On the surface, Bears quarterback Mitchell Trubisky is having an unremarkable season. Through 16 weeks, there are 36 qualifying passers, and Trubisky ranks 24th in Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt. He is not doing particularly well in any conventional metric: Trubisky ranks 24th in completion percentage, 20th in yards per completion, 21st in sack rate, and a dismal 29th in interception rate! The only area where he’s really standing out is in touchdown rate, where he ranks 8th, but even his TD/INT ratio is relatively mediocre.
And yet, there is one area where Trubisky has not just been good, he’s been the best: the Bears fourth year quarterback is picking up first downs at the best rate in the NFL.
So what is going on? Trubisky seems like a large outlier; is he? I looked at how many net yards per pass attempt each starting quarterback has gained this year, and plotted that next to their passing first down rate. That is shown in the graph below, which is individual quarterback data and not team data. For the 6 teams that do not have one quarterback who started at least 10 games, I am using Trubisky over Nick Foles, Tua Tagovaiola over Ryan Fitzpatrick, Andy Dalton over Dak Prescott, Nick Mullens over Jimmy Garoppolo, Gardner Minshew II in Jacksonville, and Alex Smith over Dwayne Haskins.
So yes, Trubisky is in fact a huge outlier.
So what’s going on here?
Trubisky did take one ridiculous, 28-yard sack. Had that just been an incompletion, his Net Yards per Attempt average would be 6.29 instead of 6.18, while his first down rate would be the same.
Trubisky also has almost no big plays. His longest completion this year was just 35 yards; big positive plays really impact your NY/A, but don’t impact your first down rate once you pick up the first down. This is probably a positive indicator for Trubisky, as long plays are pretty random, and the fact that his season is not boosted by long plays is a good sign.
He is 29-for-78 on third and fourth down, which is good but nothing spectacular. Instead, Trubisky is just doing well on early downs. On first downs, he has picked up a first down on 41 out of 108 plays, and on 1st-and-10, that rate is 36 out of 93 plays. That’s at the top of the league, along with Dak Prescott, Matt Ryan, and Ryan Fitzpatrick. But interestingly enough, Trubisky’s NY/A average on first down is nothing special: in fact, he ranks just 19th at 7.36.
In fact, let’s compare Trubisky on 1st-and-10 to his team’s biggest rival and the frontrunner for MVP: Aaron Rodgers. Trubisky has 93 dropbacks, and has picked up a first down on 36 of them and gained 709 yards and lost 24 on sacks; so he’s averaging 7.37 NY/A with a 39% first down rate when facing 1st-and-10. In Green Bay, Rodgers has 171 attempts and 5 sacks, and has gained 47 first downs, 1,349 yards, and lost 35 yards on sacks. That translates to a 7.47 NY/A average but a much poorer 27% first down rate. To provide some reference, the two players rank 18th and 19th in NY/A in these situations out of 36 qualifying passers, but Trubisky ranks 3rd in passing first down rate and Rodgers ranks 27th!
So what is happening? The two players are both completing 68% of their passes, but Rodgers has completions of 78, 56, 52, 48, and 42 yards. Let’s plot how many passing yards each quarterback has gained on 1st-and-10 in team colors; dark colors means the play gained at least 10 yards for a first down, while the lighter color means the play gained less than 10 yards. I am using the same Y-scale for both players, going from -15 yards to 95 yards. The X-Axis is just play number, sorted from most yards to fewest.
Let’s start with Trubisky:
And now Rodgers:
All else being equal, we would typically assume that the more sustainable play is what Trubisky is doing. Those long plays are not sustainable, and Trubisky has been great at moving the chains. Then again, betting on him to be the better player than Rodgers feels like a foolish bet.
So what do you think?