On June 15, 2012, I launched Football Perspective. Since that day, Football Perspective has posted a new article every single day. Remarkably, this is the 1,998th post published at this site.  You can fact check that claim here, and at the top of every page is a link to the Historical Archive, a page that is updated after each post is published.

There’s no way this site could still be up and running — much less producing content daily — without this community.  Getting to know you, getting help from you, and just learning and enjoying football with you is an awesome experience. Your contributions to Football Perspective is what makes this a website and not a diary. A special thanks to all the guest writers, who help keep this site fresh and interesting.

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.  Thank you to the many people who have helped me get this site to where it is today. I hope you forgive me if the site’s 1,998th post is a little shorter than most, but hey: we have a birthday to celebrate.

In 2016, Odell Beckham gained 34% of all Giants receiving yards, the highest share in the NFL. For 31 of 32 teams, at least one player gained 20% of their team’s receiving yards, but for the Bills, Robert Woods led the team in receiving despite being responsible for only 19% of Buffalo’s receiving yards.

But since Drew Brees came to the Saints in 2006, no team has spread it around more than New Orleans. On average, Brees’ leading receiving has been responsible for only 22% of the Saints receiving yards each year. The table below shows the average percentage of team receiving yards gained by the top receiver (RB, WR, or TE) for each team in each season over the last 11 years. The Falcons, buoyed by long runs of success by Roddy White and then Julio Jones, have been the most WR1-heavy passing game, while the Saints have been the most diverse: [continue reading…]

Saints wide receiver Michael Thomas is in about as good a situation as it gets. Here’s what he has in his favor:

• The Saints pass the ball a ton. The last three years, New Orleans ranked 2nd each season in pass attempts, finishing 2 attempts behind the Colts in 2014, 9 attempts behind the Ravens in 2015, and 5 attempts behind the Ravens last year. The Saints have an even 2,000 attempts over the last three seasons, the Ravens are 2nd with 1,909, and the Colts are 3rd with 1,864. It’s true that New Orleans did just add Adrian Peterson, but the Saints are well-established as the league’s preeminent pass-heavy team.

• Thomas, unlike players on the Ravens, gets to play with a superstar quarterback in Drew Brees. Because more important than the 2,000 attempts is that New Orleans has thrown for 14,808 gross passing yards the last 3 years, more than 1,000 yards more than anyone else. Only the Falcons, Steelers, and Patriots have even 13,000 passing yards.

• As a rookie, Thomas and Brandin Cooks were essentially WR1A and WR1B in New Orleans. Cooks had 117 targets, 1,173 receiving yards, and 8 TDs in 16 games, while Thomas had 121 targets, 1,137 yards, and 9 TDs despite missing one game. But here’s where it gets exciting for Thomas: Cooks was traded in the offseason, and will be replaced with 32-year-old Ted Ginn.

Is there a more favorable situation for a WR to produce massive stats? Unless you just think Thomas will be harmed by all the attention — and that’s where Peterson should help — this is basically as good as it gets. He’s on the league’s most pass-happy offense, with a top-3 quarterback, and he is likely going to get fed a significant amount of targets. As a rookie, Thomas was targeted on 18.2% of passes. That number is almost certainly going to rise this year. The most targets any Saint has had with Brees is 149, set by Jimmy Graham in 2011.

But there is one other thing that helped Thomas last year. The Saints threw 59% of their passes to wide receivers last year, a new high in the Brees era. That coincided with just 17% — a record low since 2008 — of passes going to tight ends. In 2006 and 2007, Reggie Bush was a target monster while Mark Campbell and Eric Johnson were the top tight ends. But beginning in ’08, the Saints had Jeremy Shockey and then Jimmy Graham and a breakout season from Ben Watson in 2015. Last year, Coby Fleener was the tight end, and he was underwhelming. Fleener had a lower catch rate than any Saints wide receiver last year, and that’s not exactly how its supposed to work.

In 2014, Siants receivers had 47% of targets, then 54% in 2015 and 59% last year. Meanwhile, TE targets dropped from 27% with Graham to 24% with Watson and then 17% with Fleener. Take a look: the graph below shows the percentage of targets in New Orleans by position since 2006: [continue reading…]

Five years ago, I asked two questions: how often does the first receiver selected in the Draft turn out to be the best rookie receiver? And how often does the best rookie receiver turn out to be the best receiver from his draft? Yesterday, we updated that post to answer the first question. Today, we look at the second one, and that makes Saints star Michael Thomas (who had 1,137 receiving yards as a rookie in 2016) the focus of this post.

How likely is it that Thomas will turn out to be the best receiver from his class? Thomas has some competition, but though he was farther ahead of the pack than the average top receiver:

So how optimistic should we be that Thomas will in fact finish as the top receiver from this class? You may be surprised to learn that from 1999 to 2013, the top rookie receiver (as measured by receiving yards) *never* finished as the top receiver from his class (as measured by receiving yards). Bookmarking those years? Randy Moss in 1998, and Odell Beckham in 2014. There are a few cases where the top rookie had a great career (Anquan Boldin, Marques Colston, and A.J. Green stand out) but ultimately was bested (to date, in the case of Green) by another star, but also a large number of guys who didn’t quite live up to their potential after year one.

