I loved the 2019-20 titans offense. It’s like Plato’s ideal old under center offense. Run and pass and play action with FB and or 2nd TE. Henry finally had a QB so 11 defenders can’t just focus on him. Great OL. Mariota made all this look bad; Davis and aj brown and Jonny’s smith were GREAT! Good DL too.
The season hinging on goal line stand is a topic to research. 2007 NYG would have been 0-3 if not for a goal line stand. Write about SB participants who we’re only there because they punched it in or stopped someone else from doing so…
I would think the persistent question about Tannehill is whether he was as good as his statistics, which just from my "old school" perspective were always very good. That was a dirty little fact that the "quarterback tier" proponents who wanted to keep him out of the club of the first two or three tiers didn't want to grapple with.
You piqued my interest on his 2016 combination of statistics. I was thinking of that question of whether he was as good as his traditional stats. You suggest that the disparity between his EPA/Play (27th) and his CPOE (+5.3%) was a matter of the Dolphins not having much talent around him. Indeed, we know that Jarvis Landry was a running back in a receiver's body and so not exactly gifted with speed. We know DeVante Parker was notorious for lack of separation and the low completion percentages to him.
But what I would propose is that the EPA/Play here might really be very insightful in reflecting Tannehill's true quality of play. Note that his yards per completion of 11.48 (+0.71 on league average) more than kept up with his simple advantage in completion percentage over league average (67.1 vs. 63.0). The Dolphins WERE getting yards out of those passes. It wasn't that RT was completing them, and then guys weren't going anywhere, and hence EPA/play was weak.
Then you look at how the Dolphins fared on third downs -- I don't have that adjusted for the yards to go on those third downs, but their 36.7% conversation rate placed them 31st of the 32 teams.
So it seems they didn't really pair their plays well, or that there must be something phony in both the pure completion and yard numbers. So in this one case, I do suspect Ryan was not as good as the old school numbers (and CPOE) said.
I should also say that that sack pct of 6.94% (or 7.1 more sacks per 600 attempts than the average 2016 rate) was another factor that at least theoretically should have brought passing production closer to average from its initial appearance of being well above that. (Know your characterization of the number here as "workable" was accurate. Just wanted to make a full accounting for my analysis, also, to be workable. :))
Ryan Tannehill fits the criteria to be underrated. In general, if you're an underrated QB, it's for one of two reasons. Either you weren't drafted in the first two rounds, or you were but are no longer with the team that drafted you. When you think of all the underrated QBs recently (Kirk Cousins, Dak Prescott, Brock Purdy, Jimmy Garoppolo, etc.), they all fit this criteria except for Tua Tagovailoa. Ryan Tannehill fit it too.
For some reason, the public at large refuses to allow those who come into their own on their second team to break into the 'top tier' of QBs. There is one exception in Steve Young (the 49ers' second choice when they lost out on trading for Jim Everett, which I mention just for you LOL), but that situation gets a bit muddied by the USFL, and good luck finding another one. My top 60 QBs of all time list is littered with people who came of age only after switching teams (Steve Young, Trent Green, Rich Gannon, Billy Kilmer, and arguables in Kirk Cousins and Jared Goff, plus Jeff George just outside the top 60, who is an absurdly underrated player). With the exception of Steve, the public never allowed any of these guys to be recognized as the top QBs in the league that they were. That's ten percent of the best QBs of all time, doomed to be systematically underrated forever because the public doesn't like players switching teams. That doesn't seem like a lot, but when you take into account the sheer unlikelihood of such a great QB switching teams before having their best season, it's a lot.
I don't understand the inclination to vote against players who've switched teams, but it's always been this way. People just don't like it.
As far as Ryan on the Dolphins, I'm not sure why it just never worked. His individual stats were good. I laid them out in the article. Advanced metrics don't hate his receivers in 2016 either. His offensive line sucked, but his sk%+ was only 92 I believe that year. You can work with that. You can work with all of this, but it just didn't work together, and that confounds me to no end. It's not like his throw depths were out of the ordinary. They were about league average (which is where all the great QBs hang out). His INT%+ was 87, which was really high, and indicative of extremely bad turnover luck when coming out of a top five CPOE finisher. Such accurate passers don't turn the ball over that much very often, and Ryan never did again until he was at a much different stage of his career.
