field than the short left. Did that hold true for 2018?

Yes and yes. There were 5,079 passes marked as “short right” in 2018, and 5,508 attempts marked as “short left.”  And once again, passes that were thrown short and to the left were slightly more effective. Passes thrown short and to the left were completed 73.0% of the time, and had a slightly lower interception rate and slightly higher yards per completion rate, too.  In the aggregate, it does appear that throwing short and to the right is better than throwing short and to the left

So we have here a bit of an inefficiency, at least on the surface.    It seems as though teams should be throwing more short left passes than short right passes, but the opposite is happening.  What if we look at the individual data — are some teams throwing short passes more often to the left, and other teams are throwing significantly more often to the right?

I sorted all quarterbacks with at least 50 passes that were either short left or short right, and then noted which quarterbacks had the largest disparity between those.  On one side, you have  Tom Brady, C.J. Beathard, and Jared Goff.  On the other side you have Blake Bortles, Kirk Cousins, and Eli Manning.

Anyone want to guess which trio of quarterbacks was throwing short left at a disproportionately high rate?  If you guessed the quarterbacks coached by Bill Belichick, Kyle Shanahan, and Sean McVay, you are correct.

Now, I don’t know enough to say that there is a definite market inefficiency that can be exploited. But after seeing the results from this table, I am now more inclined to think that there is one.