You might be surprised to see that the median rank of these rookie receivers is just to finish fourth in their class. In recent years, we’ve seen Tampa Bay’s Mike Williams, Eddie Royal, and Tampa Bay’s Michael Clayton excel as rookies but have disappointing careers. Excluding the players from 2014, 2015, and 2016, the only receivers since 1982 to finish 1st as both a rookie and overall were Proehl, Galloway, and Moss.  Do you think there’s something there, or is that a fluke?

Another interesting: other than Antonio Brown, none of the receivers who wound up as the top receiver in their class really struggled as a rookie. Since 2002, Brown is the only one who didn’t rank in the top five.

Five years ago, I asked two questions: how often does the first receiver selected in the Draft turn out to be the best rookie receiver?  And how often does the best rookie receiver turn out to be the best receiver from his draft?  In the 2017 NFL Draft, the Titans selected Corey Davis, the excellent wide receiver from Western Michigan with the fifth overall pick.

At the time of my original post, the protagonist was Justin Blackmon, the highest selected receiver in the 2012 Draft.  And at the time, the odds looked ugly: from 1970 to 2010, only 4 out of 31 times did the first receiver drafted lead his rookie class in receiving yards: Ahmad Rashad in 1972, Isaac Curtis in 1973, Jerry Butler in ’79, and then Willie Gault in 1983.  When A.J. Green did it in 2011, it ended a streak of 27 straight years where the top receiver didn’t lead the league in receiving yards.

So what’s happened since then? Well, Blackmon did in fact lead all rookies in receiving yards, although the margin over T.Y. Hilton was just four yards. In 2013, Tavon Austin was the first wideout drafted, but he ranked 9th among that group in receiving yards as a rookie with 418. Instead, Keenan Allen (1,046) took top honors that year.

In 2014, Sammy Watkins was the first wideout selected in perhaps the best wide receiver class ever.  Watkins had a very good year with 982 yards (ranking 4th among wide receivers drafted that season), but that was a far cry behind Odell Beckham and his 1305 yards (in just 12 games).  But then two years ago, Amari Cooper joined Green and Blackmon by being the top rookie wide receiver in both the draft and the regular season. Cooper was the 4th overall pick and had 1,070 yards, beating undrafted Willie Snead (984).  Finally, last season, Corey Coleman was the first wide receiver drafted, but he had only 413 yards in 10 games.  In 2016, there was just one great rookie wideout: Michael Thomas had 1,137 yards, and no other rookie receiver had even 700 yards. [continue reading…]

It’s early June, but pretty soon we will all be gearing up for 2017. So I thought I’d open things up and ask what you guys want to read (or write — freelance articles are always welcome!) about over the next three months.

Do you want more analysis of the 2016 season? Articles covering NFL history? Preview articles for 2017? Deep stat dives?

Throw it all out there, and I’ll chime in in the comments.

Thanks,

Chase

Tyreek Hill was noticeably absent from yesterday’s list of yards from scrimmage leaders. The main reason for that? Hill was a part-time player for the first seven weeks, failing to take the field on even half of Kansas City’s offensive snaps in even a single game.  By the end of the year, he was a more regular part of the offense, although he never participated in 70% or more of the Chiefs offensive plays in any regular season game (and in the playoff loss to Pittsburgh, he was present for 69% of Kansas City’s offensive snaps). The graph below shows the percentage of offensive snaps he was on the field each week of the 2016 regular season:

[continue reading…]

Doug Drinen wrote this article 11 years ago, and it serves as a good reminder to always look at offensive numbers in the context of a player’s team. Yesterday, I looked at tackle leaders as a percentage of team tackles.  Today we will do the same thing with yards from scrimmage.

Arizona running back David Johnson led the NFL in yards from scrimmage last year with 2,118 yards. The Cardinals as a team gained 6,157 yards of offense (before deducting for sack yards lost), which means Johnson gained 34.4% of his team’s total output. That also led the league. However, Steelers RB Le’Veon Bell missed three games due to suspension and sat out a meaningless week 17 game.  Bell averaged 157 yards per game last year, the third-most in NFL history. He was responsible for 30.7% of the Steelers total yards from scrimmage last year, but on a pro-rated basis (i.e., multiplying that by 16/12), that jumps to an insane (although not historically extraordinary) 40.9%.

That’s the column the table is sorted by below. Here’s how to read Bell’s line. He gained 1,884 yards for Pittsburgh, while the Steelers as a team had 6,137 total yards. Bell therefore was responsible for 30.7% of Pittsburgh’s yards, but he only played in 12 games. On a pro-rated basis, he ranks first at 40.9%. The table below shows the top 75 leaders in this metric, minimum 6 games played: [continue reading…]

Do you know who led the NFL in tackles in 2016? It was Tampa Bay’s second-year linebacker Kwon Alexander, with 108 solo tackles.  If you give half-credit for assists, Kwon – who had 37 assists — would get 126.5 total tackles.  That would be the second-most in the league, just behind Seattle linebacker  Bobby Wagner (86 solos, 82 assists, for 127 total tackles).