Therefore, I view the precipitous decline in turnovers that happened as soon as he got to Nashville as something that was more likely than unlikely to happen in Miami too. That eliminates that line of questioning as far as I'm concerned. Upon moving teams, his CPOE only jumped 2.4 points, which is big but not unheard of, and his sack rate actually got worse. Are any of these improvements unreasonable or even jagged? I don't think I have reason to think so. They're large improvements, but smooth enough to still be in the realistic realm of possibility in my opinion. Peyton Manning's CPOE jumped 3.2 points moving from Indianapolis in 2010 to Denver in 2012. Nobody accused him of not being as good as numbers.
I think you've found the culprit David. Looking through the numbers, Ryan Tannehill was an extraordinarily bad third and fourth down player. Limiting the sample to just late down plays, Ryan generated an appalling -0.191 EPA/Play. Not the very worst in the league in third and fourth down situations, but close. This doesn't make any sense either though, as his CPOE on these plays was still 1.6, and he had only ten sacks on 139 such touches, only marginally higher than his season-long rate.
It seems to me like Ryan's 2016 results were torpedoed by poor late down luck. I say 'luck,' and not poor performance, because the same relationships between stats and performance tend to hold on all plays. Trevor Lawrence with the worst on the late down situations in 2024, generating -0.25 on a -8.9 CPOE. This is typical. Better than average accuracy and a 7.1% sack rate do not translate into results this bad very often, even in a 139 play sample.
If we fast forward to 2019, Ryan generates 0.075 EPA/Play on third or fourth down. This is not great (12th out of 30 qualified QBs in 2019), but it's likely the results he should've had in Miami, based on his third down performance metrics that aren't results. Combine this with the greatness that Ryan showed on first and second down, and you get a legitimately great player in my opinion, albeit one that can struggle in must-pass situations, but when you get into so few, it truly doesn't matter if you struggle in must-pass situations or not. Tom Brady typically struggled in must-pass situations. Nobody cares.
So was Ryan Tannehill more on the game manager side of the game manager-gunslinger spectrum? Yes he was, but so was Tom Brady. Even Joe Burrow tends to struggle in must-pass situations. It's something you can get around if you're good enough on first and second. Ryan Tannehill did, just like Tom and Joe always did.
I think the results improvements can be explained from 2016 to 2019 by improving the third and fourth down results to above average instead of abysmal, in conjunction with improvements that were big, but small enough to be reasonable, in general. I can't say definitively that anybody was or was not as good as their numbers, but I can say that Ryan's 2019 numbers are a lot more realistic than Matthew Stafford's in his best years, for instance.
Thanks for the thoughts and analysis. I do think we need to distinguish among slightly different paths/reflections of being underrated. You have guys who are underrated, maybe for unclear reasons, like Tannehill, and because of this, they become available to another team. Throwing those perhaps unusual cases out, I don't think it's clear whether it's that a QB within this team-changing group doesn't get his just due because the second team serves as a stigma, or because he just wasn't always good, and that's what stays with the public. Steve McNair and Bradshaw were late developers, Phil Simms, too. They stayed with their first team and the last two probably go too much credit for great late play, so that would support your theory that it's the team change that's mainly the thing, although the picture is complicated by your other variable, as I think they summed to be something like 10th overall pick. (I can go on about Bradshaw's being overrated, by the way, almost to Robbie Marriage heights.)
I went and looked up the 2016 Dolphins on a per-drive basis, and they come out just as they do on an EPA-per-play basis. They had the 8th-best starting field position, but were 19th in points. Without getting the benefit of that field position, they were 26th in yards (I think you had Tannehill as 27th in EPA per play, although I don't know how large the field for that was.) We are ignoring kicking in drive anaysis, and the running game, and perhaps notably, we come to the same spot. You can tell me if I'm wrong, but running plays, certainly in the old days of football, before phenomena like running quarterbacks and the 'tush push', seem to add no more than a data imputation method would. They will not make or break your analysis, it seems.
Sando's quarterback tier approach really isn't helping the cause of fluid, responsive rankings. It implies that that tier takes hold, and the player can't change it. Being good is as simple as playing good. There is no law that someone eventually can't, and certainly no law that average measurables make it impossible for him to do so.
