18in32
Petard Hoister
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- May 23, 2010
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No idea how this affects @ibeeballin 's defense of Kap, but here's an analysis on QB mediocrity from the WSJ...
Cut and pasted for you non-subscribers...
The Rise of the NFL’s Mediocre Quarterback
As teams throw more, they’re also throwing shorter—allowing passers who struggled in the past to thrive
By Andrew Beaton
Sept. 6, 2018 12:13 p.m. ET
The finish to the last NFL season was unquestionably weird. It ended with something good happening for the sports fans of Philadelphia—a Super Bowl title.
Yet there was something even odder than that: Most of the quarterbacks still playing at the end of the season were the ones judged mediocre by the smartest people in the NFL. The Eagles’ Nick Foles and Minnesota’s Case Keenum were meant to be backups. Jacksonville Jaguar fans probably would’ve been happier at the start of the season if Blake Bortles were a backup.
This is the opposite of how the NFL is supposed to work. Quarterbacks are the most valuable players and having a good one determines if your team wins like the Patriots or flounders like the Browns. The burden on this one player has grown in an era when offenses are passing so much.
But as teams pass more, their quarterbacks are getting rid of the ball faster and throwing shorter. It matters less if the guy throwing the ball has a howitzer attached to his torso. Quarterbacks have become less important because they became more important.
“You don’t have to have the most ridiculous arm in the world to be successful,” said former NFL quarterback Greg McElroy. “You just have to know your limitation.”
Three decades ago, the game was still rooted in the fundamental philosophies that had existed since the invention of the forward pass. Short gains were achieved by running the ball. Big gains came through the air, and completion percentages were lower.
Then, in 1982, Bengals quarterback Ken Anderson completed a record 70.6% of his passes. The number was made even more impressive by the fact that the leaguewide completion percentage was just 56.4%. It was an extreme outlier.
The record stood until 2009, when Drew Brees reached 70.6%. The Saints quarterback did it throwing about 66% more passes than Anderson did in 1982. Brees quickly broke his own mark in 2011. Then the Vikings’ Sam Bradford topped that in 2016. Brees, at 72%, reclaimed the record a year ago.
Reaching rates like that used to be “unheard of,” said Brian Griese, the ESPN analyst who in 2004 had one of the highest completion percentages ever at 69.3%. “Nowadays, there’s a handful in that range every year.”
That this once seemingly unreachable plateau has become routinely reachable has less to do with Brees and Bradford than with how much the game has changed. Anderson’s 218 completions topped the NFL in 1982. That would have ranked 27th in 2017—right between DeShone Kizer and Trevor Siemian.
The explosion of passing plays in recent years didn’t come without ramifications. Defenses learned it was increasingly important to pressure the quarterback. That meant quarterbacks had to start getting rid of it quicker unless they wanted to spend games with their noses buried in the grass.
The combination of increased volume and decreased time led to something logical. Quarterbacks began throwing the ball shorter. While old-school fans lamented the diminished importance of the running game, it didn’t functionally disappear. The high-probability short gains previously accomplished on the ground were simply substituted by high-probability short gains through the air.
Passes traveled an average of 9.6 yards through the air in 1992, according to Stats LLC. That number last reached 9.0 in 2004. Since then, it has dropped and reached an equilibrium with an all-time low of 7.9 air yards in 2013 and 2014 and 8.2 in each of the three years since.
Making sense of this effect is easiest by looking at the guys who broke the completion percentage. Among qualified quarterbacks, Bradford averaged the lowest air yards per attempt in the NFL in 2016. Brees was lowest a year ago, when he broke Bradford’s record.
Brees’s passes last season flew a yard shorter than they did earlier in his career, according to airyards.com. He wasn’t alone. Other top quarterbacks like Aaron Rodgers have been throwing the ball far shorter, too.
But the biggest effect wasn’t on the quarterbacks who could be great in any scheme in any era like Brees and Rodgers. Now coaches and offensive coordinators who aren’t blessed with an all-time great have figured out that these new trends can help them make lesser talents into Super Bowl winners.
