The 2018 NFL Draft was supposed to change the landscape of the NFL at the quarterback position. Maybe not right away, of course, but in a few years — say, 2021? — the five quarterbacks selected in the first round of the 2018 NFL Draft would be the stars of the day. Instead, Josh Rosen flamed out immediately, Sam Darnold proved to be underwhelming under three different coaches, and Baker Mayfield’s stock fell dramatically in his fourth year. Even Lamar Jackson, the 2019 AP MVP, has fallen off; after a notable dropoff in play from 2019 to 2020, he fell further in an injury-plagued 2021. At this point, only Josh Allen is an unimpeachable franchise quarterback, but even he has seen a significant decline in passing efficiency this season.

All told, the 2018 first round quarterbacks as a group have been decidedly below average as passers this season, with three of the four starters (excluding Rosen) being in the bottom five of the NFL in interception rate.

This made me curious: which draft classes have been the most productive in 2021? With 17 weeks in the books — a traditional NFL regular season — here’s what I did. [continue reading…]

Cowboys cornerback Trevon Diggs has  recorded 11 interceptions through 15 team games this season. That’s already the most in the NFL by any player since 40 years ago, when another Dallas corner — Everson Walls — also had eleven picks.  Last year, I wrote about Xavien Howard and J.C. Jackson, the two AFC East cornerbacks who were doing something pretty remarkable. Both players had absurdly high interception numbers given the context of the modern game, which involves adjusting for era.

While teams throw more often now than they did throughout the history of the game, the frequency of interceptions per pass attempt has dipped at an even more severe rate than the quantity of pass attempts has risen. That’s why, despite more passing, there are fewer interceptions per game in the modern era than there has been at any other time since World War II. The graph below shows interceptions per team game in the NFL from 1945 through week 16 of the 2021 season: [continue reading…]

Davante Adams was the best wide receiver in the NFL in 2020, and by a very large margin. Unless you want to assign a heavy penalty on him for playing with the MVP quarterback, Adams had otherworldly numbers. He played in just 14 games, but still gained 1,374 yards, 73 first downs, and caught 18 touchdowns. This came in just 461 pass attempts during those 14 games, making that even more impressive.

When measuring receiver performance, it’s important to recognize that some wide receivers play on pass-heavy teams while some play on run-heavy teams. Targets are often mistakenly viewed as a measure of opportunity, when really targets are a form of production; a player who gets a target on a play is doing something positive. The best measure of opportunity is routes run, and team pass attempts serves as a good proxy for that.

Let’s skip Adams, who again blows away the field. Let’s instead look at Titans wide receiver A.J. Brown, who is often the lead horse for the great efficiency numbers that Ryan Tannehill has produced since joining the Titans. Brown missed two games this year, but in those 14 games, he gained 1,075 receiving yards, 55 first downs and 11 touchdowns. Most impressively, this came with only 424 pass attempts (excluding sacks) in those games. Brown picked up a first down on 13% of all Titans pass attempts in the games he played, the fourth-best mark in the NFL; he caught a touchdown on 2.6% of all Tennessee pass plays during those 14 games, the third-highest mark in the league. A receiver can only produce on passing plays, and Brown was a huge reason for the Titans success last year.

For each receiver last year, I calculated how many Adjusted Catch Yards they gained, which is simply receiving yards with a 9-yard bonus for each first down and a 20-yard bonus for each touchdown. ^[1]Without duplication, so a touchdown only gets 11 additional yards, since each touchdown is always a first down. For Brown, that means he gained 1691 adjusted catch yards; in the 14 games he played, he averaged 3.99 ACY per team pass attempt, the second-best rate in the NFL. Here are the top 100 receivers by this metric: [continue reading…]

In the modern NFL, the passing game — and the passing offense — is king.  With completion percentages, passing yards, and passing touchdowns continuing to hit all-time highs, and interceptions reaching all-time lows, it’s easy to only focus on each team’s passing game.  But you may have missed not one, but two of the greatest defensive record-breaking seasons of all time.

