Adam Steele is back with the crazy notion that we should stop using stochastic, binary events in ratio form as the basis for judging quarterbacks. Fancy that. We thank Adam for his ideas and analysis.

The most commonly cited quarterback stats in mainstream analysis are touchdown passes and interceptions, usually presented as TD/INT ratio. This essentially functions as shorthand to compare the quantity of a player’s great plays against his terrible plays. But this is quite unfortunate since both stats are very noisy and situation dependent. TD/INT ratio not only lacks important information but it can be downright misleading at times.

Luckily for us the good folks at Pro Football Focus have come up with a much better alternative: Big Time Throws (BTT) and Turnover Worthy Plays (TWP). These stats are tabulated by watching film so they capture far more signal than the process-blind box score numbers. Passers get credited with a BTT when they make a throw that goes well beyond what’s expected on a given play, and this includes passes which are dropped or wiped out by penalty. Meanwhile a TWP is charged when a throw is made that has a good chance of being intercepted (whether it’s actually picked or not), or when the QB gets careless with the ball during his dropback and fumbles when such an error could’ve been avoided. [continue reading…]

Adam Steele comes to us today with a philosophical question regarding the nature of fandom. We thank him for it.

After a weekend in which all four games were coin flips decided on the final play, I started thinking about how much the results actually matter to fans in the long run. We’ve had the primacy of titles drilled into our heads throughout our lives – hoisting the Lombardi trophy is why you play the game, there’s only one winner and 31 losers, etc. And sure, in the most literal sense, attempting to win a championship is the reason we hold a season every year.

But how much do championships really matter to fans? My sense is that they matter far less than you’d initially think. If you ask a group of fans to name their most cherished football memories, a majority of their answers will probably not be related to winning it all.

Think about all the amazing player seasons throughout football history. The vast majority of them did not result in a ring. Did fans of Randy Moss, Barry Sanders, Dan Marino, or J.J. Watt enjoy their heroes less because they don’t have the jewelry? Doubtful. It’s more likely that fans will wax poetic about how they got to watch these legends play.

In many cases, even average players and coaches on perennially losing franchises become local heroes in their communities. Fans fall in love with players they feel a connection with irrespective of the number of titles those athletes bring home. This is why long suffering fanbases of ringless teams often have the most loyal and devoted followers; it’s more about the journey than the destination.

Quantifying Fan Priorities

There’s actually pretty strong empirical evidence that championships are not the most important thing to fans. From 2003-2016, ESPN ran a series called Ultimate Standings (insert hyperlink ESPN The Magazine’s 2016 Ultimate Standings). They surveyed fans across all four major North American sports to come up with a formula for determining which teams reward their fans the most. The responses were whittled down into seven broad categories, weighted by importance:

Fan relations – 27%
Money spent per win – 27%
Players – 15%
Ownership – 13%
Stadium experience – 12%
Championships – 4%
Coaching – 3%

Well look at that! Championships are way down the list of things that fans consider important. Teams that make a genuine effort to connect to their communities engender loyal fans regardless of on-field results. Regular season wins matter but only if fans aren’t being gouged in the process; less frequent winning is acceptable if being a diehard fan is affordable for the average Joe. Players are judged by their effort and likability more than their performance. Having a solid ownership situation and a fun stadium to attend are also several times more important than past or potential championships.

Does this post resonate with you? What are your favorite memories as a sports fan? Would you trade those memories for a championship? Let me know in the comments.

Adam Steele is back again, this time with a look at teams resting their starters over the years. Bless him.

Over the past few years I’ve been documenting the historical instances of teams resting their starters in late season games. I like to remove such games when comparing teams since even a single upside down result can warp a club’s statistical profile (especially since these meaningless games disproportionately affect the best teams in a given season). Now that the 2021 regular season is complete, I figured I might as well share this database with FP readers in hopes that some of you might find it useful or interesting. [continue reading…]

The penultimate week of the season was an odd one from a statistical standpoint. QBR and PFF mostly agreed (for once), but some of the boxscores straight up lied to us about how well quarterbacks played. We saw 45 touchdown passes and 32 QB turnovers, and that’s standard fare for a late season week in today’s NFL. However, according to PFF graders, quarterbacks registered 36 big time throws and a whopping 55 turnover worthy plays!

Let’s look at the week 17 rankings then take a closer look at some of these misleading statlines: [continue reading…]

I’m short on time right now so this week’s QB rankings will be presented without commentary. [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…]

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…]

Adam Steele is back, and he’s eschewing the expository fluff (which I am re-adding, right here). Enjoy, friends.