I loved the 2019-20 titans offense. It’s like Plato’s ideal old under center offense. Run and pass and play action with FB and or 2nd TE. Henry finally had a QB so 11 defenders can’t just focus on him. Great OL. Mariota made all this look bad; Davis and aj brown and Jonny’s smith were GREAT! Good DL too.
The season hinging on goal line stand is a topic to research. 2007 NYG would have been 0-3 if not for a goal line stand. Write about SB participants who we’re only there because they punched it in or stopped someone else from doing so…
I would think the persistent question about Tannehill is whether he was as good as his statistics, which just from my "old school" perspective were always very good. That was a dirty little fact that the "quarterback tier" proponents who wanted to keep him out of the club of the first two or three tiers didn't want to grapple with.
You piqued my interest on his 2016 combination of statistics. I was thinking of that question of whether he was as good as his traditional stats. You suggest that the disparity between his EPA/Play (27th) and his CPOE (+5.3%) was a matter of the Dolphins not having much talent around him. Indeed, we know that Jarvis Landry was a running back in a receiver's body and so not exactly gifted with speed. We know DeVante Parker was notorious for lack of separation and the low completion percentages to him.
But what I would propose is that the EPA/Play here might really be very insightful in reflecting Tannehill's true quality of play. Note that his yards per completion of 11.48 (+0.71 on league average) more than kept up with his simple advantage in completion percentage over league average (67.1 vs. 63.0). The Dolphins WERE getting yards out of those passes. It wasn't that RT was completing them, and then guys weren't going anywhere, and hence EPA/play was weak.
Then you look at how the Dolphins fared on third downs -- I don't have that adjusted for the yards to go on those third downs, but their 36.7% conversation rate placed them 31st of the 32 teams.
So it seems they didn't really pair their plays well, or that there must be something phony in both the pure completion and yard numbers. So in this one case, I do suspect Ryan was not as good as the old school numbers (and CPOE) said.
I should also say that that sack pct of 6.94% (or 7.1 more sacks per 600 attempts than the average 2016 rate) was another factor that at least theoretically should have brought passing production closer to average from its initial appearance of being well above that. (Know your characterization of the number here as "workable" was accurate. Just wanted to make a full accounting for my analysis, also, to be workable. :))
Ryan Tannehill fits the criteria to be underrated. In general, if you're an underrated QB, it's for one of two reasons. Either you weren't drafted in the first two rounds, or you were but are no longer with the team that drafted you. When you think of all the underrated QBs recently (Kirk Cousins, Dak Prescott, Brock Purdy, Jimmy Garoppolo, etc.), they all fit this criteria except for Tua Tagovailoa. Ryan Tannehill fit it too.
For some reason, the public at large refuses to allow those who come into their own on their second team to break into the 'top tier' of QBs. There is one exception in Steve Young (the 49ers' second choice when they lost out on trading for Jim Everett, which I mention just for you LOL), but that situation gets a bit muddied by the USFL, and good luck finding another one. My top 60 QBs of all time list is littered with people who came of age only after switching teams (Steve Young, Trent Green, Rich Gannon, Billy Kilmer, and arguables in Kirk Cousins and Jared Goff, plus Jeff George just outside the top 60, who is an absurdly underrated player). With the exception of Steve, the public never allowed any of these guys to be recognized as the top QBs in the league that they were. That's ten percent of the best QBs of all time, doomed to be systematically underrated forever because the public doesn't like players switching teams. That doesn't seem like a lot, but when you take into account the sheer unlikelihood of such a great QB switching teams before having their best season, it's a lot.
I don't understand the inclination to vote against players who've switched teams, but it's always been this way. People just don't like it.
As far as Ryan on the Dolphins, I'm not sure why it just never worked. His individual stats were good. I laid them out in the article. Advanced metrics don't hate his receivers in 2016 either. His offensive line sucked, but his sk%+ was only 92 I believe that year. You can work with that. You can work with all of this, but it just didn't work together, and that confounds me to no end. It's not like his throw depths were out of the ordinary. They were about league average (which is where all the great QBs hang out). His INT%+ was 87, which was really high, and indicative of extremely bad turnover luck when coming out of a top five CPOE finisher. Such accurate passers don't turn the ball over that much very often, and Ryan never did again until he was at a much different stage of his career.