The NFL record by a defensive player for interceptions in a season is 14, set by Dick “Night Train” Lane in 1952.   A bad faith argument sometimes notes how remarkable it was that Lane did that in a 12-game season, ignoring the fact that interceptions were more than three times more likely per pass attempt back in the early ’50s.  And while pass attempts are going up, because the interception rate has dropped so significantly, the amount of interceptions in each game has significantly decreased over time:

[continue reading…]

Previously:

• Week 1 Passing Stats
• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4
• Week 5
• Week 6
• Week 7
• Week 8
• Week 9
• Week 10
• Weeks 11 and 12

[continue reading…]

The Giants have 306 rushing yards this year, and quarterback Daniel Jones has 137 of them, leaving just 169 for the rest of the team.

In the passing game, Jones has thrown every pass for New York through four weeks in 2020. He has picked up 889 passing yards and also lost 83 yards due to sacks. If we look at his advanced splits, we see that 541 of his passing yards have come through the air, with 348 yards coming via yards after the catch. A quarterback is not fully responsible for his air yards, and a quarterback also plays a role in how much YAC his receivers gain. That said, I thought it would be fun to engage in a bit of fiction and treat all air yards as belonging to the quarterback, and all YAC as belonging to the receivers.

In that case, Jones has gained 137 rushing yards, thrown for 541 yards, and lost 83 yards due to sacks, for a total of 595 yards. That is not very much, but consider: all other Giants have gained just 169 yards on the ground and 348 after the catch, for a pitiful total of just 517 yards. So Jones has been responsible for 53.5% of all Giants yards in 2020, which is actually the largest percentage of any player in the league.

To go to the opposite extreme, let’s go visit newly benched quarterback Dwayne Haskins in Washington. The Football Team has rushed for 369 yards, with Haskins only adding 30 yards on the ground. And while the 2018 first round pick has thrown for 939 yards this year, most of them have come after the catch: Haskins has just 362 air yards, compared to 577 yards added after the catch by his receivers (Washington running backs Antonio Gibson and J.D. McKissic have combined for 21 receptions and 176 yards, but 190 of those yards came after the catch; in addition, wide receiver Terry McLaurin leads all wideouts through four weeks in YAC with 198 yards.) Haskins has also lost 101 yards on sacks so far this season: add it up, and Haskins is responsible for adding only 291 yards of offense (30+362-101) by this methodology, while his teammates have picked up 916 yards of offense (339 rushing yards and 577 of YAC). That puts Haskins as the main man for just 24.1% of the yards that Washington’s offense has gained this year.

I used this methodology for every team in the league. Only two quarterbacks, Jones and Ryan Fitzpatrick in Miami, are responsible for over half of their team’s offense. Among teams that have winning records, Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen stand out as two quarterbacks who have gained over 48% of their team’s offenses. After them, Ryan Tannehill, Russell Wilson, and Tom Brady stand out (all over 45%) as no other quarterback is on a team with 3+ wins and has even 40% of his offense.

The full list is below. I also included what percentage of the team’s pass attempts each quarterback has taken, to help you identify quarterbacks who have missed some time. Here’s how to read the Lamar Jackson line. This year he has thrown for 516 air yards compared to having just 253 yards of YAC; he also has rushed for 235 yards. Jackson has lost 70 yards due to sacks, giving him a total of 681 responsible yards. As a team, Baltimore has 1,366 yards of offense, which means Lamar Jackson has been responsible for 49.9% of the team’s yards. Jackson has also taken 97% of the Ravens team pass attempts this year, and has a 3-1 record. [continue reading…]

Previously:

• Week 1 Game Scripts

[continue reading…]

Rob Gronkowski played for the New England Patriots from 2010 to 2018. It was one of the wildest and most celebrated rides in NFL history. But today I want to build on the great work done by Adam Harstad and analyze Gronk’s career through the lens of how Tom Brady fared — with and without Gronk. ^[1]As always, thanks to Adam for the inspiration and much of the methodology behind this post. For defining what is included in my data set, please jump to the end of this post to see how Gronk games and non-Gronk games are defined.

I am going to not going to spend much time discussing Gronk’s first and last seasons, for two reasons. In 2010, rookie Gronk was not yet Gronk(TM); he also didn’t miss any games. And 2018 Gronk was BrokenGronk; outside of 2010 and 2018, he was pretty much always a dominant force when healthy.