Tackles aren’t a great stat for a lot of reasons.  One reason is the statistic treats all tackles the same.  Another is it ignores opportunity: the 49ers led the NFL last year with 855 total tackles (again, treating assists as half-tackles), which helped safety Antoine Bethea rank 9th in the league in solo tackles.  That’s because the 49ers defense was on the field a ton last year; meanwhile, the Eagles recorded the fewest total tackles in the NFL last season with just 699.  Eagles linebacker Nigel Bradham had 67 solos and 81 assists last year, but that total looks a lot better when you realize he was responsible for about 12% of all Eagles tackles in 2016.

In addition to looking at total tackle numbers as a percentage of his team’s tackles, there’s one other adjustment worth making. Carolina’s Luke Kuechly had 86.5 total tackles last year, good enough for 11.0% of Carolina’s 785 total tackles. But Kuechly played in just 10 games! If we multiply his 11.0% tackle share number by 16/10 — in other words, pro-rating for missed games — that means Kuechly gets credit for a whopping 17.6% of all Panthers tackles.

Another player who benefits from this sort of adjustment is Bears linebacker Jerrell Freeman, who had a great first season in Chicago. Freeman had 98 total tackles, or 12.5% of the Bears total tackles, despite missing four games.  If you pro-rate those numbers, he gets credit for 16.6% of all Chicago tackles, second in the league behind Kuechly.

Do this for every defensive player in the NFL, and the top three players in adjusted total tackle share are Kuechly, Freeman, and Wagner.  Alexander, while still impressive, drops to 7th via this method. Below are the top 75 players in pro-rated adjusted total tackle share. [continue reading…]

Before the 2017 NFL Draft, Bill Barnwell wrote about the incredible amount of draft value accumulated by the Browns. At the time, Cleveland’s 2017 draft picks equaled 96.7 points of draft value, but because of some trades – particularly involving Houston’s trade up for QB DeShaun Watson (which hurt the Browns 2017 Draft but added a 2018 1st round pick), along with a pair of trade-ups by the Browns that cost the team some value – Cleveland wound up using 86.9 points of draft value. That was still, by a good measure, the largest amount of draft value for any team in 2017.

In the last 20 years, only two teams had even 85 points of draft value — the expansion Texans (85.2 points) and 2008 Chiefs (86.6 points). As a result, the 2017 Browns had more draft value than any team since the 1993 Patriots (88.4 points)! Meanwhile, the current iteration of the Patriots had very, very little draft value: New England started behind the 8-ball with the last pick in each round, and things only got worse after trading a 1st round pick for Brandin Cooks, a 2nd round pick for Kony Ealy, and a 4th round pick for Dwayne Allen and a 6th rounder. That’s the lowest in the last five years, topping the 2014 Colts (17.3 points of value), and the fewest since the 2012 Raiders, who had just 14.9 points. [continue reading…]

Yesterday, I wrote Colin Kaepernick was an extreme outlier in 2016 in terms of TD/INT ratio relative to his Net Yards per Attempt average.  Kaepernick ranked tied for 6th in TD/INT ratio, but was 2nd-to-last in NY/A.  At a high level, we have a good clue that the sparkling TD/INT ratio wasn’t as valuable as it seems: that’s because Kaepernick went 1-10 as a starter last year, and the one win came in a game where Kaepernick threw an interception! Now we all know that win-loss record isn’t a good way to judge quarterbacks, especially considering that Kaepernick played for a team that ranked last in points allowed and yards allowed. But the 49ers ranked 27th in points scored and 31st in yards gained, so it’s not as though the defense deserves all of the blame. Because while Kaepernick had a great TD/INT ratio, that disguises how ineffective the passing attack really was. [continue reading…]

This website has been pretty light on coverage of Colin Kaepernick, despite his name turning into a traffic boom for the rest of the football world. The last time Kaepernick’s name appeared in a headline was over a year ago, when I wrote about him declining for three straight years (that ended last season). In fact, Kaepernick’s name has appeared in the text of just three articles at FP in 2017, where his name was used in passing in each case.

And I’m not interested in getting into the usual Kaepernick debate. But there is something that Football Perspective is well-equipped to address: the citing of Kaepernick’s 16/4 TD/INT ratio as evidence of his productive play. Regular readers know that I’m not a fan of TD/INT ratio, and Kaepernick is a pretty good case study in why TD/INT ratio is a poor way to judge a quarterback. A 4.00 TD/INT ratio is very good, no doubt: but in the abstract, it doesn’t mean much. And what do I mean by the abstract?

