Brad Oremland is a longtime commenter and a fellow football historian. Brad is also a senior NFL writer at Sports Central. There are few who have given as much thought to the history of quarterbacks and quarterback ranking systems as Brad has over the years. What follows is Brad’s latest work on quarterback statistical production.

---

This is the penultimate article in a seven-part series. It is a supplement to my series on the greatest quarterbacks of all time, last year’s article on the top-ranked QBs in Total Statistical Production, and last month’s post about QB-TSP in the 2017 season and another way of using TSP. Over the last five weeks, I’ve written about the top 100 quarterbacks of the Modern Era, as ranked by TSP:

81-100
61-80
41-60
21-40
1-20

This article presents a different way of evaluating quarterbacks. It is data-heavy, so if you’re just here for my prose, I’m sorry to disappoint. The chart below shows those same 100 QBs, along with each player’s: Adjusted TSP, Career Value, Seasons among the top 10 in QB-TSP, Top-10-Points, Year-Points, 500-TSP seasons, 1,000-TSP seasons, 1,500-TSP seasons, 2,000-TSP seasons, 2,250-TSP seasons, 2,500-TSP seasons, Pro Bowls, All-Pro honors ((From 1970-present, I used the Associated Press All-Pro Team. I counted First-Team selections as 3 points and Second-Team selections as 1 point. A First-Team selection by one or more other major organizations, for a player not named First-Team by AP, counts as +1, and an MVP selection by any major organization was worth +1.

For instance, in 2016, Tom Brady was named Second-Team All-Pro by AP (1 pt), but First-Team by the Sporting News, so he scored 2 pts that season. The score of AP First-Team All-Pro Matt Ryan was unaffected, remaining 4 points (including his MVP selection). In 1993, the AP All-Pros were Steve Young and John Elway, but the Sporting News chose Troy Aikman. Young scored 3, and Aikman and Elway 1 each. In 1990, Joe Montana scored 4 points, with Randall Cunningham and Warren Moon earning 2 each. [continue reading…]

A couple of months ago, I asked this question on Twitter:

Do you know the answer? I’ll give you a couple of moments to think about it. First, a graph showing the 200 players with the most pass attempts in NFL history (all have at least 1,325 attempts). On the X-Axis is completion percentage; on the Y-Axis is Yards per Completion. There are no era adjustments here, which can also make it kind of fun: over time, completion percentages have skyrocketed, while the average yardage gained per completion has decreased. As a result, a player with a very high yards per completion percentage almost certainly played long ago, and therefore has a low completion percentage (and vice versa). Take a look: [continue reading…]

Today’s post is a re-post from friend of the program Bryan Frye’s site, which is being republished with his permission and encouragement. As regular readers know, Bryan operates his own fantastic site, http://www.thegridfe.com. You can view all of Bryan’s guest posts here, and follow him on twitter @LaverneusDingle. What follows are Bryan’s words, with minor editing from Chase.

---

Over the years, I’ve given much thought to the value (Championship Leverage) of postseason games relative to regular season games. Sabermetrics guru Tom Tango invented the Leverage Index in 2008 to apply a value to the gravity of a given base-out-inning situation in baseball. Later, Neil Paine used the concept for basketball and, subsequently, football. I found his application of the concept to NFL quarterbacks to be particularly interesting, and I decided to go into more detail on Neil’s methodology and expand the findings back to 1936 (the first NFL season with a standardized schedule). [continue reading…]

Yesterday, we looked at quarterback records against the spread.  In that post, I noted that Tom Brady and the Patriots have been favorites in a remarkable 52 consecutive games, which would nearly be an NFL record if Brady hadn’t missed any games. For his career, the Patriots have been favored in 232 games that Brady has started, been an underdog 52 times, and the line has been a Pick’em in 4 games.

The table below shows the number of games that each quarterback’s team has been a favorite, underdog, or pick’em since 1978. For quarterbacks who started games before 1978, like Terry Bradshaw, I have played ** next to their name to indicate that this data does not cover their whole career.  Post-1978 Bradshaw, however, has the highest percentage of games as a favorite, followed by Steve Young and then Brady. [continue reading…]

Joe Montana’s teams were really good at winning football games, going 117-47 and 16-7 in games started by the Hall of Fame quarterback. Montana’s teams had a 0.711 overall winning percentage, which is great; but what’s even more remarkable is how well his teams did against the points spread.

