This is great. I could spend a lot of time just looking at this data and seeing what pops out. Looking at Elway for example, for his first several seasons it's almost like his estimated CPOE is negatively correlated with team success. The first season he had a positive CPOE was by far the worst record the Broncos had during his career. (Speaking of his career, that -8.4 his rookie season was a really deep hole to climb out of.) Obviously there's a lot more to a team than just good QB play, but I find that really interesting. Was Elway forced to throw better because his team was losing?
I'm going to have to think some more about whether I agree that CPOE and sack rate are sufficient to define a QB's tangible skills. One aspect I'll push back on a bit is the suggestion that receiver quality is the explanation for why a QB wouldn't see good YAC on his throws. That's part of it, but the QB decision making process is a factor too. Take Wilson for example. He often chose to throw (accurately) into situations where the receiver had no opportunity to get additional yards, where if he had thrown the ball sooner or to a different receiver the YAC would have been there. It's also a matter of where on the field Wilson would choose to throw. He rarely targeted receivers over the middle where they could make a move. He'd hit them on the sidelines where they could be forced out of bounds.
Anyway, this is excellent work. I'm sure a lot of people will find this incredibly useful.
For my money, John Elway in the 1980s has a real argument for the most overrated player in the history of the game. In the 1990s he got much better, so it keeps him as a whole from being the most overrated player in the history of the game, but it just wasn't great in the 1980s. Not from what I can tell. Let's go through the whole 80s (not including his rookie season in 1983) and see where the Broncos ranked in simple net yards per drop back as a passing offence:
1984: 18th
1985: 19th
1986: 13th
1987: 4th, which is still bad enough to make this a completely undeserved MVP award in my opinion.
1988: 12th
1989: 16th
There's a lot of winning in Denver, but as far as I can tell, this is an average QB running an average passing offence, with the exception of the outlier 1987, and I do feel comfortable calling it an outlier, because it was not unordinary in either fitted CPOE or sk%+, only in results. As you said, the first year John had a positive fitted CPOE in 1990, the team's record got dramatically worse, but John's contribution to it stayed approximately the same, as the team ranked 16th in NY/A again.
1991: 15th
1992: 18th
It's not until 1993 and beyond when the Broncos become a consistently good passing offence, and I don't think that's a coincidence when you look at John's CPOE figures before then, contrasting them with afterwards. It's not that John's performance had an inverse effect on team record before that. In my opinion, it's that John's performance generally had nothing to do with the team's record, as the Bronco passing offence was right there in that 12th-18th range all the way up until 1993, pretty much without fail, whether they were 13-3 or 5-11 or anywhere in the middle. The fluctuation was never going to be due to the passing offence. They were going to continue doing their 'not good, but not bad either' thing no matter what.
Before 1993, that's exactly how I would describe John Elway. Not good, but not bad either. Very rarely a top ten QB, but very rarely lower than 16th. This makes more sense when you complement his negative CPOE figures with his very good sk%+ numbers (generally in the 110s in the 1980s before his feet slowed a bit as he got older), which generally combined to put him a little bit above the average in my QB skill rankings throughout the 80s. The league average score with the way I've scaled the formula is 112. A typical John Elway season in the 80s would be around 120, with Joe Montana and Dan Marino at the top of the league scoring around 200. That kind of thing, and with the Bronco passing offence consistently placing in the teens. I'm happy that my skill formula produced this result. It seems right to me.
Onto your second paragraph.
I tend to believe there's a degree of correctness in what you're saying, but the fact remains that passing accuracy and sack rate are the two things in the game that the QB has the very most degree of independent control over. Putting them together, and not looking at results at all, you can predict a QB's EPA/Play in a season with an accuracy of 65 percent. I challenge you to find just two other non-results numbers that correlate with results so well.
65% still leaves 35 percent of a QB's results to be determined by other stuff than his individual skill. Some would argue that this is still too much, and that QBs have more than 65 percent control over their own results, but I tend to think 65/35 is a fairly good split between controlled and uncontrolled in a game as circumstantial as football. Aaron Rodgers' average EPA/Play difference between one season and the next is about a third of his career average EPA/Play. This is just one example of course, but it indicates to me that 65/35 may not be too bad a number.
I'm just not sure what else I need to see to determine that a QB is really good or not. CJ Stroud can't throw the ball accurately, nor can he avoid a sack, so CJ Stroud sucks. Jared Goff can throw the ball extremely accurately, and has a track record of being great at avoiding sacks too. Jared Goff is great. I'm not sure it needs to be more complicated than that.
I'm open to be convinced, but what other skill is there for a QB, that's also quantifiable, that I could include in my analysis? I'm not sure there is one.