So let’s focus on the prime 7 years of Gronk’s career. In 2011, 2014, and 2015, Gronkowski was almost always healthy. There was only one missed game of note there, and it was one where Brady and the entire Patriots team struggled. ^[2]Technically there was a second missed game, but it was a week 17 game where Gronkowski sat out to rest and Brady only played a half. In those three seasons, Gronkowski was a unanimous first-team All-Pro selection each season among major voting publications.

So, for WOWY purposes — that is, With Or Without You — the seasons we have to analyze for Gronkowski and Brady are 2012, 2013, 2016, and 2017. And the results are staggering in each year.

2012

The Patriots had 10 Gronk games and 8 non-Gronk games this season, which ended in a loss without Gronk to the Ravens in the AFC Championship Game. The stats:

• In the Gronk games, New England had a 0.700 winning percentage, averaged 35.8 (!) points per game, picked up 28.4 first downs and 16.4 passing first downs per game, and the passing offense averaged 7.73 Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt (ANY/A).
• In the non-Gronk games, New England had a 0.750 winning percentage, averaged 31.6 points per game, picked up 26.5 first downs and 15.8 passing first downs per game, and averaged 6.84 ANY/A.

Notably, that’s a difference of 4.2 points per game and 0.89 ANY/A per game without Gronk. And while the record was slightly worse, it’s worth noting that the three losses came by a combined four points.

2013

The Patriots had 7 Gronk games and 11 non-Gronk games this season, which ended in a loss without Gronk in the AFCCG to the Broncos.  The stats:

• In the Gronk games, New England had a 0.714 winning percentage, averaged 32.0 points per game (and allowed 27.1 PPG), picked up 26.6 first downs and 16.3 passing first downs per game, and averaged 6.98 ANY/A.
• In the non-Gronk games, New England had a 0.727 winning percentage, averaged 25.4 points per game (and allowed 17.8 PPG), picked up 21.3 first downs and 12.3 passing first downs per game, and averaged 5.64 ANY/A.

The offense nearly fell apart without Gronk, dropping 6.6 points per game and gaining 5.3 fewer first downs.  The passing offense declined by 1.34 ANY/A. And while I presume this is mostly (all?) due to randomess, this begins a trend of New England allowing significantly fewer points in non-Gronk games. Which is just weird.

2016

The Patriots had 5 Gronk games and 10 non-Gronk games this season — which was perhaps Brady’s best season outside of ’07.  New England won the Super Bowl without Gronkowski.  The stats:

• In the Gronk games, the Patriots posted a 4-1 record ^[3]With Gronk unable to haul in the game-tying touchdown catch, or the victim of pass interference, depending on your perspective., averaged 32.0 points per game (and allowed 20.4 PPG), picked up 23.6 first downs and 13.8 passing first downs, and had a ridiculous 9.93 ANY/A average.
• In the non-Gronk games, the Patriots went 1o-0, averaged 30.4 points per game (and allowed 14.8 PPG), picked up 24.0 first downs and 14.9 passing first downs, and averaged 7.67 ANY/A.

It’s hard to argue with 10-0, and the team gained more first downs without Gronk… but the record was driven in large part by that defense, too.  The Patriots averaged 1.6 more points per game with Gronk and 2.26 ANY/A per game with Gronk.  In the 5 Gronk games, Brady’s stat line was just ridiculous, and the offense scored 20 touchdowns and had just 18 punts and one interception. That was, of course, an unsustainable pace, but it just highlights how dominant Brady and Gronk were in ’16; in the 10 non-Gronk games, the offense had 34 touchdowns and 47 punts. In these 5 games, Gronkowski caught 24 passes for 19 first downs, 529 yards and 3 touchdowns.

2017

The Patriots had 16 Gronk games and 3 non-Gronk games this season, which ended with a loss in the Super Bowl to the Eagles (but don’t blame the Patriots passing attack or Gronkowski, who had 116 yards and 2 touchdowns). The stats:

• In the Gronk games, the Patriots had a 0.813 winning percentage, averaged 30.4 points per game, picked up 25.8 first downs and 15.7 passing first downs, and averaged 8.22 ANY/A.
• In the non-Gronk games, the Patriots went 2-1, averaged 21.0 points per game, picked up 19.7 first downs and 13.3 passing first downs, and averaged 5.81 ANY/A.