For years, Blake Bortles had been a nightmare for Jaguars fans, never living up to his billing as a high selection in the draft. After being briefly benched in the preseason, Bortles stunned the world by simply playing well enough. He threw a career-low 13 interceptions and moved his completion percentage above 60% for the first time in his career. Also: He threw the ball more than a full yard shorter than he was a year earlier, according to the NFL’s NextGen Stats. Boosted by an elite defense, this new Bortles took Jacksonville within moments of beating the Patriots and reaching the Super Bowl.
Teams around the league had similar revelations. When Carson Wentz went down for the Eagles last year, they lost an MVP contender who was also one of the few remaining gunslingers in the NFL, routinely tossed the ball deep down the field.
But the Eagles didn’t lose much by subbing in Foles. Philadelphia has been a team that fully embraced the run-pass option scheme from the college game, which favors shorter passes. Foles was named Super Bowl MVP.
Case Keenum has something in common with Foles. They were both cast off by a then-crummy team, the Rams. Before last season, the Vikings brought in Keenum in a move that functionally amounted to insurance. Sam Bradford was entrenched as the starter, coming off his record 2016 season, with a recovering Teddy Bridgewater also waiting in the wings.
Then Bradford got hurt and the Vikings didn’t miss a beat. Keenum thrived, throwing some of the shortest passes in the NFL with an exceptionally high completion rate, 67.6%, for a team he nearly took to the Super Bowl.
This off-season, the Vikings splurged for Kirk Cousins but Keenum still found his validation. The journeyman quarterback who went undrafted then bounced around with the Texans and Rams before Minnesota found himself as a desirable commodity on the free-agent market. A quarterback who nobody had really wanted was suddenly a quarterback plenty of people wanted.
Keenum wasn’t signed by just anybody. He received his fat new contract to play for the Denver Broncos from someone who happens to know a little bit about playing quarterback in the NFL. That’s because the Broncos general manager is one of the best ever quarterbacks: John Elway.
Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com
Appeared in the September 7, 2018, print edition as 'The Rise of the Mediocre QB.'
Cut and pasted for you non-subscribers...
The Rise of the NFL’s Mediocre Quarterback
As teams throw more, they’re also throwing shorter—allowing passers who struggled in the past to thrive
By Andrew Beaton
Sept. 6, 2018 12:13 p.m. ET
The finish to the last NFL season was unquestionably weird. It ended with something good happening for the sports fans of Philadelphia—a Super Bowl title.
Yet there was something even odder than that: Most of the quarterbacks still playing at the end of the season were the ones judged mediocre by the smartest people in the NFL. The Eagles’ Nick Foles and Minnesota’s Case Keenum were meant to be backups. Jacksonville Jaguar fans probably would’ve been happier at the start of the season if Blake Bortles were a backup.
This is the opposite of how the NFL is supposed to work. Quarterbacks are the most valuable players and having a good one determines if your team wins like the Patriots or flounders like the Browns. The burden on this one player has grown in an era when offenses are passing so much.
But as teams pass more, their quarterbacks are getting rid of the ball faster and throwing shorter. It matters less if the guy throwing the ball has a howitzer attached to his torso. Quarterbacks have become less important because they became more important.
“You don’t have to have the most ridiculous arm in the world to be successful,” said former NFL quarterback Greg McElroy. “You just have to know your limitation.”
Three decades ago, the game was still rooted in the fundamental philosophies that had existed since the invention of the forward pass. Short gains were achieved by running the ball. Big gains came through the air, and completion percentages were lower.
Then, in 1982, Bengals quarterback Ken Anderson completed a record 70.6% of his passes. The number was made even more impressive by the fact that the leaguewide completion percentage was just 56.4%. It was an extreme outlier.
The record stood until 2009, when Drew Brees reached 70.6%. The Saints quarterback did it throwing about 66% more passes than Anderson did in 1982. Brees quickly broke his own mark in 2011. Then the Vikings’ Sam Bradford topped that in 2016. Brees, at 72%, reclaimed the record a year ago.