For starters, it only tells us what happened on 5% of all dropbacks Kaepernick had last year. The much more predictive measure of passing performance is Net Yards per Attempt, and there, Kaepernick ranked 29th out of 30 qualifying passers. ^[1]Neither the Bears nor Browns had a single passer finish with 224 attempts. And, for what it’s worth, he has the worst NY/A average over the past two seasons among the 35 passers with at least 400 attempts since 2015.

So we have a pretty significant disconnect, with Kaepernick ranking 2nd from the bottom, ahead of only Brock Osweiler, in passing efficiency, but tied for 6th with Sam Bradford but in TD/INT ratio. The best thing to do, of course, is to combine the two metrics as we do in ANY/A. There, Kaepernick ranks 23rd out of the 30 qualifying passers. That’s bad, but not horrible, for a starting quarterback. [continue reading…]

The normal way to measure a franchise’s winning percentage is the simplest. All you need to do is take the team’s total number of wins, add to that number the total number of ties divided by two, and then take that sum and divide it by the team’s total number of games.

That’s simplest and makes sense and is perfectly correct. However, it also means games in 1960 are given the same weight as games in 2016. And depending on what you want to measure, that may not be what you want to do. If you want to measure something like the amount of pleasure a fanbase receives from its team ^[1]Why would you want to do this? I have no idea., you want to put more weight on recent seasons. [continue reading…]

Yesterday, I looked Josh McCown’s weird, winding career. McCown started 33 games through age 33, but has since started 27 more games. He’s had one of the weirdest and back-loaded careers in NFL history.

Which made me wonder: how can we measure which quarterbacks had the most front-loaded or back-loaded careers? Here’s one clean way to do it. For every quarterback, identify his exact age for every start of his career, and then calculate the average age in all games he started. For McCown, with 60 starts, his average age (summing his age in every start, and dividing by 60) so far is 30.7. If Josh McCown somehow starts 16 games for the Jets this year, the first will come when he is 38.2 years old, and the last will come when he is 38.5 years old. That will bring his average age of start up to 32.3. That would be pretty old, but not remarkably old the way his median age would be (more on this in a minute).

By this method, the quarterback with the oldest average age is Doug Flutie. The CFL superstar and Bills fan favorite started 66 games in his NFL career, but on average, he was 35.5 years old during his average start. If you read yesterday’s post, you won’t be surprised to learn that after Flutie, Warren Moon, Roger Staubach, and George Blanda have the next oldest average age. Babe Parilli, who is 5th in median age, is down at #10, thanks to 9 starts coming at the age of 22 or 23.

The table below shows the average age and median age of start for all 179 quarterbacks with at least 50 starts. Some fine print: this only covers starts beginning in 1950, so this list may overstate the average age for quarterbacks who played pre-1950; similarly, for current quarterbacks like Luck, this obviously is biased in the other direction. The table below is fully sortable and searchable; by default, it lists the 15 oldest players based on average age of start. [continue reading…]

Let’s say Josh McCown starts 6 games for the Jets this season. That will give McCown 66 career starts, and shockingly, half of those starts will have come after McCown turned 34 years old. That is remarkable no matter how you slice it, because at the start of the 2013 season, the odds would have been infinitesimal that McCown would start 33 more games in his career. Take a look at his career through 2012: the most likely outcome, I suspect, would be him never starting another game:

The Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors are facing off in the NBA Finals for the third straight season. That’s never happened before in NBA history, and it only happened once in pro football history… and it also involved Cleveland.

In 1952, the Browns won the American with an 8-4 record, while the Detroit Lions won the National division with a 9-3 record (after defeating the defending-champion Rams in the National tiebreaker game). Otto Graham and Bobby Layne were the two top quarterbacks in the NFL that year according to both the AP and the NY Daily News. Detroit traveled to Cleveland on December 28th and defeated the Browns 17-7, with Doak Walker’s 67-yard touchdown providing the biggest blow.

The next season, Graham had a season for the ages by any measure.  You’d be hard-pressed to argue for a better regular season by any quarterback from World War II to 1983, when a Graham-led Browns passing game finished with a Relative ANY/A of +5.00.  The Browns began the 12-game season with 11 straight wins, while Detroit finished 10-2 with both losses coming against the 8-3-1 Rams.  Cleveland lost the season finale in Philadelphia, and then traveled to Detroit for an NFL Championship rematch.

The Browns and Lions were tied 10-10 after three quarters, and Cleveland was up 16-10 late in the game.  But in the final minutes, Layne found an unlikely hero in Jim Doran for a 33-yard game-winning touchdown (video here), with Walker’s extra point providing the margin of victory. The bigger story? Graham having one of the chokiest games in football history, finishing with 2 of 15 for 20 yards with 2 interceptions. [continue reading…]

Longtime commenter Jason Winter has chimed in with today’s guest post. Jason is a part-time video game journalist and full-time sports fan. You can follow him on twitter at @winterinformal.

As always, we thank Jason for contributing.