That sounds like a huge drop — 9.4 points per game and 2.42 ANY/A — but the sample size is small.  Brady played poorly in the two regular season non-Gronk games, an upset loss to Miami and a narrow win over Tampa Bay.   Those were two of his worst games of the season, which probably wasn’t just a coincidence. I don’t want to make much out of a 3-game sample size, but putting aside the magnitude, the direction is consistent with other years.

Gronk WOWY Stats

Here are the full stats for Brady and the Patriots offense in each season, in both Gronk games (top rows) and non-Gronk games (bottom rows).

What Is A Gronk Game and What is Not A Gronk Game?

Finally, let me explain how I identified what is a Gronk game and what is not a Gronk game. Let’s work in reverse order:

• 2018: Gronk missed the games in weeks 8, 10, and 11 due to ankle and back injuries.  While he was not necessarily his former self, he played in at least 67% of the snaps in every other game this season.
• 2017: Gronk missed 3 games here.  He missed a game on a short week against the Bucs due to a thigh injury, was suspended for the second Dolphins game, and suffered a concussion in the first half against the Jaguars in the AFC Championship Game.  He finished that game with just 1 target and 26 snaps, representing 41% of the team’s snaps.  I am counting this as NOT a Gronk game (which the Patriots won).  Note that in the regular season finale against the Jets, Gronk played most of the game (68% snaps) but functioned solely as a blocker: he did not record a single target. That still counts as a Gronk game, as it was more importantly for the Patriots offense, a Bryce Petty game.
• 2016: Gronk missed the first two games of the season with a hamstring injury, and played just 11 snaps (blocking on 10 of them) in the week 3 game against Houston.  However, I am going to exclude all of the first four games of the 2016 season for New England, since Brady was suspended; those games are eliminated from this study and don’t count as a Gronk game or a non-Gronk game, since we are analyzing Brady’s WOWY stats. Then in week 12 against the Jets, Gronk suffered a season-ending back injury and played just 7 snaps. New England won, 22-17; this game is counting as NOT a Gronk game. So games 5 through 9 are the only Gronk games this year.
• 2015: Gronkowski missed one game (against the Eagles) due to a knee injury.
• 2014: Gronkowski began the year missing the preseason as he recovered from a torn ACL/MCL (more on this below); he wound up playing between 40 and 45% of the Patriots offensive snaps the first two weeks, where New England went 2-0.  I am counting these games as Gronk games (he had 17 combined targets), but just wanted to note the injury.  Gronkowski sat out the week 17 game, which would normally mean that’s a non-Gronk game.  But because the Patriots had clinched the #1 seed before the week 17 game and Brady only played for the first half, so I am excluding that game as a non-Gronk game, too.  That is the fifth and final game in this study I am eliminating entirely (along with the four suspension games for Brady).
• 2013: Gronkowski suffered a season-ending knee injury on a hit by T.J. Ward early in the 3rd quarter of a week 14 game against the Browns.  Since Gronk played 49% of the snaps and made it into the third quarter, I will still count this as a Gronk game (as opposed to the Jaguars AFCCG).
• 2012: Gronk broke his forearm late in a win over the Colts in week 11; that game counts as a Gronk game.  However, he barely played (31% of snaps) in his return, a tune-up, week 17 game to get ready for the playoffs, and then re-injured his arm seven snaps into the team’s first playoff game.  He would miss the rest of the season.  Both of those final two games are being counted as non-Gronk games. Therefore, the first 10 games of ’12 were Gronk games, and the last 8 games were non-Gronk games.
• 2011: No missed games.
• 2010: No missed games.

As always, please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Today’s guest post comes from one of the longest followers of this blog (and its predecessor), Richie Wohlers. Richie is an accountant from Southern California who is a Dolphins fan despite never being to Florida. As always, we thank our guest posters for contributing.

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Inspired by Bill James’s Game Score for pitchers, I’ve been tracking something similar for quarterbacks.