Reaching rates like that used to be “unheard of,” said Brian Griese, the ESPN analyst who in 2004 had one of the highest completion percentages ever at 69.3%. “Nowadays, there’s a handful in that range every year.”
That this once seemingly unreachable plateau has become routinely reachable has less to do with Brees and Bradford than with how much the game has changed. Anderson’s 218 completions topped the NFL in 1982. That would have ranked 27th in 2017—right between DeShone Kizer and Trevor Siemian.
The explosion of passing plays in recent years didn’t come without ramifications. Defenses learned it was increasingly important to pressure the quarterback. That meant quarterbacks had to start getting rid of it quicker unless they wanted to spend games with their noses buried in the grass.
The combination of increased volume and decreased time led to something logical. Quarterbacks began throwing the ball shorter. While old-school fans lamented the diminished importance of the running game, it didn’t functionally disappear. The high-probability short gains previously accomplished on the ground were simply substituted by high-probability short gains through the air.
Passes traveled an average of 9.6 yards through the air in 1992, according to Stats LLC. That number last reached 9.0 in 2004. Since then, it has dropped and reached an equilibrium with an all-time low of 7.9 air yards in 2013 and 2014 and 8.2 in each of the three years since.
Making sense of this effect is easiest by looking at the guys who broke the completion percentage. Among qualified quarterbacks, Bradford averaged the lowest air yards per attempt in the NFL in 2016. Brees was lowest a year ago, when he broke Bradford’s record.
Brees’s passes last season flew a yard shorter than they did earlier in his career, according to airyards.com. He wasn’t alone. Other top quarterbacks like Aaron Rodgers have been throwing the ball far shorter, too.
But the biggest effect wasn’t on the quarterbacks who could be great in any scheme in any era like Brees and Rodgers. Now coaches and offensive coordinators who aren’t blessed with an all-time great have figured out that these new trends can help them make lesser talents into Super Bowl winners.
For years, Blake Bortles had been a nightmare for Jaguars fans, never living up to his billing as a high selection in the draft. After being briefly benched in the preseason, Bortles stunned the world by simply playing well enough. He threw a career-low 13 interceptions and moved his completion percentage above 60% for the first time in his career. Also: He threw the ball more than a full yard shorter than he was a year earlier, according to the NFL’s NextGen Stats. Boosted by an elite defense, this new Bortles took Jacksonville within moments of beating the Patriots and reaching the Super Bowl.
Teams around the league had similar revelations. When Carson Wentz went down for the Eagles last year, they lost an MVP contender who was also one of the few remaining gunslingers in the NFL, routinely tossed the ball deep down the field.
But the Eagles didn’t lose much by subbing in Foles. Philadelphia has been a team that fully embraced the run-pass option scheme from the college game, which favors shorter passes. Foles was named Super Bowl MVP.
Case Keenum has something in common with Foles. They were both cast off by a then-crummy team, the Rams. Before last season, the Vikings brought in Keenum in a move that functionally amounted to insurance. Sam Bradford was entrenched as the starter, coming off his record 2016 season, with a recovering Teddy Bridgewater also waiting in the wings.
Then Bradford got hurt and the Vikings didn’t miss a beat. Keenum thrived, throwing some of the shortest passes in the NFL with an exceptionally high completion rate, 67.6%, for a team he nearly took to the Super Bowl.
This off-season, the Vikings splurged for Kirk Cousins but Keenum still found his validation. The journeyman quarterback who went undrafted then bounced around with the Texans and Rams before Minnesota found himself as a desirable commodity on the free-agent market. A quarterback who nobody had really wanted was suddenly a quarterback plenty of people wanted.
Keenum wasn’t signed by just anybody. He received his fat new contract to play for the Denver Broncos from someone who happens to know a little bit about playing quarterback in the NFL. That’s because the Broncos general manager is one of the best ever quarterbacks: John Elway.
Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com
Appeared in the September 7, 2018, print edition as 'The Rise of the Mediocre QB.'