Here are this week’s quarterback rankings: [continue reading…]

As with the rest of these recaps, the ideas and analysis presented here are from Adam Steele. I’m just a dunce with admin rights.

We’ve seen a steady decline in quarterback play across the last month, and this week hit a new low. The unweighted average QBR for week ten qualifiers was a dismal 44.7. That would have ranked 27th in the league last year! This isn’t a surprise as offense tends to decline in the second half of every season as defenses jell and the weather starts to make an impact.

Here are this week’s numbers: [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back, continuing to refine his methods in real time, and we get to benefit from it. Thank you Adam, for working it out publicly.

After tabulating the numbers for week nine I realized I needed to make one more tweak to the formula. Since EPA per play and QBR are both agnostic to volume, QB games with a low number of plays were disproportionately clustered at the top and bottom of the rankings. Obviously it’s harder to maintain an extreme performance over a larger sample than a smaller one. My solution was to regress EPA/P by adding 20 plays of 0.1 EPA (roughly league average) to everyone’s stat line before calculating their z-scores. This fix strikes a nice balance between efficiency and volume.

Onto this week results: [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back with a brand new convention, and we thank him for keeping the site humming.

With the NFL trade deadline taking place this week, I decided to make a trade of my own. I’m ditching DYAR in favor of EPA per play. After Davis Mills placed seventh in DYAR by turning into Dan Marino down 38-0, I knew I had to switch to a metric that filters out garbage time.

Thanks to Ben Baldwin and his nifty site rbsdm.com, it’s easy to query EPA/P with various amounts of garbage time removed. After some experimentation I settled on a 4% filter; plays which occur when win probability is below 4% or above 96% are thrown out. The vast majority of plays are still counted but nonsense like the Davis Mills experience is rightfully ignored. To wit, Mills drops from -.149 to -.474 EPA/P with this filter applied.

Here are the week eight numbers: [continue reading…]

Guys, gals, and nonbinary pals, Adam Steele is back with his quarterback recap. And we thank him for it.

I’m going to keep the commentary short and sweet today, so here are the week seven rankings: [continue reading…]

After offenses lit up the scoreboard in week five, we were treated to the poorest quarterbacking of the year in week six. Both DYAR and QBR hit their low points in the 2021 season. What’s shocking is that this happened with the Jets on their bye week!
[continue reading…]

Finally, a week in which the best QB games were more extreme than the worst. The league saw DYAR and ANY/A reach their high points for any week in 2021. Oddly, this was the second worst week for QBR despite the meteoric conventional stats. There seemed to be an unusual number of highlight reel catches and long completions on busted coverages, both of which are likely discounted in QBR.

Fittingly, old man Brady tops the chart in the same week he became the all time leader in total DYAR. Brady and Lamar Jackson had the two best games of the year according to DYAR but fared much worse in QBR. In Brady’s case it’s likely because he faced almost zero pressure vs Miami, while Jackson gets taken to the woodshed for his goal line fumble (another example of QBR overweighting running plays).

Josh Allen had the opposite result – dominant in QBR but merely good in DYAR. He was very successful on his runs, completed his average pass a whopping 13 yards downfield, and didn’t have enough plays to pump up his counting stats. [continue reading…]

With it being the (almost) quarter point of the 2021 season, I’m going to skip commentary on the week four games and focus on quarterback performance across the first month of the season. [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back with his quarterback recap for week 3, 2021. Thank you, Adam, you beautiful man.

The theme of week three is the same as week two: terrible rookies. Remarkably, the eleven worst QB games this season have all been more extreme than the single best game. Anyone reading this is well aware of Justin Fields‘ spectacularly awful sack-fest performance against Cleveland. But according to DYAR, that wasn’t even the worst game this week!

Here are the week three numbers: [continue reading…]

The following post attributes authorship to Bryan Frye, but everything under the line comes from the mind of Adam Steele. We thank him for his contributions to the site and to football discussion.

For the second week in a row, the worst quarterbacks had more extreme performances than did the best. By absolute value, the eight worst games this season have been more extreme than the single best game. I don’t have a good explanation for this other than sheer randomness. [continue reading…]

The following post attributes authorship to Bryan Frye, but everything under the line comes from the mind of Adam Steele. We thank him for his contributions to the site and to football discussion.

With Chase being such a busy man, I have taken over posting weekly passing reviews during the 2021 season. While the classic ANY/A formula has served its purpose over the years, I’m going to tap into a couple of more advanced metrics to rank quarterbacks on a weekly basis.

