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Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota have been linked together for a long time.

In college, Jameis Winston was the 2013 Heisman Trophy winner, and his Florida State team won the college championship that season. The next season, Marcus Mariota won the Heisman Trophy Winner and his Oregon Ducks knocked Winston and the Seminoles out of the playoffs.

The two quarterbacks then were selected as the first two picks in the 2015 Draft. Who was the better prospect? That was a tough debate for many analysts to answer. Four years later, the question of who is the better pro quarterback is just as difficult to solve.

Both have been average starters in the NFL. There have been 32 quarterbacks to throw 800+ passes since Winston and Mariota entered the NFL. Of those passers, Winston ranks 17th in ANY/A and Mariota ranks 20th. Stylistically, the two quarterbacks are very different: Mariota takes a ton of sacks (he has the 5th-worst sack rate of those 32 quarterbacks; Winston is square in the middle at 16th), while Winston throws a lot of interceptions (he has the 2nd-worst INT rate) but also is a deep thrower (he has the 3rd-best yards/completion rate).

But perhaps the biggest discrepancy between the two players through four years is their records. Mariota is an average 27-28, but that’s dragged down by a 3-9 rookie season; he has been slightly better than .500 every year since. Winston, meanwhile, has a 21-33 record; his 0.389 winning percentage is the 4th-worst of those 32 quarterbacks.

But how they got to those records tells a pretty revealing story. Mariota has started 55 games and has produced a 6.16 ANY/A average in those starts, while Winston has started 54 games and averaged 6.34 ANY/A. I calculated each quarterback’s ANY/A average in each game, and then combined those games into groups: an ANY/A of 0 to 0.99, 1 to 1.99, 2 to 2.99, etc. Then, I checked to see how many games under or over .500 each quarterback was in each group.

That’s shown below, with Winston’s numbers in orange and Mariota’s in blue.  I have also included each quarterback’s full record for each category of games.  For example, take a look at the graph below and look in the middle for the 7 on the X-Axis.  This is all games where the quarterbacks averaged between 7 and 7.99 ANY/A.  Mariota is four games over .500 in those games, going 4-0.  Winston is two games over .500 in those games, going 5-3.

The biggest outliers concern Winston, particularly at the 6 and 10 marks.  For Winston, he is 3-7 when averaging between 6 and 6.99 ANY/A, while Mariota is 4-5.  More striking, perhaps, is at the 10-10.99 ANY/A mark: Winston there is 0-3!  (Those losses were to Carolina, Washington, and Atlanta.) Mariota, meanwhile, is 7-1 when in games with an ANY/A of 9.00 or better. [continue reading…]

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Marcus Mariota Needs To Throw More Incomplete Passes

Mariota is taken down for another sack.

Marcus Mariota is having the worst season of his career.  As a rookie in 2015, he ranked 22nd in ANY/A.  In 2016, he had a very strong year, finishing 8th in Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt. Last year, he fell back to 22nd in ANY/A, and this season, he ranks just 28th in ANY/A.

Of course, it’s important to know which statistics to examine. Mariota has completed 70.3% of his passes; before this year, his career best was a 62.2% rate as a rookie.  But there are two factors that make his completion percentage meaningless: one, completion percentage is rising league-wide, and more importantly, Mariota has taken a ton of sacks.

He has a 12.8% sack rate this year, easily the worst of his career.  What’s really remarkable is the interplay between his completion rate and his sack rate.  Mariota has thrown just 71 incomplete passes all season, while he’s taken 35 sacks.  That’s nearly a 2:1 ratio of incomplete passes to sacks!  By way of comparison, AFC South rival Andrew Luck has a ratio of nearly 13:1 — he’s thrown 138 incomplete passes and taken only 11 sacks.

There have been seven games this season where a quarterback had more sacks than incomplete passes: Mariota is responsible for 3 of those 7, and all 3 were losses (all other quarterbacks are 3-1 in such games): [continue reading…]

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Jameis Winston‘s average pass completion has traveled 8.24 yards in the air, the longest distance in the league.