This is just a simple way to look at box score stats for a quarterback to see who had the most statistically impressive games.  This is not taking things into account such as win probabilities, air yards, EPA, opponent quality, etc.  More importantly, there are no era adjustments, so this is biased in favor of modern players. That said, the goal was just to create a single number to back up the “awe” factor we may have seen while watching the game.

Methodology:

There are five components to my game score.  They are each weighted equally, though (as with passer rating) completion percentage ends up getting “double-counted” with yards per attempt.  The categories are: Total Yards, Touchdown Passes, Completion Percentage, Yards per Attempt and Interception Percentage.  Each category is worth 20 points, so a perfect game would be worth 100 points.

The threshold for each category is based on the best performance of all time.  Those thresholds are:

Yards: 554 (Norm Van Brocklin, 1951)

Touchdowns: 7 (6 times, most recently Drew Brees in 2015)

Completion Percentage (min 15 attempts): 96.7% (Drew Brees, 2019)

Yards/Attempt (min 15 attempts): 20.5 (Craig Morton, 1970)

Interception Percentage: Each percentage point deducts two points from a player’s score.  (Drew Brees is the highest-rated QB to throw an interception, when he threw for 511 yards, 7 TD and 2 Int in 2015.  It ranks as the 19^th-best game.)

A player’s portion of those records is multiplied by 20.  So when Patrick Mahomes threw for 443 yards last season, that was worth ( 443 / 554 = 0.8 * 20 )  16 points.

The top 10 performances: [continue reading…]

Let’s get it out of the way: playing with Tom Brady and Peyton Manning sure helps. From 2007 to 2013, Wes Welker had the best seven year stretch of his career, and most of that time came with Brady as his quarterback (there was one season with Matt Cassel and the 2013 record-breaking season with Manning). During those seven seasons, Welker’s teams averaged a remarkable 32.3 points per game. In 2014, Welker’s team — still the Broncos — also topped 30 points per game, but the other seasons of Welker’s career were spent on significantly less productive offenses.

Of course, in most of those other seasons, Welker himself wasn’t a significant part of the offense: he was a young backup or a past-his-prime player. I wanted to calculate how many points per game each wide receiver’s offense scored over his career. This is trickier than you’d think: what do you do for years where a player was a backup, or missed time due to injury? For Welker, he played 14 games with the 2004 Dolphins but as a returner and did not catch a pass. Would that team count in his career average?

To solve for these problems, I weighted each season by the percentage of career receiving yards he gained in that season.  Welker gained 9,924 receiving yards in his career.  In 2015 with the Rams, he gained 102 yards, or 1.0% of his career total.  That isn’t much, so the Rams production that year — 17.5 points per game, or 5.31 PPG below average — counts for 1.0% of Welker’s career score.  The 2013 Broncos averaged 37.88 PPG, 14.47 better per game than league average; since Welker gained 7.8% of his career yards that season, the 2013 Broncos stats count for 7.8% of his career total.  Welker’s best year was 2011, when he gained 1,569 yards.  That represented 15.8% of his career total, so the 2011 Patriots — 32.06 points per game, 9.88 points per game above league average — counts for 15.8% of Welker’s career grade.

If you perform this analysis for every season of Welker’s career, his team’s averaged 30.13 points per game once you weight for Welker’s production, which was 8.11 points per game above average. Here’s the math: the final two columns represent the product of multiplying his percentage of career receiving yards in that season by his team’s scoring (both raw and relative to league average): [continue reading…]

Let’s talk about little bit about Kellen Winslow II. Winslow’s life has been marked more by what’s happened off the field than what happened on the field, starting with being the son of a Hall of Famer, continuing with an awful motorcycle accident early in his career, and ending with a conviction for rape and a CTE diagnosis. On the field, Winslow was productive but played during the peak of the tight end era: Tony Gonzalez, Antonio Gates, and Jason Witten were all still in their prime, Rob Gronkowski and Jimmy Graham were setting single-seaosn records, and guys like Vernon Davis and Dallas Clark were productive Pro Bowlers.

