Don't know that I have anything of value to say, but I was certainly glad to see you take on Kaepernick. He was absolutely unconscious that season and made big plays repeatedly. The goal is just to score every time you have the ball, however you do it, but Kaepernick seemed to do it in a very EPA-per-play-friendly way that made him seem even better than the methodical guys like Brady and Manning. That was an interesting point about how, in the Bears game, the team only even got to third down four times in the first half or something. I looked it up, and for the year, I think only Cam Newton had a higher average yards per completion than Kaepernick, and it's not like he had a lot of speed at receiver. You do see a difference there in 2012 statistics betwen him and Smith: 13.3 for CK, 11.4 for Smith.
Kaepernick might not have done much with designed runs, but I contend that he was an electrifying runner, with his own style. He ran straight up and accelerated. I guess Randall Cunningham might be the comparison, although I remember Cunningham as more graceful, while Kaepernick was a touch faster.
You don't necessarily say this, but I wouldn't say CK was standing around with a clipboard, waiting for Smith to get a concussion. I remember the 49ers as giving him packages earlier in the season. His run/pass production in that early season action was slanted toward running, giving this some credence. I remember watching him against the Jets. He played in three straight games, but they were 34-, 42-, and 23-point games, so we'd have to check the play-by-play to see whether these were packages, or him playing in garbage time. But there were rumors that the 49ers were sitting on something pretty big.
Like you, I had immense faith in CK, considered him unstoppable, and took it for granted he would succeed. So when he threw for 412 yards against the Packers in the 2013 opener, and the 49ers won, I remember still being disappointed with him, thinking that, beyond the numbers, he looked a little off. That did indeed bear out. It was clear he lost his confidence. I don't know to what extent defenses figured him out, but he went from unconscious to very conscious, to seemingly thinking too much. One thing that was said was that he totally lost the ability to forecast trajectory, which is very much a feel thing. Anybody can aim and throw the ball more or less the right distance, but how do you decide just what is the right way to throw the ball?
For the record, while Smith and Rodgers were pitted against each other, the #1 and #2 quarterbacks in the draft lead up, everything I have heard is that the 49ers were clear in their decision to take Smith all along. I never heard that they reversed course, or even agonized.
A dead reversal on a second-round pick in the early 2000s lighting a fire underneath a first-round pick and failing to unseat him would be Brees and Rivers' time together in San Diego. Brees was the incumbent second-round pick who'd shown little, Rivers the new guy.
It had never occurred to me that the 2012 NFC was an historic group of teams. Interesting that's what your numbers say. I don't remember that from the time. I would have thought none of those teams were standouts. The Falcons were pretty widely seen as fraudulent, I think. But we have discussed that the Packers were coming off that 15-1 season, and the Seahawks would win the Super Bowl the next year, and then lose the Malcom Butler game. So I can kind of see it, although a lot can change with a team in a year.
In your QB ranking system, how do you handle a season like Kaepernick's 2012 where he plays half the season due to being a 2nd string instead of injury?
I don't. It's a QB value formula. Either you accrued the value or you didn't.
Because it's a formula primarily designed to grade players in retrospect, not looking forwards, I see no reason to delineate between missing games for injury reasons or missing games for 'I spent half the season as a backup' reasons. For instance, Sam Darnold was 24th on my 2022 QB tier list for his six starts with the Panthers, because in a historical sense he didn't really accomplish anything, but if I were to do it in a looking forward sense, I probably would've had him in the top ten in 2022, even with just 181 touches that year, because if you go back and read my 2022 tier list it was clear even then that I thought Sam had become a top ten QB in the league.
My formula is basically agnostic on the reasons why plays are missed. As far as its concerned, if I'm taking 2012 Colin Kaepernick, and his 303 plays of 0.195, 4.5 CPOE football, I'm going to have to fill my other 300 QB touches with a backup. This is why Colin is on the 2012 tier list in a whopping 17th place, right behind Carson Palmer, and his 608 plays of 0.063 EPA/Play football, because at least there's no need for any backup then.
We've actually just had a very good example of why I choose to do things this way in 2024, Derek Carr. With Derek, the Saints had 318 plays of 0.149 EPA/Play out there. Without Derek, they had 285 plays of -0.219.
Ouch.
That's what backup quality normally is, and that's why staying on the field is so important, even if you're painfully mediocre like 2012 Carson Palmer, because there's no need to deal with a black hole at any point at the QB position.
Mind you, if you blow the doors off in the snaps you do play, you CAN still make the top ten missing a fair few games. It hasn't happened in a few seasons now, but 2022 Tua Tagovailoa made the top ten while missing four starts due to finishing 2nd in EPA/Play. 2019 Ryan Tannehill made it starting just ten games, because even though I have to cover seven starts with a backup, 360 plays of 0.232 EPA/Play on a 7.7 (!) CPOE are just too good to pass up.