Therefore, I view the precipitous decline in turnovers that happened as soon as he got to Nashville as something that was more likely than unlikely to happen in Miami too. That eliminates that line of questioning as far as I'm concerned. Upon moving teams, his CPOE only jumped 2.4 points, which is big but not unheard of, and his sack rate actually got worse. Are any of these improvements unreasonable or even jagged? I don't think I have reason to think so. They're large improvements, but smooth enough to still be in the realistic realm of possibility in my opinion. Peyton Manning's CPOE jumped 3.2 points moving from Indianapolis in 2010 to Denver in 2012. Nobody accused him of not being as good as numbers.
I think you've found the culprit David. Looking through the numbers, Ryan Tannehill was an extraordinarily bad third and fourth down player. Limiting the sample to just late down plays, Ryan generated an appalling -0.191 EPA/Play. Not the very worst in the league in third and fourth down situations, but close. This doesn't make any sense either though, as his CPOE on these plays was still 1.6, and he had only ten sacks on 139 such touches, only marginally higher than his season-long rate.
It seems to me like Ryan's 2016 results were torpedoed by poor late down luck. I say 'luck,' and not poor performance, because the same relationships between stats and performance tend to hold on all plays. Trevor Lawrence with the worst on the late down situations in 2024, generating -0.25 on a -8.9 CPOE. This is typical. Better than average accuracy and a 7.1% sack rate do not translate into results this bad very often, even in a 139 play sample.
If we fast forward to 2019, Ryan generates 0.075 EPA/Play on third or fourth down. This is not great (12th out of 30 qualified QBs in 2019), but it's likely the results he should've had in Miami, based on his third down performance metrics that aren't results. Combine this with the greatness that Ryan showed on first and second down, and you get a legitimately great player in my opinion, albeit one that can struggle in must-pass situations, but when you get into so few, it truly doesn't matter if you struggle in must-pass situations or not. Tom Brady typically struggled in must-pass situations. Nobody cares.
So was Ryan Tannehill more on the game manager side of the game manager-gunslinger spectrum? Yes he was, but so was Tom Brady. Even Joe Burrow tends to struggle in must-pass situations. It's something you can get around if you're good enough on first and second. Ryan Tannehill did, just like Tom and Joe always did.
I think the results improvements can be explained from 2016 to 2019 by improving the third and fourth down results to above average instead of abysmal, in conjunction with improvements that were big, but small enough to be reasonable, in general. I can't say definitively that anybody was or was not as good as their numbers, but I can say that Ryan's 2019 numbers are a lot more realistic than Matthew Stafford's in his best years, for instance.
Thanks for the thoughts and analysis. I do think we need to distinguish among slightly different paths/reflections of being underrated. You have guys who are underrated, maybe for unclear reasons, like Tannehill, and because of this, they become available to another team. Throwing those perhaps unusual cases out, I don't think it's clear whether it's that a QB within this team-changing group doesn't get his just due because the second team serves as a stigma, or because he just wasn't always good, and that's what stays with the public. Steve McNair and Bradshaw were late developers, Phil Simms, too. They stayed with their first team and the last two probably go too much credit for great late play, so that would support your theory that it's the team change that's mainly the thing, although the picture is complicated by your other variable, as I think they summed to be something like 10th overall pick. (I can go on about Bradshaw's being overrated, by the way, almost to Robbie Marriage heights.)
I went and looked up the 2016 Dolphins on a per-drive basis, and they come out just as they do on an EPA-per-play basis. They had the 8th-best starting field position, but were 19th in points. Without getting the benefit of that field position, they were 26th in yards (I think you had Tannehill as 27th in EPA per play, although I don't know how large the field for that was.) We are ignoring kicking in drive anaysis, and the running game, and perhaps notably, we come to the same spot. You can tell me if I'm wrong, but running plays, certainly in the old days of football, before phenomena like running quarterbacks and the 'tush push', seem to add no more than a data imputation method would. They will not make or break your analysis, it seems.
Sando's quarterback tier approach really isn't helping the cause of fluid, responsive rankings. It implies that that tier takes hold, and the player can't change it. Being good is as simple as playing good. There is no law that someone eventually can't, and certainly no law that average measurables make it impossible for him to do so.