I’m short on time right now so this week’s QB rankings will be presented without commentary. [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back to give us his thoughts on this week’s quarterbacks. It’s been fun to follow his progression from hopeful fan to ranting madman over the course of just fifteen weeks.

This is starting to sound like a broken record but we just witnessed yet another week of terrible quarterbacking. Only 9 of 32 qualifiers even cracked a QBR of 50! We can’t even blame this on backup QB’s dragging down the average as the bottom 10 were all regular starters aside from Mike Glennon. If anything, the backups outperformed the starters with Tyler Huntley taking the week 15 crown and Nick Mullens placing eighth. [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back with another quarterback recap. He has a broken arm and a detached retina, and he’s ready to win it.

This may have been the least interesting week of the 2021 season for overall game quality (favorites were 12-2 with some totally noncompetitive matchups), but it was still a fascinating slate for analyzing quarterback performance. [continue reading…]

As has been the case for nearly two months now, the steady decline of NFL offenses continued in week 13. Scoring has dropped from 24.8 points per game last year to 22.9 this year. The league is currently averaging 11.0 yards per completion; if this holds it will be the lowest in NFL history. There’s also been a marked shift in touchdown passes vs. interceptions. Early in the season there were 3.5 TD passes for every INT; that ratio is now below 2 to 1. For the first time in several years the NFL has found a nice equilibrium between offense and defense. It’ll be interesting to see if the competition committee devises rule changes to boost offense again in 2022.

Here are the week 13 rankings: [continue reading…]

This week I’m excited to introduce a new data set into my quarterback rankings, courtesy of Pro Football Focus. I’d like to give a helmet knock to our good buddy Bryan Frye for working out some details behind the scenes to make this possible. ^[1]Note from Bryan: all I did was ask.

From this point forward, I will be using two metrics to rate quarterbacks: QBR and PFF offensive grades. This makes me giddy because both systems attempt to isolate the QB’s contribution from that of his teammates. That’s a significant step up from ANY/A, DYAR, and EPA which simply assign team offensive statistics to the QB taking the snaps. I can live with that for historical comparisons where we don’t have anything better, but in today’s world of robust data there’s no reason to settle for such a high degree of entanglement.

As neither QBR nor PFF grades account for workload, I needed to make an adjustment to prevent low usage QB’s from hogging the top of the rankings. After experimenting with a few ideas I settled on adding a z-score for play count (based on qualifiers only) and giving it half weight compared to the z-scores for the two metrics. It’s not perfect but it gets the job done without too many arbitrary decisions.

Let’s see how the new system looks for week 12: [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back, and he’s eschewing the expository fluff (which I am re-adding, right here). Enjoy, friends.

Here are this week’s quarterback rankings: [continue reading…]

As with the rest of these recaps, the ideas and analysis presented here are from Adam Steele. I’m just a dunce with admin rights.

We’ve seen a steady decline in quarterback play across the last month, and this week hit a new low. The unweighted average QBR for week ten qualifiers was a dismal 44.7. That would have ranked 27th in the league last year! This isn’t a surprise as offense tends to decline in the second half of every season as defenses jell and the weather starts to make an impact.

Here are this week’s numbers: [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back, continuing to refine his methods in real time, and we get to benefit from it. Thank you Adam, for working it out publicly.

After tabulating the numbers for week nine I realized I needed to make one more tweak to the formula. Since EPA per play and QBR are both agnostic to volume, QB games with a low number of plays were disproportionately clustered at the top and bottom of the rankings. Obviously it’s harder to maintain an extreme performance over a larger sample than a smaller one. My solution was to regress EPA/P by adding 20 plays of 0.1 EPA (roughly league average) to everyone’s stat line before calculating their z-scores. This fix strikes a nice balance between efficiency and volume.

Onto this week results: [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back with a brand new convention, and we thank him for keeping the site humming.

With the NFL trade deadline taking place this week, I decided to make a trade of my own. I’m ditching DYAR in favor of EPA per play. After Davis Mills placed seventh in DYAR by turning into Dan Marino down 38-0, I knew I had to switch to a metric that filters out garbage time.

Thanks to Ben Baldwin and his nifty site rbsdm.com, it’s easy to query EPA/P with various amounts of garbage time removed. After some experimentation I settled on a 4% filter; plays which occur when win probability is below 4% or above 96% are thrown out. The vast majority of plays are still counted but nonsense like the Davis Mills experience is rightfully ignored. To wit, Mills drops from -.149 to -.474 EPA/P with this filter applied.

Here are the week eight numbers: [continue reading…]

Guys, gals, and nonbinary pals, Adam Steele is back with his quarterback recap. And we thank him for it.

I’m going to keep the commentary short and sweet today, so here are the week seven rankings: [continue reading…]

After offenses lit up the scoreboard in week five, we were treated to the poorest quarterbacking of the year in week six. Both DYAR and QBR hit their low points in the 2021 season. What’s shocking is that this happened with the Jets on their bye week!
[continue reading…]

Finally, a week in which the best QB games were more extreme than the worst. The league saw DYAR and ANY/A reach their high points for any week in 2021. Oddly, this was the second worst week for QBR despite the meteoric conventional stats. There seemed to be an unusual number of highlight reel catches and long completions on busted coverages, both of which are likely discounted in QBR.

Fittingly, old man Brady tops the chart in the same week he became the all time leader in total DYAR. Brady and Lamar Jackson had the two best games of the year according to DYAR but fared much worse in QBR. In Brady’s case it’s likely because he faced almost zero pressure vs Miami, while Jackson gets taken to the woodshed for his goal line fumble (another example of QBR overweighting running plays).

Josh Allen had the opposite result – dominant in QBR but merely good in DYAR. He was very successful on his runs, completed his average pass a whopping 13 yards downfield, and didn’t have enough plays to pump up his counting stats. [continue reading…]

With it being the (almost) quarter point of the 2021 season, I’m going to skip commentary on the week four games and focus on quarterback performance across the first month of the season. [continue reading…]

Adam Steele is back with his quarterback recap for week 3, 2021. Thank you, Adam, you beautiful man.

The theme of week three is the same as week two: terrible rookies. Remarkably, the eleven worst QB games this season have all been more extreme than the single best game. Anyone reading this is well aware of Justin Fields‘ spectacularly awful sack-fest performance against Cleveland. But according to DYAR, that wasn’t even the worst game this week!

Here are the week three numbers: [continue reading…]