On average, Montana’s teams were favored by 4.5 points. And given the nature of how points spreads work, you would expect most teams to win about half of their games against the spread. But Montana’s teams went 114-73 against the spread, a remarkable winning percentage of 0.610. Much of the success was due to the 49ers of 1981 (15-4 ATS), 1984 (13-5), and 1989 (13-3). The ’81 team was one of the most surprising Super Bowl champions of all time; San Francisco was favored in just 9 of 19 games that year, with three of those spreads being just 1-point lines. And the ’84 and ’89 teams were two of the greatest teams of all time, so it’s not surprising that they had great ATS records, too. The table below show’s the record against the spread for each of Montana’s teams in each season of his career:

…

Also really good against the spread, of course, is Tom Brady and the Patriots. The ’01, ’03, and ’04 Patriots were all Super Bowl champions that were remarkable against the spread, combining to go 41-11-3 relative to the Vegas odds. The Patriots remained solid but unspectacular against the spread since then, although the ’16 team went 13-2 with Brady under center.

What makes the Brady stuff all the more remarkable: the last 52 times the Patriots have taken the field with Brady under center, the Patriots have been favored. And you have to go back 60 games, November 2014 game against the Packers, where New England has been underdogs with Brady under center. More on that tomorrow. [continue reading…]

Brad Oremland is a longtime commenter and a fellow football historian. Brad is also a senior NFL writer at Sports Central. There are few who have given as much thought to the history of quarterbacks and quarterback ranking systems as Brad has over the years. What follows is Brad’s latest work on quarterback statistical production.

---

What I thought was an off-hand musing about Drew Brees’ production in low-leverage situations (for my ongoing series about the greatest statistical QBs in history) sparked a surprisingly contentious debate about whether Brees had padded his stats in garbage time.

I tried to align this with a very conservative definition of “garbage time” … all data are from 2004-17 — 2004 was Brees’ first good season — and none of the game/score situations below produced any wins by any team during those years. “P/B/R” indicates the combined total of Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Aaron Rodgers.

Please pardon the informal prose and formatting; this was originally composed as a comment, not an article. [continue reading…]

Yesterday, Brad Oremland’s great series on his top-ranked QBs in Total Statistical Production concluded. You should give that a read today, especially if you missed it because of the holiday.One thing that Brad wrote about in the Manning section was how Manning was nearly always better than Brady during the ’00s. It’s easy to forget about that now — Brady has been the much better QB for each of the last three years, and for most years in the ’10s. But during the ’00s, the only year that Brady was clearly better was ’07.I decided to make a graph of the Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt for Tom Brady (in red with blue dots) and Peyton Manning (in blue with white dots for his Colts years, and orange with blue dots for his Broncos years) for each of the last 20 seasons. Brady missed all or nearly all of the ’98 (college), ’99 (college), ’00 (backup), and ’07 (injury) seasons, while Manning missed all of the ’11 (injury), ’16 (retired), and ’17 (retired) seasons. They each get a zero for those seasons, even tho Brady threw 14 passes combined in those years. The thin black line represents league average ANY/A each season.You can break this down into a few categories. [continue reading…]

Brad Oremland is a longtime commenter and a fellow football historian. Brad is also a senior NFL writer at Sports Central. There are few who have given as much thought to the history of quarterbacks and quarterback ranking systems as Brad has over the years. What follows is Brad’s latest work on quarterback statistical production.

---

This is part five of a seven-part series. It is a supplement to my 2015 series on the greatest quarterbacks of all time, last year’s article on the top-ranked QBs in Total Statistical Production, and a recent post about QB-TSP in the 2017 season and another way of using TSP. I strongly encourage you to read those pieces if you haven’t done so already. You may also be interested in the previous entries of this series.

Best Statistical QBs: 81-100
Best Statistical QBs: 61-80
Best Statistical QBs: 41-60
Best Statistical QBs: 21-40

In this series, I present the top 100 pro football quarterbacks as ranked by QB-TSP. This is a purely statistical ranking, with all the drawbacks that entails, and in many places it is not reflective of my subjective evaluations. This week, we examine the top 20 quarterbacks of the Modern Era.

Questions and comments are encouraged, but please understand that this series is a product of extensive research and analysis, not whim or guess or hot take, and it was produced with no agenda except to inform and explain. Thanks for reading. [continue reading…]

Let’s start with some trivia.

Which running back has the most 100-yard rushing games in his career?