The debate is still open as to whether YAC is a QB skill or not. It's one of the few things in the football data world that is not yet completely settled. Stats like ESPN QBR assume that YAC has nothing to do with the QB at all, simply giving them credit for the expected YAC on every ball, but I'm not sure if that's the right approach or not.
When I was doing the Tom Brady vs Peyton Manning debate, I came across the fact that Tom never passed Peyton in total EPA, the most important QB results metric, so Tom doesn't even really have volume over Peyton, which is something that I never would've expected, but I bring that up in this context because I found in the course of that research that Tom Brady got about 150 more total EPA over his career from YAC than Peyton Manning did. That's a whole season's worth of EPA, even for a top QB.
If you're a type that thinks YAC is completely QB agnostic, this 150 EPA difference from YAC is close to being a debate sealer in favour of Peyton. If you're the type that thinks YAC is something the QB has a significant amount of control over, this is something (pretty much the only thing) that Tom is better than Peyton at. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but then the question becomes what portion of the credit for the YAC the QB gets credit for? There is no consensus.
I hate having no answers to give to somebody who took the time to leave a comment, but I'm going to have to plead the fifth. I have no idea how much of the credit a QB in general should get for the YAC of his receivers.
Thank you for the comment my friend! I know I've been pouring over the data to find interesting little stories for more time than I'd like to admit. Marc and I in the comments above this talked about Brian Sipe. In the post I talked about Ken O'Brien and Steve Pelluer, and I'm sure there's countless others that I just haven't noticed yet. Thanks for taking the time to look.
Commenting on your posts is a pleasure. Your responses are always well thought out, and I very much appreciate that.
I think there has to be some credit given to QBs for YAC in some cases, but I agree it's really hard to quantify that. Sometimes it's all the receiver. I was watching these clips of Lil'Jordan Humphrey a couple days ago (https://x.com/FrankiesFilm/status/1862153063626133804) and on some of those it wouldn't have mattered what the QB did - Humphrey was fighting for every inch he could get. We've all seen plays where the QB throws it to someone who has no chance of getting more yards, yet somehow they do. I don't know that even the most detailed player tracking data can account for that. Maybe a stat that's Expected YAC for the QB component and YAC Over Expected for the receiver? Something like that.
Quantifiable is the key word in the discussion about QB quality. Obviously there are intangibles like leadership ability that matter a lot but can't be quantified. But are there any true skill elements that can't be easily measured but have a real impact on performance? Mental processing? Skill at reading and manipulating defenses? You make a good argument that if there are, it shows up in the two stats you're considering.
You're exactly right about the intangibles thing. They matter, but it's not truly possible to measure their impact., because there's no way to impose a consistent standard on everybody. Inconsistency and bias really get my goat. I'm obsessed with grading everybody in exactly the same way, so it's an intentional choice to leave out things like that.
Most skills people bring up are either nebulous, and/or have no impact on results at all. For instance, the ability to throw a great deep ball. Kyle Boller had one of the best deep balls I've ever seen. Kyle Boller sucks. Why? Because he couldn't accomplish anything 20 yards and in. How about the ability to work the quick game? Lamar Jackson is terrible at the quick game. Lamar Jackson does not suck. Why? Because his feet are good enough that he doesn't need to throw the ball quick.
There are things that would be good to have, but can be gotten around (i.e. Lamar's inability to run a quick passing game, which has been limiting Baltimore's RPO potential for years, and likely will forever), and then you dig one level deeper, to the skills that cannot be gotten around. If you suck at them, you suck at being an NFL QB. To me, accuracy and sack avoidance are the only two skills that are in this category.
These are purposefully vague terms, because there's more than one way to be great at them. If you're Peyton Manning, your ability to avoid sacks comes from your prodigious ability to know what the defence is doing, and pre-empt them, either by running bootleg or by just throwing the ball quickly. If you're Anthony Richardson, your ability to avoid sacks is likely more of a physical element to your game.
You've actually touched a nerve when it comes to the mental stuff being included in the numbers. It leads me to make the same warning that I make to other people. Don't use NFL NGS's version of CPOE. It's not good, and it doesn't do what CPOE is intended to do.
The NFL NGS version of CPOE includes the distance to the closest defender in its calculation, which turns it into a much more strict measure of arm talent, compared to the NFLFastR version of CPOE, which is a much more holistic measure of the ability to complete passes, which rewards (and doesn't punish) players for not throwing into coverage.
For instance, according to NGS, I don't think Patrick Mahomes has ever had a positive CPOE. Why? He sucks as a tight window thrower, and always has. NGS sees him throwing to wide open people all the time(bottom three in total tight window passes every season of his career), and doesn't interpret that as something that takes a lot of talent, meanwhile according to NFLFastR's version, Patrick is 21st all time, because it doesn't punish QBs for throwing to open players.