The ultimate example is definitely 2013 Josh McCown, a man I will never quit talking about, because he made my top ten with just five starts. 257 plays. The only man to make the top ten hitting either benchmark since Bob Griese and his 254 touches (and 6.07 ANY/A, radical for the time) in 1975. Those are the only two that have ever done it. I never thought it'd happen again, but then Josh McCown brought out 257 plays of 0.374 EPA/Play football, the fourth highest of all time in a qualifying season, so he gets to be eighth in 2013.
Fun fact: that's one of three top ten QB seasons the Bears have ever had LOL.
So yeah. I hope that's explained it. As far as my formula is concerned, there is no difference between being injured and being a backup. Missing plays is missing plays, and even in a circumstance like this where a backup turns out to be one of the best QBs in the league, I would still have to fill the other half of my season with something, if selecting in retrospect. 2002 Chad Pennington runs into the same problem. Even though I've said a million times he was the literal best QB in the league, if you look at my actual 2002 list he's only in second place, and almost falls behind Trent Green too, because that's four starts I have to fill with somebody else.
That makes sense. I'm not sure if would impact rankings much, but I'm wondering does that same logic apply to QBs who sit games or play one half due to their team having nothing to play for?
Yes it does. That's a regrettable feature of including touches as a variable. Luckily, you are correct that it doesn't affect anything very much. For any given player in a season, this is bound to cost them 50 plays at the extreme max (I'm talking Peyton 2004 max), and nobody ever sat out as many fourth quarters in blowout wins as 2004 Peyton Manning.
The formula enters plays nonlinearly. They affect better players differently than poorer players, but if you take somebody with 0.300 EPA/Play in a season, and give them 50 extra plays, it will boost them about a spot and a half. If you give 50 extra plays to a player with 0 EPA/Play, it'll give them about 1.2 spots.
I hate that I can't do anything about this, but my alternative would be to loop through every single season and figure out which missed plays were in 'acceptable' circumstances like these we're discussing, and which were not. In the play tracking era this could probably be done, but pre-1999 it would be absolutely impossible. To prevent giving modern players any advantage, I just do this for nobody.
You might be able to say this gives modern QBs (in more pass-happy offences) an advantage anyway, and this is evidenced slightly by four and a half spots on my top 20 of all time list being taken up by players who played their best years in the 2010s (Philip Rivers, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers, arguably Patrick Mahomes), plus one and a half more that are playing their best years in the 2020s (the other Patrick Mahomes argument, Josh Allen). Although, this lost of names passes the smell test enough that I've never worried about it.
Don't know that I have anything of value to say, but I was certainly glad to see you take on Kaepernick. He was absolutely unconscious that season and made big plays repeatedly. The goal is just to score every time you have the ball, however you do it, but Kaepernick seemed to do it in a very EPA-per-play-friendly way that made him seem even better than the methodical guys like Brady and Manning. That was an interesting point about how, in the Bears game, the team only even got to third down four times in the first half or something. I looked it up, and for the year, I think only Cam Newton had a higher average yards per completion than Kaepernick, and it's not like he had a lot of speed at receiver. You do see a difference there in 2012 statistics betwen him and Smith: 13.3 for CK, 11.4 for Smith.
Kaepernick might not have done much with designed runs, but I contend that he was an electrifying runner, with his own style. He ran straight up and accelerated. I guess Randall Cunningham might be the comparison, although I remember Cunningham as more graceful, while Kaepernick was a touch faster.
You don't necessarily say this, but I wouldn't say CK was standing around with a clipboard, waiting for Smith to get a concussion. I remember the 49ers as giving him packages earlier in the season. His run/pass production in that early season action was slanted toward running, giving this some credence. I remember watching him against the Jets. He played in three straight games, but they were 34-, 42-, and 23-point games, so we'd have to check the play-by-play to see whether these were packages, or him playing in garbage time. But there were rumors that the 49ers were sitting on something pretty big.
Like you, I had immense faith in CK, considered him unstoppable, and took it for granted he would succeed. So when he threw for 412 yards against the Packers in the 2013 opener, and the 49ers won, I remember still being disappointed with him, thinking that, beyond the numbers, he looked a little off. That did indeed bear out. It was clear he lost his confidence. I don't know to what extent defenses figured him out, but he went from unconscious to very conscious, to seemingly thinking too much. One thing that was said was that he totally lost the ability to forecast trajectory, which is very much a feel thing. Anybody can aim and throw the ball more or less the right distance, but how do you decide just what is the right way to throw the ball?
For the record, while Smith and Rodgers were pitted against each other, the #1 and #2 quarterbacks in the draft lead up, everything I have heard is that the 49ers were clear in their decision to take Smith all along. I never heard that they reversed course, or even agonized.
A dead reversal on a second-round pick in the early 2000s lighting a fire underneath a first-round pick and failing to unseat him would be Brees and Rivers' time together in San Diego. Brees was the incumbent second-round pick who'd shown little, Rivers the new guy.