There have been 11 running backs who have rushed for 100+ yards in a winning effort in 40 or more regular season games. Ten of them are in the Hall of Fame, but the man who has done it 51 times — the third most ever — is not (and is eligible). Name him.

Which running back has the best winning percentage in games when he rushed for 100+ yards, minimum 15 games?

Which running back has the best winning percentage in games when he rushed for 100+ yards, minimum 30 games?

Here’s a record that I am confident will not be broken in the next 20 years, and might not ever be broken at all. One running back rushed for 100+ yards in a game that his team lost 32 times in his career. No other player has done it more than 23 times. To get a sense of comparison, Adrian Peterson and Steven Jackson have done it 31 times, combined.  Name him.

[continue reading…]

Frank Gore has had a remarkable career. He’s averaged at least 60 rushing yards per game in 12 different seasons, second only to Emmitt Smith. But it’s also been somewhat remarkable in how unremarkable each season has been: Gore averaged a nondescript 43.4 rushing yards per game as a rookie and then an eye-popping 105.9 rushing yards per game in his second season; since then, for 11 straight years, Gore has averaged between 60 and 80 rushing yards per game. No other player has more than 7 such seasons in their career, let alone consecutive, with Warrick Dunn, Franco Harris, and Ricky Watters tied for second place on the list.

So far, Gore has rushed for 14,026 rushing yards in his career.  But I wanted to try to identify similar — and dissimilar — rushers to Gore.  So here’s what I did: for each running back, I identified his rushing yards in each season of his career.  For seasons where the league had fewer than 16 team games per season, I pro-rated that player’s production as if the league had 16 games.  So players in a 14-game season get their rushing yards bumped by 14.3%, regardless of how many games they played.  Then, I gave a player 100% credit for their best rushing season, 90% credit for their second best rushing season, 80% credit for their third best rushing season, and so on.  Doing this gives Gore just 6,824 rushing yards, just under half of his actual total.

[continue reading…]

The 2017 Eagles won the Super Bowl, but the 2016 Eagles were just 7-9. That is pretty misleading: the 2016 Eagles had the best DVOA of any team in the last 30 years with a losing record, so in some ways, the ’17 season wasn’t a big surprise.

On the other hand, well, the Eagles became just the 4th team to go from a losing record to Super Bowl champion in one season. The other three teams were much worse in the prior year than the 2017 Eagles, but you can probably guess them: the 2001 Patriots, 1999 Rams, and 1981 49ers.

On average, Super Bowl champions win 12.7 games the year they win the Super Bowl (with non-16 game seasons pro-rated to 16 games), 10.9 games the year before, 9.7 the year before that, 9.5 three years before, and 9.2 four years before. The table below shows the number of wins in Year N (the Super Bowl year) for each Super Bowl champion, along with their number of wins in the prior four years. The final column shows the average of wins in Years N-1, N-2, N-3, and N-4. Note that all non-16 game seasons have been pro-rated. [continue reading…]

Simeon Rice was one of the best pass rushers of his generation. He led all players in sacks from 1996 to 2005, and also from 1999 to 2002. During those four seasons, Rice played on defenses that faced just 2,098 pass plays: every team other than the Bills (2,078 pass plays) faced more pass plays during those years.

In fact, in his average season — weighted for the number of sacks Rice recorded — his defenses faced just 32.78 pass attempts (including sacks) per game. The reason I weight for number of sacks is that if Rice played on defenses that faced 600 pass attempts during his big sack years, and 400 pass attempts during his low sack years, that’s not the same as facing 500 pass attempts every year. A player’s reputation is built off of his big sack years, which generally coincide with his prime; as a result, those years should received more weight. If a 37-year-old Rice played on a team that faced 700 pass attempts and Rice barely played, it wouldn’t make sense to count that equally with a year in his prime.

The table below shows every season of Rice’s career. By way of example, as a rookie, he played for Arizona and recorded 12.5 sacks, which is 10.25% of his career total. His Cardinals faced 548 pass plays (including sacks), or 34.25 per game that season, so when calculating his career grade, 10.25% of it will come from the 34.25 number. The “Prod” column is the product of the “Perc” column and the “TPA/G” column. The far right column shows the average NFL sack rate that season, which is shown only for reference. [continue reading…]

There are 256 regular season games each year, plus 11 postseason games, for a total of 267 NFL games per season. This means there are 534 team games each year, which means 534 different Game Scripts and 534 different pass ratios. Here’s a graph of all pass ratios (on the Y-Axis) from 2017, marked against Game Scripts (on the X-Axis).  As you can see, as a team’s Game Script improves, its pass ratio tends to decrease.