Winslow produced solid numbers, but he did so in the worst of circumstances. During this time, his quarterbacks were mostly Josh Freeman and Derek Anderson, along with a season of Charlie Frye, and a few games from Josh Johnson, Brady Quinn, and end-of-career Byron Leftwich. On average, Winslow’s offenses were 0.87 ANY/A below average during the course of his career, weighted by how productive Winslow was each season. Among tight ends with at least 5,000 career receiving yards, that is — by a large measure — the worst group of passing offenses. The second-worst would be Todd Heap: About a quarter of his career came with the early days of Joe Flacco, and another quarter was defined by the Kyle Boller era. He caught passes from end-of-career Steve McNair, Anthony Wright, Jeff Blake, Chris Redman, Elvis Grbac, and also Kevin Kolb and John Skelton in Arizona. On average, Heap’s offenses finished 0.45 ANY/A below average.

Only three other tight ends with 5,000+ career receiving yards played on teams that finished at least 0.20 ANY/A below average: Rich Caster (who had a little bit of prime Joe Namath and then little else), Delanie Walker, and Greg Olsen. If you want to lower the threshold for tight end production, we should all feel badly for Chargers TE Freddie Jones, who played with Ryan Leaf and a string of bad quarterbacks who were either bad, very young, or very old (or two of those three). For his career, Jones’s passing offenses finished 1.46 ANY/A below average. We can also pour one out for Boston Patriots TE Jim Whalen, who was one of the best tight ends of the late ’60s. In 1968, as the Patriots finished with the second-worst passing offense in the AFL — the passing offense was 2.88 ANY/A below average — Whalen somehow was a first-team AP All-Pro. Among all tight ends who have been named first-team All-Pro in a season, that is the worst accompanying passing offense in history. Whalen was a consummate Massachusetts man: he was born and raised in Cambridge, starred at Boston College, and then was drafted and spent the first five years of his career with the Patriots. That said, most of his career was played with bad or out of their prime quarterbacks.

On the other side, Brent Jones had a pretty sweet set-up: he played most of his career with Steve Young or Joe Montana, and his average offense had a Relative ANY/A of +2.00.  Second on the list would be Rob Gronkowski, who of course played with Tom Brady.  And if you lower the minimum threshold, nobody had it easier than Aaron Hernandez, who played his entire, short career during Brady’s prime.

I looked at the careers of over 100 tight ends and calculated how productive their average passing offense was. Regular readers may recall that I previously used a similar methodology to grade wide receivers. Let’s use Vernon Davis as an example.  He’s experienced it all, from the early struggles of Alex Smith to the efficient version, the dark days of Shaun Hill and Troy Smith, but also the good days of Colin Kaepernick and Kirk Cousins. [continue reading…]

How much did passing efficiency decline in 2019 compared to a record-setting 2018? That depends, a bit, on how you measure passing efficiency — in more ways than one.

In 2018, all NFL passers combined to average 6.32 Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt. In 2019, all NFL passers combined to average 6.16 ANY/A, a decline of 2.6%. However, there is another way to measure league average, and that’s by taking an average of the average ANY/A stats for each of the 32 teams.

In 2019, while “the NFL” as a whole had a 6.16 ANY/A average, an average of each of the ANY/A rates for the 32 teams comes to 6.19. If that is confusing to you, think of it this way: when we calculate “the league average” in passing stats, we are giving more weight to the Bucs, Panthers, and Falcons than to the Ravens, Titans, and Vikings. Collectively, those three NFC South teams were responsible for 11.0% of all passing plays in 2019; meanwhile, pass plays from Baltimore, Tennessee, and Minnesota account for only 7.7% of NFL passing plays.

When we think of league average, we almost always mean a weighted average that gives more weight to the teams that pass most frequently. But there’s at least an argument to be made that league average would be better defined by taking an average of the averages. And in this case, in 2019, it would mean a higher average: that’s because the wrong passers threw it more often in 2019.

Last year, the right passers threw it more often: an average of the ANY/A produced by each of the 32 teams was 6.29 (which was lower than the normal average of 6.32, since the weaker passing teams threw less frequently last year). By this measure, passing efficiency declined only 1.6% — from 6.29 to 6.19 — from 2018 to 2019, rather than by 2.6%.

Let’s look at each team in 2019. The X-Axis shows the number of dropbacks: the NFC South teams (other than the Saints) are on the far right, because they passed the most. The Y-Axis shows pass efficiency, as measured by ANY/A.