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Two years ago, I started a little experiment. I saw that many NFL prognosticators were posting mock drafts for 2016 just a few days after the 2015 draft concluded. I found as many as I could and, when the 2016 draft rolled around, rated all of them on their predictive prowess.  Regular readers may recall that last year’s article was posted here at Football Perspective.

I did the same for the 2017 draft, recording the same people’s drafts – along with a couple others – right after the 2016 draft, so it’s time to see how they did this year. Were the same people good (or bad) at predicting the draft a year out? Or was it an exercise in guesswork and randomness?

This year, I had 12 different sources to draw from – the same 10 from last year, along with a pair of new entries: Steve Palazzolo from Pro Football Focus and Todd McShay from ESPN. To recap my scoring methods:

I applied two different scoring systems to each mock draft. The first, which I call the “Strict” method, better rewards exact or very close hits: 10 points for getting a pick’s position exactly right; 8 points for being 1 pick off; 6 for being 2 off; 4 for being 3-4 off; 3 for being 5-8 off; 2 for being 9-16 off; and 1 for being 17-32 off. [continue reading…]

It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.
— Father Dennis Edward O’Brien, USMC

Today is a day that we as Americans honor and remember those who lost their lives protecting our country. As my friend Joe Bryant says, it’s easy for the true meaning of this day to get lost in the excitement of summer and barbecues and picnics. But that quote helps me remember that the things I enjoy today are only possible because those before me made incredibly selfless sacrifices. That includes a number of football players who have lost their lives defending our country.

The most famous, of course, is Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals safety who chose to quit football to enlist in the United States army. On April 22, thirteen years ago, Tillman died in Afghanistan. Over thirty years earlier, we lost both Bob Kalsu and Don Steinbrunner in Vietnam. You can read their stories here. For some perspective, consider that Hall of Famers Roger Staubach, Ray Nitschke, and Charlie Joiner were three of the 29 NFL men who served in the military during that war.

An incredible 226 men with NFL ties served in the Korean War, including Night Train Lane and Don Shula. Most tragically, World War II claimed the lives of 21 former NFL players.

• Nick “Mike” Basca
• Charlie Behan
• Keith Birlem
• Al Blozis
• Chuck Braidwood
• Young Bussey
• Ed Doyle
• Grassy Hinton
• Smiley Johnson
• Eddie Kahn
• Alex Ketzko
• Lee Kizzire
• Jack Lummus
• Roy “Bob” Mackert
• Frank Maher
• Jim Mooney
• Gus Sonneberg
• Len Supulski
• Don Wemple
• Chet Wetterlund; and
• Waddy Young

Jack Chevigny, former coach of the Cardinals, and John O’Keefe, an executive with the Eagles, were also World War II casualties. The Pro Football Hall of Fame has chronicled the stories of these 23 men, too. Lummus received the Medal of Honor for his bravery at Iwo Jima, and you can read more about his sacrifice here. In 2015, the Giants inducted him into the team’s Ring of Honor. [continue reading…]

In 2007, the Jets drafted David Harris in the second round, and the linebacker has turned into one of the best players in the league who has never made a Pro Bowl. Since then? That round has failed to yield a single productive player. Here are New York’s second round picks in each of the last ten years.  Note that this is not a pretty table, and that’s before realizing that the Jets traded up from 47 to 43 in the ’12 Draft with Seattle to draft Hill, while the Seahawks settled for Bobby Wagner.

[continue reading…]

Isaiah Crowell had a funny year. If you were paying attention in the beginning of the season — or maybe just the end of the season — you probably thought he did really well. Crowell rushed for 394 yards  in Cleveland’s first four games, the second-most among all players through their team’s first four games.  He also rushed for 347 yards in the Browns last four games, the fifth-most among all players in their team’s final four games.  And he averaged about 6.5 yards per carry during each of those quarter-season stretches, too.

The middle of the year? Well, that was a very different story.  Crowell ranked 48th among all players in rushing yards in their team’s middle 8 games of the season, with just 211 yards and an anemic 2.51 yards per carry average.  Given that Crowell was the Browns main running back, Cleveland as a team experienced similar results.  Absent a week game in week 7 when backup quarterback Kevin Hogan entered the game and wound up rushing for 104 yards himself, the Browns rushing split was dramatic: in all 8 games in the first/final quarter of the season, Cleveland rushed for at least 107 yards; in the 7 games in the middle of the season, the Browns rushed for fewer than 70 yards in every game.  Take a look:

Browns Rushing By Game

Another team that had a weird rushing split was the Miami Dolphins.  This was closely tied to the success of Jay Ajayi, who had three games with over 200 yards, one other game with over 100 yards, and failed to hit 80 yards in Miami’s other 12 games.

Dolphins Rushing By Game

I didn’t pick Miami and Cleveland at random: those two teams had the largest variation in rushing performance in 2016, at least when measured as a percentage of average output. Miami rushed for 114 yards per game, with a standard deviation of 69.8 rushing yards, or 61.8% of the team’s average performance. Cleveland was at 107.0 and 64.8, respectively, or 60.6%. The table below shows the standard deviation in rushing for each team in 2016: [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.