[continue reading…]

In 2001, Michael Strahan had 22.5 sacks, the most in a single season since 1982.

In 1987, Reggie White had 21 sacks in just 12 games, the highest per-game average since 1982.

In 1986, Lawrence Taylor won the AP MVP award and had 20.5 sacks.

Those three seasons were all great sack seasons, but I’d argue that DeMarcus Ware in 2008 – when he had 20.0 sacks – was the best sack season of the bunch.

Let’s start by looking at the NFL average sack rates (defined as sacks divided by sacks plus pass attempts) in each season since 1982, when the NFL began tracking sacks for individual defensive players. I have colored in red the ’86, ’87, ’01, and ’08 seasons. [continue reading…]

Brad Oremland is a longtime commenter and a fellow football historian. Brad is also a senior NFL writer at Sports Central. There are few who have given as much thought to the history of quarterbacks and quarterback ranking systems as Brad has over the years. What follows is Brad’s latest work on quarterback statistical production.

---

This is part four of a five-part series. It is a supplement to my 2015 series on the greatest quarterbacks of all time, last year’s article on the top-ranked QBs in Total Statistical Production, and last month’s post about QB-TSP in the 2017 season and another way of using TSP. I strongly encourage you to read those pieces if you haven’t done so already. You may also be interested in parts one, two, and three of this series.

In this series, I present the top 100 pro football quarterbacks as ranked by QB-TSP. This is a purely statistical ranking, with all the drawbacks that entails, and in many places it is not reflective of my subjective evaluations. Each week, we’ll examine 20 players, continuing this week with ranks 21-40. [continue reading…]

Yesterday, I looked at the 34 quarterbacks to throw 1,000 passes from 2011 to 2017. In that group, there were four quarterbacks who stood out with low interception rates and high sack rates. All four are black, which is pretty unlikely to happen by random chance given that there were just six black quarterbacks in the study.

But that was a small sample. Today, we expand the group to look at all quarterbacks with at least 1,000 career pass attempts who were active in 2002 or later. For each quarterback, I looked at their INT% and sack% in each season, and measured those rates relative to league average. I have plotted the career grades on the graph below.

On the X-Axis is interception rate relative to league average; it spans from -1.5% (which means 1.5% worse than league average: i.e., really bad) to +1.5% (really good). Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers are the two at just over +1.0%, while Tommy Maddox is at the far left at -1.26% (he has the worst era-adjusted interception rate since the merger). On the Y-Axis is sack rate relative to league average: at the very bottom, of course, is David Carr, at -4.7%; at the very top are Peyton Manning (+3.3%) and … old Bears QB Jim Miller (+3.0%). ^[1]Miller played from ’95 to ’02, so he just makes it into the study. To be clear, if a player was active in ’02, his entire career was included, which is just another reason why we … Continue reading

So for purposes of this chart, you want to be up and to the right, which indicates better than average sack rates and better than average interception rates. There are 22 black quarterbacks who threw 1,000 passes. I have plotted them in red, while all other data points are in blue. Take a look: [continue reading…]

In December 2010, Jason Lisk wrote an interesting piece about whether race still matters when it comes to quarterback play in the NFL. That article has stuck with me over the years — I referenced it last year in a piece questioning whether Colin Kaepernick’s political stance impacted his style of play in 2016 — and the key excerpt is below:

Still, one of the things I have observed is that black quarterbacks, as a group, have tended to be better at avoiding interceptions than their white counterparts. …

Interceptions are highly random, subject to game situation, dependent on deflections, tips, the receiver running the correct route, the defender making a good play and not dropping the ball. They can also be somewhat controlled by the quarterback’s behavior. If you try to fit the ball into tight windows, your chances for both a good play and a bad one increase. There is also no other quarterback action that gets criticized as “stupid” or “dumb” like an interception thrown. I can see how black quarterbacks feel they need to be more cautious when it comes to interceptions, to avoid that criticism. I suspect that the difference in interception numbers is a real effect driven by this external pressure.

So, I think that race matters, because the numbers – as well as direct statements from McNabb and Doug Williams as quoted in Hill’s piece – tell me it matters in affecting how the black quarterbacks play the game as far as avoiding interceptions.