On Carson Wentz‘s average completion, the ball traveled 8.11 air yards.

And Marcus Mariota? His average completion picked up 7.61 air yards before being caught.

Those are the three most vertical passers in the NFL this season by that metric.

Last year, Winston and Mariota ranked 2nd and 3rd in this category: Winston’s average gain was 7.89 yards before being caught, Mariota’s 7.86. Cam Newton led all passers at 8.14 air yards on completed passes. But Wentz? He ranked 27th out of 30 qualifying passers, at 5.34 yards.

In 2015 — the rookie years for Winston and Mariota — Winston ranked 2nd behind Carson Palmer with an 8.13 average; Mariota was in the top 10 at 7.24.

Wentz is having a remarkable season: he ranks 4th in yards per pass attempt, and ranks 1st in yards per completion. Winston ranks only 4th in yards per completion, while Mariota is down at 11th in yards per completion. That’s because those two — and especially Mariota — aren’t getting much yards after the catch from their receivers. Mariota and Winston are both getitng just 4.2 yards of YAC per completed pass, ranking them both in the bottom six of that metric. Wentz ranks 19th with 4.8 YAC per completion.

The graph below shows Air Yards per completed passes for each quarterback in the 2017 season on the X-Axis, and Yards After the Catch per completed passes on the Y-Axis. Mariota, Wentz, and Winston are all to the far right of the graph, of course: [continue reading…]

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Today at the New York Times, a look at the impressive rookie seasons from the top quarterbacks in the 2015 Draft.

In the 2015 N.F.L. Draft, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Tennessee Titans owned the top two picks. The teams selected Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota, making them just the sixth pair of quarterbacks to be selected one-two since 1970. Each player is having an excellent season by rookie quarterback standards, and both showed their long-term potential in exciting wins on Sunday.

Mariota has thrown for 19 touchdowns in 10 games and has a 95.1 passer rating this year; both marks are among the best in N.F.L. history for a rookie. Against the Jaguars, he threw for 268 yards and three touchdowns on just 29 passes, his fourth game with at least three touchdown passes. He also ran for an 81-yard touchdown, the third longest touchdown run by any quarterback in N.F.L. history. In addition, Mariota joined Randall Cunningham and Michael Vick as the only players since 1960 with three passing touchdowns and 100 rushing yards in the same game.

You can read the full article here.

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This week at the New York Times, some thoughts on Marcus Mariota’s insanely productive debut:

Mariota became the youngest player in N.F.L. history to throw for four touchdowns in the first half of a game. Just one other rookie quarterback has thrown four first-half touchdowns in a single game: Johnny Green of Buffalo in 1960. Mariota also joined Matthew Stafford, Drew Bledsoe, and Fran Tarkenton as the only players since 1950 to pass for four touchdowns in a single game before turning 22 years old, and he and Tarkenton are the only rookie quarterbacks to throw for four touchdowns in their team’s first game.

You can read the full article here.

I also wrote about the A.F.C. East going 4-0 in week 1. You can read that article here.

The Dolphins may be the most balanced team in the division, with a better defense than New England and a more reliable offense than either New York or Buffalo. But Miami is also the one team without a clear identity. The strength of the team last year was the rushing attack and running back Lamar Miller, but Miami had a curious tendency to refrain from relying on the ground game. That trend continued in Week 1: Before the final, run-the-clock-out drive, Miller had only 9 carries (for 49 yards). The Dolphins finished the day with 18 carries, five fewer than any other team that won in Week 1. The rush defense, which was supposed to be bolstered by the off-season acquisition of Ndamukong Suh, was shredded for 161 rushing yards, the third highest total of the week. But one bright spot for the Dolphins was on special teams. According to Football Outsiders, Miami had the worst special teams in the N.F.L. in 2014; on Sunday, Jarvis Landry’s 69-yard fourth-quarter punt return was the game winner.

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