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On Monday, I updated my ever-evolving Positive Yards Per Attempt metric. Today’s post will serve as an introduction to its contra metric, Negative Yards Per Attempt (NegY/A). The very simple formula is as follows:

NegY/A = ( – sack yards – INT * 45) / dropbacks

The result will always be either zero or negative, but less negative (i.e., closer to zero) numbers are better. I chose to exclude fumbles because I want to maintain an apples to apples comparison with PY/A, so NegY/A covers passing plays only. I want to be very clear – NegY/A is NOT intended to be a comprehensive measure of QB play and should never be cited on its own. Its primary purpose, as with PY/A, is to estimate the relative importance of the different components of the passing game.

I won’t bore you with more words, so lets get straight to the numbers. Similar to the PY/A table, NegY/A is presented as both value over average and relative to league average on a per play basis. I wanted to cover the same timeframe as the previous article, so this includes all QB seasons since 1992 of at least 224 dropbacks (n = 829). [continue reading…]

Last Tuesday, James “Four Touchdowns” Hanson posted a great article on the support that Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers have enjoyed throughout their careers. Two days later, he posted Part 2, and both articles were extremely well-received.  Today is the third part in his series. As always, we thank our guest posters for contributing. What follows are James’ words.

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Elite Quarterbacks: Measuring Team Support by Wins & Losses

Last time, I took a look at the overall support received by four elite quarterbacks – Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers – throughout the course of their careers. [continue reading…]

The graph below shows the percentage of NFL (or AFL or AAFC) games that have ended in a tie since 1940. Note that the Y-Axis goes from only 0% to 20%: that may be misleading, but showing the graph from 0% to 100% would make for a much less useful visual in my opinion.

I’m short on time today, but most observers seem to think that shortening overtime from 15 to 10 minutes is likely to result in more ties. It certainly seems unlikely to result in fewer ties, although it’s possible that teams will just engage in tie-averse behavior earlier in overtime now.

We have spent a long time debating the best way to handle overtime. In general, I’m not too opposed to more ties in the regular season. While unsatisfying at the time, they arguably serve as a better tiebreaker than traditional tiebreakers. When two teams are 9-7, the tiebreaker to determine which one advances to the playoffs is not necessarily better than 50/50 at deciding which is the “better” or more “deserving” team. But if one of those 9-7 teams wound up being 9-6-1 rather than losing in the 74th minute of the game, that would be the team that advances. That seems more likely, in the long run, to identify the “better” or more “deserving” team. I think. Of course, that does not to change the unsatisfying result in the short term.

What do you think?

Last week, I published two posts on quarterbacks based on their completion percentage and yards per completion averages, relative to league average. The Sam Bradford Index post looks at quarterbacks with high completion percentages and low yards/completion averages, while the Jay Schroeder Index looks at the reverse.  Freddy Alejandro made a request for career ratings in the comments, and with the help of Bryan Frye’s formula, I went ahead and generated those ratings.

Note that when calculating single-season standard deviations in both completion percentage and yards per completion, I used two modifications from last week’s posts. One, I used a three-year rolling average, and two, I used all passers (and not just qualifying passers) to calculate standard deviations. These combinations had the effect of making the standard deviations greater, which makes the Z-Scores smaller. As a result, the numbers are more compressed than they were last week, in addition to the fact that career ratings always bring less extreme ratings than a list of single-season leaders.

The most extreme rating belongs to Joe Montana, who for his career was 1.23 standard deviations above average in completion percentage.  That’s the second-best rating, behind only Steve Young: each passer led the NFL in completion percentage five different times.  From 1980 to 1997, 49ers passers led the league in completion percentage 10 times, with the rest of the league winning just eight crowns.

The difference between Young and Montana: Young had a slightly above-average yards per completion average for his career, while Montana was slightly below-average. ^[1]Despite Montana finishing with a higher Yd/Cmp average for his career, that is a function of era; Montana never finished higher than 10th in that metric, while Young had three top-5 finishes and … Continue reading And remember, this metric is calculated by taking each passer’s Z-Score in completion percentage and then subtracting their Z-Score in yards/completion, so a negative number in the latter category leads to a higher rating.  After all, we are trying to identify the passers who had the highest completion percentages with the lowest yards per completion averages.

Note that this is a measure of style, not quality.  Finishing high or low on this list is neither inherently good or bad.  Joining Montana in the top 3 is Chad Pennington, although most of the top quarterbacks are Hall of Famers.  Take a look: [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.

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Positive Yards Per Attempt: 2017 Update

If I could only share one thing from my time doing football analytics, it would be the following principle: Positive plays carry more weight than negative plays in determining the winner of a football game. I’ve already written a couple of articles on this subject and hope to further the cause with this update.