[continue reading…]

How do you identify who is a rushing quarterback? On the surface, rushing yards per game seems like a pretty simple and easy way to do it.  Michael Vick is the career leader in rushing yards per game by a quarterback, at 42.7. ^[1]Although Spec Sanders would be number one if you were inclined to label him a quarterback. Robert Griffin (39.8), Cam Newton (39.6), Russell Wilson (34.1), and Colin Kaepernick (33.3) are the next five quarterbacks on the career rushing yards/game list after Vick. ^[2]Bob Hoernschemeyer, Tuffy Leemans, and Charley Trippi also all averaged more than 25 passing yards per game and at least 35 rushing yards per game.

That seems to work pretty well, I suppose. But what about Bobby Douglass? He averaged 40.5 rushing yards per game with the Bears in 61 games but only 45 starts; he played in 30 more games the rest of his career that torpedoed his career average to 29.2. Or Greg Landry, who averaged 24.5 rushing yards per game with the Lions, but whose career averaged is only 18.5 because of time spent as a backup.

And here’s the really tricky part. Today’s quarterbacks pass more than ever. If a quarterback runs 6 times and passes 34 times in 2018, does that make him less run-happy than a quarterback who ran 6 times and passed 24 times in 1981? I think it might: the 1981 QB ran on 20% of plays, while the 2018 QB will run on 15% of his plays. But it is not necessarily intuitive (or correct) to identify rushing quarterbacks by how much they rush for relative to their passing.

So that’s what I did today: I calculated both the rushing yards per game and the rushing yards per pass attempt career averages for all quarterbacks with at least 1,000 pass attempts.  Here’s how to read the table below (which shows the top 100 rushing quarterbacks by this metric), using Bobby Douglass as an example. Douglass rushed 410 times in his career for 2,654 yards, a 6.47 YPC average. He played in 91 games, meaning he averaged 29.2 yards per game. He threw only 1,178 passes, however; as a result, Douglass averaged an incredible 2.25 rushing yards for every pass attempt in his career. That’s the best in NFL history, and Vick is the only one who is even close. [continue reading…]

You probably don’t think too much about Vince Young these days. The former Texas Longhorn star and Tennessee Titans disappointment last played in an NFL game back in 2011. But when I ran some queries recently, Young shocked me in a couple of stats. Let’s start with one you probably didn’t expect.

Young had a really good sack rate, particularly in 2009. But what makes Young’s sack rate really impressive is his sack rate relative to his rushing ability. In 2009, Young rushed 55 times and was sacked just 9 times. Among players with at least 200 pass attempts in a season, Young 2009 is the only instance where a player had at least 6 times as many rushing attempts as sacks; even if you drop the ratio to 5 times, only two other seasons are included.

And because Young had an insanely low average sack yards that year — he averaged just four yards lost per sack — he set another “record” that year. Young rushed 55 times and lost 36 yards on sacks; no other player has ever had more rushing attempts than sack yards lost, much less than 1.5:1 ratio that Young had that would hold up until you drop the pass attempt minimum below 120.

For his career, the numbers are similar, though obviously less extreme. Young had 282 career rushing attempts and just 83 sacks; that ratio of 3.40 rush attempts per sack is the highest among all players since 1970 (among the top 200 leaders in pass attempts). If you look at rushing yards compared to sacks, Young was at 17.58-to-1, second only to Michael Vick, who was helped by a remarkable 7.0 yards per carry average that nobody can match.

The table below shows this data for the 200 quarterbacks with the most attempts since 1970. When it comes to being a rushing quarterback and avoiding sacks, nobody can beat Vince Young: [continue reading…]

Today we are going to look at the Game Scripts from the 11 games in the 2017 playoffs. There were two big blowouts in the postseason: the Eagles over the Vikings in the NFCCG and the Patriots over the Titans in the division round. Both teams won by over 20 points and had Game Scripts of over +10. But there were two other games that were very close but with blowout Game Scripts: in other words, two games that almost saw miraculous comebacks.

The Jaguars beat the Steelers with a Game Script of +10.6. Jacksonville led 21-0 early in the 2nd quarter and 28-7 late in the first half. But Pittsburgh scored 5 touchdowns on the team’s final 7 drives of the game, ultimately falling 45-42.

