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Guest Post: QB Game Scores

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


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

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

Methodology:

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

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

Yards: 554 (Norm Van Brocklin, 1951)

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

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

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

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

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

The top 10 performances: [continue reading…]

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Guest Post: 4th Quarter Comeback Percentage

Today’s guest post comes from one of the longest followers of this blog (and its predecessor), Richie Wohlers. Richie is 44-year-old accountant from Southern California who is a Dolphins fan despite never being to Florida. As always, we thank our guest posters for contributing.


One of the stereotypical traits of a great quarterback is to be able to rescue his team from certain defeat in the fourth quarter by leading his team to a come-from-behind win. Thanks to the awesome work of Scott Kacsmar, we now have definitions for what it means to have a “4th quarter comeback”.

I began watching football in the early ’80s, and for most of the late ’80s and early ’90s I had heard that Dan Marino and John Elway were battling for the title of most 4th quarter comebacks (4QC). You can run a query on Pro Football Reference and see that when Elway retired, he was tied with Marino for most 4QC. Marino picked up 2 more 4QC after Elway retired and then Marino retired as the all-time leader in the regular season.

In this game in 2009, Peyton Manning recorded his 34th 4QC to become the new all-time leader. Entering the 4th quarter trailing by 3 points and scoring the winning touchdown with 5:23 left isn’t the most exciting of comebacks, but it counts, nonetheless.

Manning remains the leader with 8 more 4QC than Tom Brady and 9 more than Drew Brees.

I was a Dan Marino fan, and always loved when he was listed at the top of the unofficial leaderboard for 4QC, but it felt a little hollow to me. Joe Montana also had a lot of comebacks, but it seemed to me that his team trailed in 4th quarter far less often than Marino’s teams. This meant that Marino had far more chances to rack up his 4QC than did Montana. In fact, Marino’s teams lost almost twice as many games during his career as Montana.

So which QB’s have had the best success rate for 4QC given the number of chances they had?

In order to figure out the 4th Quarter Comeback Percentage (CB%), I am dividing the number of successful 4QC by the number of opportunities. By Kacsmar’s definition, a QB can only earn a comeback if the team trailed or was tied at some point in the fourth quarter, and some type of offensive scoring drive put points on the board in the 4th quarter while the team trailed by one possession or were tied and of course the team had to win the game.

I calculated a 4QC opportunity as the sum of all of a quarterback’s losses, plus all his ties, plus all his successful comebacks. There is a little bit of slop in these numbers for a few reasons.

  • A QB’s W-L-T record on PFR is based on games started, so if a QB came on in relief and trailed in the 4th quarter but did not get a 4QC it will not count as a failed opportunity for him. Likewise, if he does get a 4QC, PFR still won’t credit him with a win.
  • If the defense scored the winning points it would not be a 4QC and would also not count as a failed opportunity.
  • If a team never trailed in the 4th quarter, but the game ended up as a tie, this would have never been an opportunity to earn a 4QC for the QB.
  • I think the 25 points by Neil Lomax was the largest 4th quarter comeback in history. So, any deficit of more than 25 would be nearly impossible, but it will still count as a failed opportunity. I’m fine with that, because any team trailing by more than 25 points probably got there because the QB wasn’t playing well to begin with.

There are probably a few other exceptions, but this should still create a reasonable approximation of 4QC success rate. The denominator is therefore (QB Losses + QB Ties + Successful 4th Quarter Comebacks). The numerator is Successful 4th Quarter comebacks plus QB Ties divided by 2, so a quarterback gets half-credit for each tie.

On average, these quarterbacks have a 19% success rate. The table below shows every QB who has had at least 5 opportunities for 4QC since the merger (including pre-merger stats for quarterbacks who played after the merger, but only back to 1960 for Len Dawson, John Brodie).

The final column shows how each quarterback fared relative to the average 19% success rate. Let’s use Peyton Manning as an example. He had 79 career losses, 0 ties, and 43 successful 4th quarter comebacks: therefore, he had 122 opportunities. Given the 19% success rate for the average quarterback, we would expect an average quarterback to have 23.1 successful comebacks. Instead, Manning has 43, or 19.9 more than expected. That’s the most of any quarterback; his father has the fewest. [continue reading…]

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Guest Post: Wide Receivers and the Hall of Fame

Today’s guest post comes from one of the longest followers of this blog (and its predecessor), Richie Wohlers. Richie is 44-year-old accountant from Southern California who is a Dolphins fan despite never being to Florida. As always, we thank our guest posters for contributing.