I'll rephrase. The NGS CPOE is not a bad metric. It simply doesn't do what we became accustomed to CPOE doing. It doesn't measure the same thing. Those who get caught thinking the two CPOE figures are interchangeable end up with a lot of headache. The NGS version is a lot more physical, meanwhile the NFLFastR version allows a lot more variance in the method in which the players complete their passes.
Anyway, that was a side tangent. You touched a nerve Nick LOL. Generally, all of the mental stuff ends up coming out in either the accuracy metrics, the sack metrics, or both. There are amazing physical specimens that can't can't avoid a sack to save their lives (Justin FIelds, Michael Vick). There are people with feet made of lead that never get sacked (Peyton Manning, Tom Brady). There are people with the best arms in the world who cannot throw the ball accurately (Ryan Leaf). There are players with a wet noodle who can always seem to get the ball to their receivers anyway (Chad Pennington). That's where the mental end comes in.
I would assume NGS CPOE would've absolutely despised Chad Pennington, because I have trouble imagining a worse tight window thrower, but he could find the open guy better than almost anybody else, and get the ball there. Is this a proxy measure for mental processing? That seems like a leap in logic, but nevertheless, it can capture that Chad Pennington was good, and Ryan Leaf was bad, despite the immense gap in strictly physical talent between the two.
Warren Moon has one of the lesser known great peaks. From 89-92, he had projected CPOE of 4.1, a Sack%+ of 113, and a NY/A of 116. He also claims back to back number 1 slots on your QB tiers. His only weakness was fumbling (0.81 fumbles per game).
It is fitting to see Stafford and Eli both at -1.3 career CPOE. Page 9 is my favorite. Andrew Luck has the same CPOE as Mitch Trubisky, and CJ Stroud is in between Justin Fields and Alex Smith. Imagine people trying to rationalize that.
Absolutely. If Warren's career weren't weighed down by all the bad years at the very beginning and very end, I think his peak would be remembered more. He's another one of the guys that tried to fill the gap in the early 90s when all the great players left, but just like all the rest, he failed to fill it all the way. His 1992 in particular deserves more historical look. It gets entirely disregarded because of the horrifying comeback loss to the Bills that will forever be plastered on the end of it, but his 4.9 CPOE on 116 sk%+ makes this the best individual season of the 1990s out of a player not named Steve Young, Troy Aikman, Jim Kelly, or 1999 Kurt Warner. Note that taking out all those players makes this barely a top 15 season of the 1990s, but on a player by player basis, few could match Warren's 1992. John Elway never could. Brett Favre never could, etc..
Even in that playoff game against the Bills, Warren still gets a 'good' on my Tom Brady scale. He didn't exactly snatch it by the neck, but the loss is nowhere near his fault. I often wonder how much impact that singular loss has on his legacy, because who's beating the 1992 Oilers if not the Bills? Nobody until the Cowboys, in my opinion, and if Warren Moon makes a Super Bowl, I think people would remember him a lot better as a player. He's in the Hall of Fame, but he's mostly in it for being the first black QB the NFL allowed to stick. Kind of like an honourary builder.
It's all too forgotten these days that the Oilers drafted a QB third overall in an effort to replace Warren Moon. I remember, because that QB turns out to be Jim Everett, and we've walked that path many times on here. Somehow, in the wake of this, Warren becomes a dramatically better player, and never plays as bad as he did before 1986 ever again.
All roads lead to Jim Everett LOL, because I was literally having a conversation the other day with David Harris about how Jim Everett gets viewed as not worth all that it took to get him (two firsts plus a fifth to pry him out of Houston, once they realised that Warren indeed was their guy), meanwhile Andrew Luck, for some reason, avoids that reputation.
We need not mince words. The Andrew Luck draft pick was a colossal failure. He never performed. He was top ten in EPA/Play once. Top ten in CPOE never. He started too many games to be labelled a bust in my opinion, but as a player, he was never as good as RG3, never as good as Russell Wilson, never as good as Kirk Cousins, never even as good as the best of Nick Foles. All these men were drafted after Andrew. All these men would've (in retrospect) been preferred by the Colts over Andrew, except Robert, who may never have been injured like that if not forced to play on the worst team in the league in Washington.
When you mix that into the fact that the Colts essentially traded the man who would move to Denver and immediately prove that he was still the best QB in the league for all this, you get one of the worst roster moves in the history of the NFL in my opinion. I have no idea how Andrew Luck gets away with this without being labelled one of the biggest busts in history, because as a number one overall pick QB, he is one of the biggest busts in history. Compare his career numbers (-0.9 CPOE, 110 sk%+) to Jeff George's (0.3, 90). You'll see that this is an argument between these two players as far as skill goes, and if we allow results to factor in, Jeff George got better results than Andrew Luck ever got. Specifically from 1995-1999, Jeff George showed he could actually be a top ten QB in the NFL consistently, including finding himself top five in EPA/Play in 1999. Even Jeff George had a level Andrew Luck never showed.