The Vikings led the Saints 17-0 just 20 minutes into the division round game, and that score held with just 17 minutes left in the game. From there, New Orleans staged a furious comeback, scoring 24 points in 16-minute stretch to take a 24-23 lead. This was one of the most miraculous comebacks in playoff history, but it was upstaged by an even more miraculous comeback by the Vikings just seconds later.

The full Game Scripts data from the playoffs, below: [continue reading…]

The end of 2017 was a pretty busy time for me, so I stopped the game scripts data after week 15. Under the philosophy of late than never… [continue reading…]

Brad Oremland is a longtime commenter and a fellow football historian. Brad is also a senior NFL writer at Sports Central. There are few who have given as much thought to the history of quarterbacks and quarterback ranking systems as Brad has over the years. What follows is Brad’s latest work on quarterback statistical production.

---

This is part three of a seven-part series. It is a supplement to my 2015 series on the greatest quarterbacks of all time, last year’s article on the top-ranked QBs in Total Statistical Production, and last month’s post about QB-TSP in the 2017 season and another way of using TSP. I strongly encourage you to read those pieces if you haven’t done so already. You may also be interested in parts one and two of this series.

In this series, I present the top 100 pro football quarterbacks as ranked by QB-TSP. This is a purely statistical ranking, with all the drawbacks that entails, and in many places it is not reflective of my subjective evaluations. Each week, we’ll examine 20 players, continuing this week with ranks 41-60. [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.

---

Earlier this month, I introduced a new stat called Surplus Yards and applied it to the 2017 season. If you haven’t read that post, consider that required background reading.

Since then, I calculated and archived every 40+ yard completion since 1994. The chart below shows the league average Surplus % for each of the last 24 seasons:

[continue reading…]

Nobody questions how valuable Rob Gronkowski has been to the Patriots and to Tom Brady. The future Hall of Fame tight end is a dominant force when healthy, and Brady’s numbers with and without Gronk reflect that. With the PFR game play finder, we can easily look at Brady’s career numbers in the regular season on passes to Gronkowski and to everyone else.

[Note: I still am not a fan of using per-target statistics to judge wide receivers, but I find them an interesting — but certainly not definitive — part of the puzzle when looking at quarterback production. Also note: all statistics in this post are from the PFR game play finder, so they may differ slightly from official numbers.]

Here are a few stats to consider:

• Gronk has seen 8.2% of Brady’s career targets, but is responsible for 10.7% of his career passing yards (+2.6%).
• On passes to Gronk, Brady has averaged 9.95 yards per attempt; on passes to all other Patriots, Brady has averaged 7.36 yards per attempt, a whopping 2.59 yards/attempt lower.
• Thought of another way, Gronkowski has elevated Brady’s yards per attempt by 0.21, as Brady has a career yards / attempt average of 7.57.

So yes, Gronk has been great.  ^[1]And note that using yards is not even the best way to show how valuable Gronk has been.  He’s responsible for 15.3% (!) of Brady’s career touchdowns.; But so has Jordy Nelson, who has been a critical part of the success that Aaron Rodgers has had in Green Bay.  Let’s look at those same numbers:

• Nelson has seen 14.6% of Rodgers’ career passes, but he is responsible for 18.0% (+3.3%) of his career passing yards.
• On passes to Nelson, Rodgers has averaged 9.81 yards per attempt; on passes to all other Packers, Rodgers has averaged 7.67 yards per attempt, 2.14 yards/attempt lower.
• Nelson has elevated Rodgers’ career yards per attempt average by 0.31, as Rodgers has a career Y/A average of 7.98.

Gronkowski being +2.59 Y/A better than all other Patriots is a remarkable figure, and Nelson being at “just” +2.14 doesn’t quite compare.  But due to volume, Nelson has actually raised his quarterback’s career average by a much larger degree.

I used the PFR game play finder to look at the passing breakdown of Brady, Rodgers, and also Drew Brees and Peyton Manning. Some nuggets:

• Marvin Harrison was responsible for 16.6% of Manning’s targets, the highest in the bunch. Brady is the only quarterback of the bunch who didn’t throw even 9% of his targets to one player; Rodgers, meanwhile, has seen four different receivers (Nelson, Randall Cobb, Greg Jennings, and James Jones) on the receiving end of at least 9% of his passes. This is in part because Rodgers has had a shorter career, and also the general lack of roster turnover in Green Bay.
• More than any other quarterback, Brees has made a living off of secondary weapons. Kenny Stills (11.82 yards/target, 133 targets), Robert Meachem (10.74, 251), and Devery Henderson (10.27, 384) were the only three players to average over 10 yards per target on at least 100 targets.
• Brees throws a ton to running backs, and they also kill his average. Among players for these four quarterbacks who were responsible for at least 2.5% of their quarterback’s targets, Brees has the three players with the lowest average gains: LaDainian Tomlinson, Reggie Bush, and Mark Ingram.
• Nothing stands out immediately to me about Manning: as you would suspect, Reggie Wayne, Harrison, and Demaryius Thomas are the three who have helped him the most, but not to a particularly noteworthy degree. Harrison had the most targets, Wayne bumped his average up the most (+0.16), and Thomas had the best average gain (9.32).

[continue reading…]

Antonio Brown is one of the best players in the NFL, and is on his way to becoming a Hall of Fame wide receiver. Over his last 88 games, regular and post-season combined, he’s averaging over 100 yards per game. He’s been an AP first-team All-Pro selection for four straight seasons, and has led the NFL in receiving yards since he entered the league in 2010.

He also was the 195th pick in the draft, meaning he’ll likely become the 3rd player in the 195-199th draft slot range to make it to Canton. And just like Tom Brady and Terrell Davis, Brown’s success was unexpected and unique.

Don Hutson may have been the greatest receiver in league history and wasn’t drafted, but there’s a reason for that: Hutson entered the league in ’35, and — not coincidentally — the NFL didn’t institute the draft until the following season. There are only five other undrafted wide receivers to ever average at least 80 receiving yards per game over a three-year period, with a minimum of 30 games played. Charley Hennigan and Lionel Taylor did it in the early days of the AFL. George Sauer pulled off the same trick with the Jets, operating as the perfect possession receiver for Joe Namath (to the extent such a thing existed) and opposite the great Don Maynard. Later, Rod Smith did it with the Broncos, and of course Wes Welker got there with the Patriots.

Only one player drafted later than Brown has averaged 80 receiving yards per game over a three year stretch: Raymond Berry, the dominant possession receiver of his era, who teamed with Johnny Unitas.

Brown plays with Ben Roethlisberger, of course, and that obviously helps. But what makes Brown’s success noteworthy isn’t that he was a low draft pick and has averaged 80+ receiving yards per game, but that he was a low draft pick and averaged over 100+ receiving yards per game! [continue reading…]

Five years ago, I posted one of my favorite graphs, which shows how passing has changed in the NFL since 1950. A picture is worth at least 1,000 words in this case. I have updated the graph for the last few years of data and also to include first downs.

With one chart, you can see what has happened, on average, on each pass play (sacks plus pass attempts) for each season in pro football history. The graph below shows the number of interceptions per dropback (red), sacks per dropback (purple), non-INT incomplete passes per dropback (in yellow), non-first down completions per dropback (green), and then first downs on completed passes per dropback (blue). Of course, a dropback is simply a pass attempt or a sack. The information is stacked on top of each other for ease of viewing.

Pretty fun!

On June 15, 2012, Football Perspective was born. Since that day, Football Perspective has published at least one new article every single day. This is the site’s 2,363rd post: You can view every article ever written at FP here, and at the top of each page on this site is a link to the Historical Archive, which is also updated after each post is published.

At some point, The Streak will end, and that’s okay. You guys have already made this site way more successful than it ever should have been. It is never lost on me how lucky I am to have a community where people are willing to take time out of their busy lives to check Football Perspective. And in an era where civility is moving in inverse relationship to interception rate, it’s inspiring the way you conduct yourselves. The comments sections on the internet are known for being awful and trending downward, but you go out of your way to be civil to others and to provide thoughtful, intelligent, helpful, and meaningful responses. There really is a Football Perspective community, and it’s a very cool thing. Getting to know you, getting help from you, and just learning and enjoying football with you is an awesome experience.

It’s also important to pay it forward, and a few years ago, I chronicled my history as a football writer. I hope that article is inspiring to young and old writers across the football universe, or at least not too demoralizing. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 16 years as a pro football writer, it’s that you are the sum of your connections. And nobody is more fortunate than me in that regard.

I have been influenced by some of the best people — and minds — in our football world: David Dodds and Joe Bryant at Footballguys.com, Sean Forman, Neil Paine, and Mike Kania at Sports-Reference.com, and the incomparable Doug Drinen at both sites. Without each of those six people actively and continuously supporting me, my life would be materially worse, and oh yeah this website wouldn’t exist.