Each week, qualifying QB’s will be scored using Football Outsiders’ DYAR and ESPN’s QBR metrics. I think this will give us a nice balance between play-by-play and charting stats, as well as a balance between counting stats and pure efficiency. The qualifying players will have their z-score calculated for DYAR and QBR then averaged to create their overall score.

Here are the week 1 results: [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back with a new entry into his Wisdom of Crowds series, and we thank him for it. Below are Adam’s thoughts.

We’re in the dog days of the offseason, so what better time for another Wisdom of the Crowds exercise? This time, Football Perspective readers will be voting on the greatest teams in NFL history. For the sake of accessibility, the rules will be even simpler than usual:

• List your top 25 team seasons of all time in numerical order (For example, the 2008 Lions)
• All teams from the NFL, AFL, and AAFC are eligible (Like the undefeated and untied 1948 Browns)
• Winning a championship is not required for inclusion (Hello, 2007 Patriots)
• Multiple seasons from the same dynasty are permitted (1975 and 1976 Steelers? Why not?)

Polls will be open for two weeks after this is posted. As always, comments and discussion are strongly encouraged. Let’s go!

Adam Steele is back to provide a recap for his Wisdom of Crowds project, and we thank him for it.

After two weeks of polling, we received 20 legal ballots and lots of great discussion. Thank you to everyone who participated! Let’s get straight to the results:

In this table you’ll see total points for each WR, average points per ballot, and the specific points distribution by each voter. I only ranked players who were listed on more than one ballot. Now you can compare your votes to others’ side by side!

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Jerry Rice is the runway winner for Greatest Wide Receiver of All-Time. He’s probably the only player in NFL history at any position that has no holes in his resume. Rice had a dominant peak, absurd longevity, holds every postseason record, and gave 100% effort at all times. He may very well be the greatest football player ever, period. [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back with a long-awaited wide receiver edition of his beloved Wisdom of Crowds exercise. We thank him for the beautiful discussion it will prompt.

It’s been a few years since FP has run a Wisdom of the Crowds exercise, and this time around we’re going to do wide receivers.

For anyone wanting to submit a ballot, there are a handful of simple rules:

1. You have 200 points to distribute among your choices for the greatest wide receivers of all time. The criteria for greatness is entirely up to you, and explanations in the comments are encouraged. You can use half points (but nothing smaller than that).
2. No WR may be assigned more than 15 points. This is done to prevent a few over-weighted ballots from skewing the results.
3. The maximum number of WR’s you may list is 50, but it’s okay to list fewer than that as long as the points sum to 200.
4. Players whose career began before 1935 are not eligible because the earliest days of the NFL were too different from the modern game to make fair comparisons.
5. Please compose and submit your ballot before reading anyone else’s.
6. Ballots will be accepted for two weeks after the day this is posted.

Adam Steele is back for another guest post. You can view all of Adam’s posts here. As always, we thank him for contributing.

With the 2020 NFL playoffs having just concluded, now seems like a great time to tackle a question I’ve had for years: How strongly does quarterback performance correlate with team success in the postseason?

First, we need to measure quarterback performance. I graded each playoff start on a 0-4 scale, with zero being terrible and four being dominant. I chose this because it matches the academic GPA scale we’re all familiar with. The grade is based on performance while adjusting for era, opponent, weather, and other contextual factors.

Now you may be wondering why I don’t just use stats to grade games. Well, for the tiny sample of a single game stats can be very misleading, especially given the opponent and weather extremes we tend to see in the playoffs. I also prefer a rough instrument for this study so parsing all games into five buckets is ideal.

I included all quarterbacks with six or more playoff starts, giving us a sample of 69 players and 745 graded games. We’ll look at individual quarterbacks later, but for now let’s evaluate the big picture: [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back for another guest post. You can view all of Adam’s posts here. As always, we thank him for contributing.

When Does ANY/A Get It Wrong?

In Chase’s review of week one passing stats, I commented that the league’s passing efficiency was inflated by ANY/A in comparison to expected points added (EPA). Today’s post takes a deeper dive into the discrepancy between ANY/A and EPA and which quarterbacks look better in each metric.

While ANY/A is a good metric for quick and dirty analysis, it ignores a number of important variables for accurately measuring a quarterback’s passing efficiency. These variables include: first downs, failed completions, air yard / YAC splits, dropped passes, fumbles, the context of interceptions, and garbage time adjustments. My metric of choice to solve these issues is ESPN’s model of expected points (the primary component of Total QBR). I prefer ESPN’s version in particular because it attempts to isolate the quarterback’s share of credit for every play; the EPA numbers found at Pro Football Reference and Advanced Football Analytics hold the quarterback fully responsible for his team’s pass plays, which, in my opinion, is not much better than just using ANY/A.