Overview

For those of you who don’t feel like reading the previous two posts, I’ll give you the basic gist. Since passing has a far greater impact on winning than running, I’ve focused my research on quarterbacks, but the principle applies to the entire offense (defense, not so sure). Despite everyone constantly harping on turnover avoidance, a potent passing offense is usually able to overcome giveaways. Conversely, avoiding turnovers is normally not enough to overcome a weak passing game. Furthermore, turnovers are highly random and situation dependent, so it follows that turnovers are a very poor method of gauging quarterback performance. Even though sacks are largely the quarterback’s fault, they are also very context dependent and only contribute a small amount in determining game outcomes. More importantly, the majority of signal callers trade sacks for interceptions or vice versa, so it’s no really fair to include one but not the other. [continue reading…]

This week, James “Four Touchdowns” Hanson had a couple of interesting posts on the support four star quarterbacks received.  James provided some very extensive, in-depth analysis, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a place for simple, surface-level analysis, either!

I was wondering which quarterbacks received the most and least support from their team’s rushing attacks. Which brings us to Jeff George. There are 179 quarterbacks who have started at least 50 games in the NFL. George started games across five different teams — Indianapolis, Atlanta, Oakland, Minnesota, and Washington.  And in the 124 games he started, his teams averaged just 87.9 rushing yards per game, the fewest of any quarterback in NFL history.

In Oakland (23 of 124 starts) in ’97 and ’98, George had an in-his-prime Napoleon Kaufman, so that wasn’t a bad situation: his Raiders averaged 105.9 rushing yards per game. And in 10 starts with the Vikings in 1999, George had the impressive combination of Robert Smith and Leroy Hoard, and the Vikings averaged 126.4 rushing yards per game.

But his fortunes were much different in his other stops. George began his career, of course, with the Colts from 1990 to 1993. In his 49 starts in Indianapolis, the Colts were absolutely terrible on the ground. There were 112 team seasons from 1990 to 1993 — that’s four years during the 28-team NFL — and the four Colts teams ranked 106th, 108th, 111th, and 112th in rushing yards over that period. Over those four years, Indianapolis rushed for just 4,841 yards, more than 1,000 rushing yards behind the second-worst team (Miami). The Colts averaged an anemic 3.38 yards per carry, also worst in the league. In George’s 49 starts, Indianapolis averaged just 75.6 rushing yards per game.

George then went to Atlanta, and from ’94 to ’96 (35 starts), the Falcons rushed for just 82.3 yards per game in George’s starts. George started 16 games in both ’94 and ’95, and Atlanta averaged the fewest rushing yards per game of any team in the NFL during that period.  As you probably know, those Falcons famously ran the Run-N-Shoot under head coach June Jones, so some of this was a reflection of philosophy rather than lack of talent ^[1]It’s also worth noting, even this should always be implied, that rushing yards is highly correlated to team success, and George’s Colts were terrible, going 14-35. In 1994, the Falcons ranked dead last in both rushing attempts and rushing yards, and 3rd in pass attempts and 5th in passing yards.

The personnel was suited for Jones’ offense: Terance Mathis, Andre Rison, ^[2]Ironically, Rison was traded from the Colts to the Falcons Indianapolis traded up to acquire George when he was the projected first overall selection. Bert Emanuel, and Ricky Sanders were all starters in the Falcons 0-TE/0-FB offense, with Ironhead Craig Heyward and Erric Pegram at running back.  That offense worked pretty well (and would likely work even better today), but a high number of interceptions and a bad pass defense caused the team go to 7-9 in 1994.  In ’95, Rison (who signed an enormous contract to play in Cleveland) and Sanders (just two catches in his final season) were gone, but Eric Metcalf was acquired in Rison’s place and J.J. Birden (from Kansas City) filled Sanders’ role.  Heyward actually made the Pro Bowl and rushed for 1,000 yards, but the Falcons remained a pass-heavy team.  George was benched three games into the 1996 season, ending his time in Atlanta. ^[3]And to complete the story: in the final 7 starts of his career, in Washington, George’s team rushed for only 86.3 yards per game.

The table below shows the rushing yards per game averaged in games started by each quarterback, for the 179 quarterbacks with at least 50 starts. The table is sorted by rushing yards per game, from most to fewest, so George is at the very bottom (the table is fully sortable and searchable). [continue reading…]

Yesterday, I looked at the quarterbacks who were the biggest checkdown artists: i.e., which players had the best completion percentages and lowest yards per completion averages. I measured this by calculating how many standard deviations above/below average each quarterback was in those two categories in each year.

Today, the reverse. And the big winner is rookie Terry Bradshaw. We all know Bradshaw stunk as a rookie. He had a whopping 11.0% interception rate, which was horrible even for 1970. In fact, he has the second most attempts in history by a player with an 11% or worse interception rate. And since Bradshaw also ranked dead last in completion percentage, he ranked 2nd to last in ANY/A that year.

Of course, you might wonder: how could someone with the worst completion percentage and by far the worst interception rate not rank last (by a mile) in ANY/A? Well, it’s because Bradshaw ranked 2nd in the NFL in yards per completion as a rookie. He was your ultimate boom/bust passer, finishing 2.75 standard deviations below average in completion percentage and 2.18 standard deviations above average in yards per completion.