It’s pretty clear that the “wrong teams” passed most often in 2019; the chart has a slope that is down and to the right. This, of course, is why the “NFL ANY/A” was 6.16 but the “average of the ANY/A for the 32 teams” was 6.19; by giving the Ravens and Titans equal weight to the Bucs and Panthers, you raise the average.

You might think this is how things always are: after all, the whole point behind my Game Scripts work is that teams with the lead pass less often, and trailing teams pass more often. But of course we already discussed that last year, the reverse was true: the right teams passed more often. In fact, there isn’t much of a trend in recent years as to whether or not the better passing teams are more likely or less likely to pass more often.

This final graph is a little wonky, but here goes. It shows the league average ANY/A in each season calculated the normal way minus the average of the ANY/A for all of the teams. So in 2019, you get a negative number (6.16 – 6.19 is -0.03); in 2018, it’s positive. Any time the graph is above 0, it means that the right teams are passing more often. Any time it’s below zero — as in 2019 — it means the wrong teams are passing more often.

What do you think?

On Monday, I looked at the top passers in 2019 after adjusting for strength of schedule. The same process and methodology is used to rank the defenses, so let’s look at that today. And while they had an easy schedule, there’s no denying that the 2019 Patriots had — by a good measure — the best pass defense in the NFL. Quarterbacks throwing against New England gained just 3.41 Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt in 2019, a whopping 2.75 ANY/A better than average. And while that group was 0.31 ANY/A worse than average, it still means the Patriots pass defense was 2.44 ANY/A better than average.

The Bills actually had the easiest SOS in 2019, followed by the Dolphins, Cowboys, Jets, and then Patriots. No surprise there: the AFC East and NFC East had the six easiest opposing passing schedules in 2019. Meanwhile, the Panthers, Chargers, Texans, Cardinals, and Chies all had very difficult passing schedules. In particular, this is noteworthy for Kansas City: after adjusting for SOS, Kansas City’s pass defense ranked 3rd in the NFL in 2019. Derek Carr had his worst and third-worst games of the season against the Chiefs; Tom Brady had his second-worst game of the season against Kansas City; and Philip Rivers had two of his five worst games of the year when facing Kansas City. Lamar Jackson struggled, too: he had a rare game with no passing touchdowns against Kansas City, and averaged just 5.41 net yards per pass attempt.

The full results, below. [continue reading…]

Last week, I posted the final 2019 passing numbers; today, I am going to show those numbers after we adjust for strength of schedule, using the methodology described here. As always, an iterative process is used to adjust for strength of schedule: each quarterback’s season is adjusted for the quality of the defenses he’s faced, those defenses are adjusted for the quality of the quarterbacks they faced, and so on, until equilibrium is reached.

Carson Wentz and Sam Darnold had the two easiest schedules this year. Let’s begin with Wentz. Here’s how to read his graph, starting with his best game of the season.  In week 1, Wentz and the Eagles hosted Washington and won, 32-27.  Wentz threw 39 passes for 313 yards with 3 TDs and no interceptions, and 1 sack for no yards.  That gives him 373 Adjusted Net Yards (Passing Yards + 20 * TDs – 45 * INTs – Sack Yards Lost) on 40 DropBacks (Attempts + Sacks).  This game made up 6.2% of all dropbacks Wentz had all season.  He averaged 9.33 ANY/A in this game on 40 dropbacks; assuming the league average ANY/A of 6.16, this means Wentz produced 127 Adjusted Net Yards of Value above average.  However, Washington was a bad pass defense, finishing 0.88 ANY/A below average.  Therefore, Wentz’s actual value for this game was +91, now +127, after adjusting for strength of schedule. [continue reading…]

Kyle Allen and Patrick Mahomes are at opposite ends of the quarterback spectrum. Allen was an undrafted free agent; Mahomes is one of the most talented quarterbacks in league history and was the 2018 NFL MVP.

Allen ranks 32nd out of 34 qualifying quarterbacks in the most basic (in a good way) of passing stats: net yards per attempt.