Writers like Bob Henry, Sigmund Bloom, Matt Waldman, Maurile Tremblay, Jason Wood, and many others at Football Guys have been great friends and sounding boards over the years. Jason Lisk, Chris Brown, Scott Kacsmar, Sharon Katz, Mike Clay, and Stephanie Stradley have been really smart, thought-provoking individuals who have helped shape my thoughts, both inside and outside of football.

Brian Burke, Aaron Schatz, and Bill Barnwell all could have been competitors, but have instead gone out of their way to promote me and my little site. Bill in particular has been kind enough to use his large platform to frequently drive traffic to this site and has become a good friend in the process. I met him after starting this site. How neat is that?

I’ve been lucky to get to know a number of people who work in the NFL, and they are much kinder, smarter, and interesting than you would think. It’s fascinating to get a glimpse into what’s going on behind the curtain, and I thank all of them for that.

Without my guest writers, the Streak would have died long ago. A sincere thank you to Bryan Frye, who has always been willing to help and is a brilliant football mind. It’s incredible having people like Bryan, Brad Oremland, and Adam Harstad — three guys who know as much about football as anybody — constantly contributing to this site. There have been many great guest posts at Football Perspective over the years (yes, that link will let you see all of them), and I thank all of them for their hard work.

I’ve also been happy to see some of my former guest writers move on to bigger and better things, from working at larger sites to having success in other football industries to working in the league. What’s cooler than that?

Your contributions to Football Perspective is what makes this a website and not a diary. A special thanks to all of you. Every day, I consider myself lucky to be able to participate in a community where people willingly take time out of their busy lives to check this little site. But today, I consider myself just that much luckier.

In the ’60s and ’70s, interceptions didn’t have nearly the negative stigma attached to them that they do now. Part of this was because interceptions were just an accepted part of the high variance strategy known as throwing the ball. Today, with offenses being more efficient, the opportunity cost of throwing an interception is greater. And, while I don’t have data to prove this claim, I am confident that interceptions on average happen closer to the line of scrimmage now than they used to, meaning the defense will be getting the ball in better field position. So it seems as though interceptions should be more highly correlated with losing than they used to be.

On the other hand, interceptions are pretty rare events now. Last year, a team threw zero interceptions in 46.3% of team games (counting each game as two individual games; one for the home team and one for the road team). That set a new record, breaking the old record of 45.7% set in… 2016. That broke the record of 44.0%, set back in… 2015. Okay, you get the point: teams are throwing fewer interceptions.

On the other hand, teams throwing zero interceptions won only 64% of games last season, which is the second-lowest mark (it was at 63% in 1994). By way of comparison, in 1981, teams threw zero interceptions in just 25.5% of games, but won 80% of those games. Of course, this is misleading in that it is not an apples-to-apples comparison. In 2017, when teams threw zero interceptions, their opponents averaged 0.92 interceptions per game, also the lowest mark ever. In 1981, teams that threw zero interceptions saw their opponents average 1.65 interceptions per game, so a zero interception game “should have” been more valuable back then because it meant you were winning the INT battle by +1.65 rather than just +0.92.

So perhaps we should look at net interceptions. Last year happened to be a pretty odd one. Teams that won the interception battle by exactly one interception won 65% of their games, which is pretty low. But over the ten prior years, teams that won the INT battle by 1 had a 72% winning percentage, up over the general historical average.

[continue reading…]

Brad Oremland is a longtime commenter and a fellow football historian. Brad is also a senior NFL writer at Sports Central. There are few who have given as much thought to the history of quarterbacks and quarterback ranking systems as Brad has over the years. What follows is Brad’s latest work on quarterback statistical production.

---

Top 100 QBs: 61-80

This is part two of a seven-part series. It is a supplement to my series on the greatest quarterbacks of all time, last year’s article on the top-ranked QBs in Total Statistical Production, and last month’s post about QB-TSP in the 2017 season and another way of using TSP. I strongly encourage you to read those pieces if you haven’t done so already. You might also be interested in part one of this series, published last week.

In this series, I’ll present the top 100 pro football quarterbacks as ranked by QB-TSP. This is a purely statistical ranking, with all the drawbacks that entails, and in many places it is not reflective of my subjective evaluations. Each week, we’ll examine 20 players, continuing this week with ranks 61-80. As a quick refresher/update, here are rough explanations of single-season TSP: [continue reading…]