Previously, I looked at linebackers and centers in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. With Andre Johnson’s recent retirement announcement, I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at wide receivers next. As before, I am just taking a look at post-merger players by using some objective factors to try to get a picture of what a typical HOFer looks like. Those factors are All-Pros, Pro Bowls, Weighted AV, Total AV, Super Bowl Appearances and Super Bowl wins). I am going to classify all players into a single position for simplicity. If you are interested in knowing the details of my calculation, see footnote. [1]Methodology: For All-Pros, Pro Bowls, Career AV and Total AV, I am looking at the average numbers for each player at his position. In an attempt to make the average HOFer at a position worth 100 … Continue reading

I explored the relationship between statistics (receptions, yards, touchdowns) and HOF induction for WRs, and it doesn’t improve the correlation. My “Career Score” is more aligned with HOF inductions than any single receiving statistic. The correlations are hurt by weak stats from HOFers like Swann and Hayes. And they are also hurt by big numbers from non-HOFers like Henry Ellard, Harold Jackson and Football Perspective hero Jimmy Smith. [continue reading…]

References

References
1 Methodology: For All-Pros, Pro Bowls, Career AV and Total AV, I am looking at the average numbers for each player at his position. In an attempt to make the average HOFer at a position worth 100 points, I am assigning a weight of 16.6 for each category (16.6 times 6 categories equals 99.6 points). If an average player had 5.7 All Pros I divided 16.6 to get 2.9. So each All Pro is worth 2.9 points at that position. Super Bowls are the exception. I’m just going with a straight points system. One appearance is 8 points, 2 appearances is 14 points, 3 appearances is 18 points, and then 2 more points for each additional appearance. Super Bowl wins are worth 12, 20, 26, 30 and then 2 more per additional win. I add them up for a “Career Score”.
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Guest Post: Centers and the Hall of Fame

Today’s guest post comes from one of the longest followers of this blog (and its predecessor), Richie Wohlers. Richie is 44-year-old accountant from Southern California who is a Dolphins fan despite never being to Florida. As always, we thank our guest posters for contributing.


Last time, I took a look at linebackers in the NFL Hall of Fame. Today, I am going to investigate centers and the Hall of Fame.

As before, I am just taking a look at post-merger players by using some objective factors to try to get a picture of what a typical HOFer looks like. Those factors are All-Pros, Pro Bowls, Weighted AV, Total AV, Super Bowl Appearances and Super Bowl wins). I am going to classify all players into a single position for simplicity. [continue reading…]

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Guest Post: Linebackers and the Hall of Fame

Today’s guest post comes from one of the longest followers of this blog (and its predecessor), Richie Wohlers. Richie is 44-year-old accountant from Southern California who is a Dolphins fan despite never being to Florida. As always, we thank our guest posters for contributing.


This is the first part in my series looking at the NFL Hall of Fame.  I am going to take a look at which players are in the HOF, and look at some objective attributes of HOFers.  I am only going to focus on players who played any part of their career after the AFL-NFL merger in 1970.  While this will include many players who played in the pre-merger days, the bulk of the careers will have at least been played since 1960 with at least 21 combined teams.  Before the AFL came along there were generally many fewer teams, so things like draft position and Pro Bowl/All Pro honors are more difficult to compare.  Also, the game of pro football was much different before the 1950s.  I am mostly going to stick with looking at the few statistics that can be compared across positions, such as All Pros, Approximate Value, etc.

I created a very quick and simple formula to give each player a career score based on the average of six statistical categories (All-Pros, Pro Bowls, Weighted AV, Total AV, Super Bowl Appearances, Super Bowl wins) at a position.  Each category is weighted equally (though, the categories are related, and winning a Super Bowl essentially becomes worth 2 categories).  The average HOF player at each position will have a score of 100.  This makes an easy (though not exhaustive) way to rank careers, and to quickly see if anybody is missing from the HOF.  I feel that using honors (Pro Bowl, All Pro) helps factor in peak value, AV factors in total value and Super Bowls helps factor in players on winning teams, who HOF voters seem to favor.

Today I am taking a look at linebackers. [continue reading…]

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