Mahomes ranks 1st this year in NY/A, after ranking 1st in the same stat last year among quarterbacks who started at least 8 games.  Net yards per attempt is a good stat, and Mahomes is excellent at it because he’s an excellent quarterback (or maybe vice versa).

But you know better than to expect this to be a “Mahomes good Allen bad” post. Because I did a triple take this morning when I noticed that Kyle Allen has thrown for first downs at a higher rate this season than Mahomes.  That seemed impossible, and I had to double check twice just to make sure the data wasn’t wrong.

In general, there is a significant correlation between Net Yards per Attempt (which is passing yards, net of sack yards lost, divided by pass attempts plus sacks) and Passing 1st Down Rate (which is passing first downs divided by pass attempts plus sacks).   Both of these are very good stats to measure quarterback play, and last year, Mahomes led the NFL with a 43.2% passing first down rate.   Passing 1st Down Percentage is a good quick and dirty stat, and one where the best quarterbacks tend to fare very well. It is certainly not biased against a player like Mahomes.  But this year, Mahomes ranks 13th in that metric despite still having a very good NY/A average, while Allen shockingly ranks 11th in the metric.

So we have two pretty good, and easy to calculate passing stats, that in general are very correlated.  How correlated? Take a look at the graph below, which shows the same data as the table above.  And while the logos are for teams, the data  is for individual quarterbacks, not team-level data. So the Jets logo is only Sam Darnold, not the full Jets passing stats in 2019. And for the Redskins, Titans, and Steelers, it’s Dwayne Haskins, Ryan Tannehill, and Mason Rudolph in the chart below.  The Panthers, and to a lesser extent, the Chiefs, stand out as a notable outlier: [continue reading…]

The goal of an NFL game is to win the game. If your opponent scores 17 points, you want to score 18 points, but anything more than 18 points is unnecessary. On the other hand, if you lose a game, all of the points you scored were unnecessary: losing 17-0 counts the same as losing 17-16.

With that logic, most points in an NFL game are “wasted” or unnecessary points. The Bengals started the season 0-11, so all points scored by Cincinnati were wasted during that stretch. In the 12th game, when Cincinnati won 22-6, you could claim that 15 of the 22 points scored were wasted, too. That means 172 of the 179 points scored by the Bengals this year — or 96% — were wasted points. Said differently, Cincinnati could have scored 7 points this year, not 172, and if allocated correctly, have the same record.

For Seattle, it’s a different story. The Seahawks are 10-2 and have scored 329 points; the minimum number of points Seattle could have scored and still achieved a 10-2 record is 240 points, given how many points the team has allowed each week. That means only 27% of the Seahawks points this year have been “wasted” points:

The graph below shows all 32 teams in the NFL this season.  The X-Axis shows points per game; the Y-Axis shows the “wasted” points per game, based on the following formula:

• In a win, all points scored after 1 point more than your opponent scored are wasted.  In a 20-17 victory, there are 2 wasted points.  In a 30-17 victory, there are 12 wasted points.
• In a loss, all points scored are wasted points.
• In a tie, since a tie is half a win, half of the points are wasted (i.e., you could have scored 0 points and had zero wins).

We can also look at this on a percentage basis. As you might suspect, the Bengals have wasted the highest percentage of their team’s points this year, at 96%, while the Seahawks have wasted the lowest percentage, at just 27%.

In its simplest terms, what we are solving for here is the fewest amount of points a team could have scored and still finished with the same record. And as it turns out, the Seahawks are historic outliers. Since 1970, the most “efficient” team at scoring was the 2016 Raiders. Oakland scored 416 points that season, and in 4 losses, scored 28, 13, 10, and 6 points for a total of 57 points. In the team’s 12 wins, the Raiders average margin of victory was only 6.67, which means only 5.67 points per game were wasted in wins, or 68 total. Overall, this means the Raiders wasted only 125 of the team’s 416 points; said differently, for the 2016 Raiders to go 12-4, given how many points they allowed in each game, the team needed to score at least 291 points. They actually scored 416, so the team only “wasted” 30% of their points. That’s the lowest of any team since 1970.

The table below shows the amount of wasted points by each team from 1970 to 2018.

If the Seahawks can keep this up, they will wind up being the most efficient team at distributing their points across games for any team since 1970.