It had never occurred to me that the 2012 NFC was an historic group of teams. Interesting that's what your numbers say. I don't remember that from the time. I would have thought none of those teams were standouts. The Falcons were pretty widely seen as fraudulent, I think. But we have discussed that the Packers were coming off that 15-1 season, and the Seahawks would win the Super Bowl the next year, and then lose the Malcom Butler game. So I can kind of see it, although a lot can change with a team in a year.
In your QB ranking system, how do you handle a season like Kaepernick's 2012 where he plays half the season due to being a 2nd string instead of injury?
I don't. It's a QB value formula. Either you accrued the value or you didn't.
Because it's a formula primarily designed to grade players in retrospect, not looking forwards, I see no reason to delineate between missing games for injury reasons or missing games for 'I spent half the season as a backup' reasons. For instance, Sam Darnold was 24th on my 2022 QB tier list for his six starts with the Panthers, because in a historical sense he didn't really accomplish anything, but if I were to do it in a looking forward sense, I probably would've had him in the top ten in 2022, even with just 181 touches that year, because if you go back and read my 2022 tier list it was clear even then that I thought Sam had become a top ten QB in the league.
My formula is basically agnostic on the reasons why plays are missed. As far as its concerned, if I'm taking 2012 Colin Kaepernick, and his 303 plays of 0.195, 4.5 CPOE football, I'm going to have to fill my other 300 QB touches with a backup. This is why Colin is on the 2012 tier list in a whopping 17th place, right behind Carson Palmer, and his 608 plays of 0.063 EPA/Play football, because at least there's no need for any backup then.
We've actually just had a very good example of why I choose to do things this way in 2024, Derek Carr. With Derek, the Saints had 318 plays of 0.149 EPA/Play out there. Without Derek, they had 285 plays of -0.219.
Ouch.
That's what backup quality normally is, and that's why staying on the field is so important, even if you're painfully mediocre like 2012 Carson Palmer, because there's no need to deal with a black hole at any point at the QB position.
Mind you, if you blow the doors off in the snaps you do play, you CAN still make the top ten missing a fair few games. It hasn't happened in a few seasons now, but 2022 Tua Tagovailoa made the top ten while missing four starts due to finishing 2nd in EPA/Play. 2019 Ryan Tannehill made it starting just ten games, because even though I have to cover seven starts with a backup, 360 plays of 0.232 EPA/Play on a 7.7 (!) CPOE are just too good to pass up.
The ultimate example is definitely 2013 Josh McCown, a man I will never quit talking about, because he made my top ten with just five starts. 257 plays. The only man to make the top ten hitting either benchmark since Bob Griese and his 254 touches (and 6.07 ANY/A, radical for the time) in 1975. Those are the only two that have ever done it. I never thought it'd happen again, but then Josh McCown brought out 257 plays of 0.374 EPA/Play football, the fourth highest of all time in a qualifying season, so he gets to be eighth in 2013.
Fun fact: that's one of three top ten QB seasons the Bears have ever had LOL.
So yeah. I hope that's explained it. As far as my formula is concerned, there is no difference between being injured and being a backup. Missing plays is missing plays, and even in a circumstance like this where a backup turns out to be one of the best QBs in the league, I would still have to fill the other half of my season with something, if selecting in retrospect. 2002 Chad Pennington runs into the same problem. Even though I've said a million times he was the literal best QB in the league, if you look at my actual 2002 list he's only in second place, and almost falls behind Trent Green too, because that's four starts I have to fill with somebody else.
That makes sense. I'm not sure if would impact rankings much, but I'm wondering does that same logic apply to QBs who sit games or play one half due to their team having nothing to play for?
Yes it does. That's a regrettable feature of including touches as a variable. Luckily, you are correct that it doesn't affect anything very much. For any given player in a season, this is bound to cost them 50 plays at the extreme max (I'm talking Peyton 2004 max), and nobody ever sat out as many fourth quarters in blowout wins as 2004 Peyton Manning.
The formula enters plays nonlinearly. They affect better players differently than poorer players, but if you take somebody with 0.300 EPA/Play in a season, and give them 50 extra plays, it will boost them about a spot and a half. If you give 50 extra plays to a player with 0 EPA/Play, it'll give them about 1.2 spots.
I hate that I can't do anything about this, but my alternative would be to loop through every single season and figure out which missed plays were in 'acceptable' circumstances like these we're discussing, and which were not. In the play tracking era this could probably be done, but pre-1999 it would be absolutely impossible. To prevent giving modern players any advantage, I just do this for nobody.
You might be able to say this gives modern QBs (in more pass-happy offences) an advantage anyway, and this is evidenced slightly by four and a half spots on my top 20 of all time list being taken up by players who played their best years in the 2010s (Philip Rivers, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers, arguably Patrick Mahomes), plus one and a half more that are playing their best years in the 2020s (the other Patrick Mahomes argument, Josh Allen). Although, this lost of names passes the smell test enough that I've never worried about it.