In order to compare EPA to ANY/A, I divided pass EPA by dropbacks then converted EPA/A into an index stat using the same formula for ANY/A+. For those not familiar, index stats are scaled so a score of 100 is average and 15 points represents one standard deviation above or below that average. EPA data goes back to 2006 which gives us 439 qualifying seasons to compare. As you would suspect, these two variables are closely correlated (R^2 of 0.74) in the aggregate, but there will be many individual outliers. In the graph below, the X-Axis shows the ANY/A+ for each quarterback, while the Y-Axis shows the EPA/Attempt+ for that quarterback. [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back for another guest post. You can view all of Adam’s posts here. As always, we thank him for contributing.

Last year I introduced a metric called Surplus Yards to measure the percentage of yards a QB gains from long passing plays. If you haven’t read that post I strongly encourage you to do so before continuing.

Here is a table showing every 40+ yard completion from the 2018 regular season, listed from longest completion. As you can see, Ben Roethlisberger had a 97-yard completion, a 78-yard completion, two 75-yard completions, and so on. Roethlisberger had 15 completions last year of 40+ yards, second-most in the NFL: [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back for another guest post. You can view all of Adam’s posts here. As always, we thank him for contributing.

It’s been a few years since I updated my Marginal Air Yards metric, so that’s what today’s post will do. I decided to make this a purely style based statistic rather than trying to combine style with efficiency. As such, here is the updated formula:

mAir = (completed air yards / completions – league average) * completions

Said simply, Marginal Air Yards represents the total depth of a passer’s completions compared to league average. A quarterback who averages 7.0 AirY/C on 300 completions in a league that averages 6.5 AirY/C will be credited with +150 mAir (i.e., 0.5 x 150). [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back with some Wisdom of Crowds work. As always, we thank him for that.

Best Quarterback of All Time: Wisdom of the Crowds 2019

First in 2015 and again in 2017, I solicited the opinions of Football Perspective readers to rank the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. I had a lot of fun with these exercises and thoroughly enjoyed the debates that accompanied them. Well here we are in an odd numbered year and it’s time to do it again…with a twist. At this point the GOAT debate is over among the vast majority of football fans, so if I left the ranking criteria open again the results would be predictable. Instead, I’m asking you to participate in the following thought experiment:

You’re the GM of an expansion team, and you have the privilege of choosing any QB throughout NFL history to be the face of your franchise. But there’s a catch – you have no idea which era your team will be competing in. It could be the pass happy NFL of today, the dead ball 1970’s, the war torn 1940’s, or any time in between. You won’t know until after you select your quarterback. Now if we’re going to engage in fantasy hypotheticals, we have to make some assumptions: [continue reading…]

I like to run a contest where I ask you 38 questions, you answer them, and we all look silly after the season. This year, Adam Steele did the lion’s share of the work, and we thank him for that.

Below you will find 38 pairs of numbers. In each case, you tell me which number will be bigger. One point for each correct answer. Most points wins.

Ties — and I expect there to be a nontrivial number of them — go to the side that had fewer votes. For example, here is a pair:

Number of wins by the Lions
Number of wins by the Ravens

Let’s say 49 people take the Lions and 44 take the Ravens. If the Lions and Ravens end up with the same number of wins, then each Ravens-backer will get a point and each Lions-backer will not. Last year, JimZornsLemma won with 25 correct guesses out of 38; the average was just 19 correct guesses. Thanks to Jeremy De Shetler for an assist on some of this year’s questions.

GRAND PRIZE: the main prizes will be (1) honor and (2) glory. There may also be some sort of trinket to be named later. By the time this thing is over, more than five months will have passed, so that gives me some time to scrape something together. But you probably shouldn’t enter unless honor and glory are sufficient.

MORE RULES:

1. Everyone is limited to one entry per person. This will be enforced by the honor system. If caught breaking this rule, you, your children, and your children’s children will be banned from all future FP contests.

2. I won’t enter the contest myself, which will allow me to arbitrate any dispute impartially. Any ambiguity in the rules will be clarified by me in whatever way causes me the least amount of hassle.

3. While there are quite a few items that refer in some way to the NFL postseason, unless specifically stated, all the items below refer to regular season totals only.

5. You may enter until 1:00 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, September 9th, 2018. However, there’s an incentive to entering early because…

6. In the event that the contest ends in a tie, the winner will be the person whose entry was submitted first. [continue reading…]