The top of the list features a bunch of interesting names, but I’m calling this the Jay Schroeder Index for a reason.  Schroeder only had 8 seasons where he threw at least 200 passes, but he makes the top 200 in 6 of those 8 seasons!  Schroeder made the list in ’86, ’87, and ’88 (despite moving from the Redskins to the Raiders this year), and then in ’90, ’91, and ’92.  He only missed the list in 1989 during this run, and that’s because he threw just 194 passes.  But in 1989, of the 34 quarterbacks with at least 150 pass attempts, Schroeder had the lowest completion percentage (46.9%) and by far the highest yards per completion average (17.0, the best of his career).  In other words, Schroeder had a top-200 season in 6 out of 7 straight years, with the lone exception being perhaps his most Schroeder-esque season! Of course, Schroeder’s love of the deep ball isn’t new to readers of this site.

The table below shows the top 200 seasons based on the Schroeder Index, using the same formula as yesterday: [continue reading…]

You may have heard that Sam Bradford set the completion percentage record in 2016 by completing 71.6% of his passes.

What you may not have heard: Bradford also ranked last in the league in passing yards gained per completion, which makes his record-breaking performance a somewhat hollow achievement. Bradford is the fifth quarterback in the Super Bowl era to rank 1st in completion percentage and last in yards per completion, joining David Carr (HOU 2006), Eric Hipple (DET 1986), Joe Montana (SFO 1980) in his first year as a starter, and Sonny Jurgensen (WAS 1969). In general, things didn’t work out well for those quarterbacks:  Carr posted a 6-10 record in 2006, while Hipple went 3-7, and Montana went 2-5.  Bradford went 7-8 last season, meaning only Jurgensen (7-5-2) posted a winning record of that bunch (and Washington had a negative points differential and faced a very easy schedule that year).

Expand the list to finishing 1st or 2nd in completion percentage and last or 2nd-to-last in yards per completion, and you bring in four more quarterbacks: Chad Pennington (NYJ 2007, 2nd in both), Joe Montana (SFO 1981, 1st in comp%, 2nd-to-last in YPC), Fran Tarkenton (MIN 1977, 1st, 2nd) and Len Dawson (KAN 1972, 2nd in comp%, last in YPC).  The results there were mixed: Pennington went 1-7, while Montana went 13-3, Tarkenton went 6-3, and Dawson went 7-5.  It is worth pointing out that Montana and Tarkenton both had above-average Y/A ratios that year: in other words, having a high completion percentage is great, but only if it doesn’t come at the expense of your yards per completion average.

How much of a checkdown artist was Bradford last year? He finished 1.95 standard deviations above average in completion percentage last year among qualifying passers, a metric commonly referred to as a Z-score. He also finished 1.82 standard deviations below average in yards per completion. If you take his Z-Score in completion percentage (+1.95), and subtract his Z-Score in yards per completion (-1.82), you get a result of +3.77.

That may not mean much in the abstract, but it ranks as the 3rd most extreme result in the Super Bowl era, behind only Jurgensen 69 and Carr 06. The table below shows the top 200 most extreme checkdown artists — by this metric — since 1966:

As always, please leave your thoughts in the comments. Tomorrow, we’ll look at the opposite result: any guesses as to the leaders in that category?

On Tuesday, James “Four Touchdowns” Hanson posted a great article on the support that Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers have enjoyed throughout their careers. That was Part 1, and it received over 100 comments, so give it (and the comments section) a read. Today comes Part 2. As always, we thank our guest posters for contributing.  What follows are James’ words.

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Team Support by Traditional Stats and Expected Points

About 35% to 55% of all offensive plays (depending on game script, offensive philosophy, personnel, etc.) are running plays, so there is value in looking at what each quarterback’s running game produced. Even if teams tend to run more after building a lead, it’s still a key part of closing out games. I’ve included their average league-wide ranks so we can get a better idea of how many seasons they enjoyed with great rushing support.

I’ve also included turnovers minus interceptions, which I assume are fumbles from the WRs, RBs, QBs, and Special Teams – but since I can’t determine who is responsible for what, I’ve included that information here under the assumption that most fumbles aren’t from the quarterback.

I should also note that while the rushing yards and touchdowns have had the quarterback’s contributions subtracted, the rushing first downs and expected points include any first downs gained by quarterback sneaks and scrambles.

The light green indicates the leader in that category, while the pink indicates the least amount of support in that metric.

In general, it looks like Brady and Brees have enjoyed the most rushing support while Rodgers has suffered the least amount of support by conventional metrics – and remember, those TD and first down totals include ones he picked up himself, meaning his support in those areas is likely even worse than the numbers indicate. Manning and Brady have had a top ten run game in 7 seasons, while Brees has had one 3 times and Rodgers has had a top ten running game in 2 seasons. [continue reading…]