Andrew Luck was a disaster. No question about it. For some reason though, he does not get remembered this way.
I suspect the same may end up being true for CJ Stroud. His tenure so far in Houston has been an unmitigated disaster, covered up for two thirds of last season by great teammates. Imagine if the Texans benched this guy and got themselves a real QB. We could have a real AFC contender.
I don't know why some people get off light and others get such a heavy hand in terms of the public talking about how bad they were. Using the same example as above, Jeff George did not hurt the Colts anywhere near as badly as Andrew Luck hurt them, yet Jeff gets labelled a big time bust, and Andrew gets viewed the way he does. In my eyes, they are roughly the same level of player. In terms of passing accuracy, Andrew gets lapped.
I'm not sure why people have so much issue rationalising the way things really went. Is it because Andrew won a couple of playoff games in his career? That's not his fault, and it's not Jeff's fault that at the end of his best season, he ran into the 1999 St Louis Rams. He did score 37 points against the league's best defence, but when you're playing the 1999 Rams, there's only so much you can do.
So yeah Marc. People's memories can be wildly off sometimes. We're seeing a modern example unfold right in front of our eyes in CJ Stroud. There've been plenty throughout the course of history. This CPOE table reveals a lot of them.
QB play makes up 1/5th of the QB reputation pie. Where you were drafted, how much you won (both in terms of awards and games), the perceived strength of your surroundings, and if you have a big arm/passed the eye test are all pieces of the pie. Players become over- or underrated based on the last 4 factors relation to the first. Luck was a #1 overall draft pick, won a lot of games early in his career, had a reputationally weak roster, and "passed" the eye test. Trent fails in all boxes except for level of play, which is why he needs to pumped up.
Also, peak Stabler and Moon are a interesting comparison. Replacing Stabler's outlier 76 CPOE season with 78, he has CPOE of 4.57 and a Sack%+ of 116 from 74-77, which is quite similar to Moon's 89-92 seasons. However, Moon had way more volume, even when accounting for era, and fumble struggles relate to Stabler's interception woes.
Bernie Kosar is remembered as the only good Browns QB of the SB era, but how about Brian Sipe. Career marks of 1.4 CPOE and 109 Sack%+.
You don't need to tell me about Brian Sipe my friend. On my all-time QB list (the order of which may be changing now with the new data, so this is tenuous, but take it for what it's worth), Bernie Kosar is 25th. Brian Sipe is 28th. Not quite a Favre to Rodgers transition in Cleveland, but only one step below that. Brian's 1976 (3.3 CPOE, 121 sk%+), 1977 (3.8, 106), 1978 (1.8, 107), 1980 (3.4, 119), and even 1983 (0.8, 117) all need to be talked about more, even if some of these years were held back results-wise by poor Browns teams. He did win MVP in 1980, but this hasn't kept him from falling into the dustbin of history, so to speak.
Transition Brian Sipe into Bernie Kosar, who was still elite as late as 1991, and the Browns had great QB play for a solid 15 years there. People who think the Browns have just had awful QB play forever discount the period of time from the merger up until 1991, where the Browns were probably one of the best ten quarterbacked teams in the league. They did not win very much, but we've talked a lot how team record gets less and less correlated with QB play as you go further and further back in history. The Browns are a good example.
Ken Stabler will never quit confounding me. He's the anti-Tom Brady. The one guy where the ludicrous passing accuracy never translated into an ability to avoid throwing the ball to the other team, pretty much strictly except for 1974, where merely being good at avoiding INTs got him a runaway MVP award. It's also fun to me that his 1976 was so ludicrous that it's better to just exclude it entirely, for fear of it messing up any real analysis we may try to do.
As far as my 55/45 skill metric, it is by far the best individual QB season the league has ever seen, not followed super closely by anything else. Ken's score is about 300. 1989 Joe Montana and 2000 Kurt Warner are duking it out for second place, with a score around 250. You have to go through 61 seasons to bridge the next 50 point gap. That's how wide Ken's gap is. Like I said in the Note, it really is 2023 numbers, except in 1976. The only chink in the armour is the INT% of 94. If he could've raised that even to the 113 of his 1974, this would've been the best rate-wise QB season of all time, and there would be no argument, even after 50 years.
Funnily enough, despite being the far and away number one guy all time as far as individual skill in one season in my opinion, he is one of very few players to be in the top 20 seasons of all time, without being there multiple times. He never got near 1976 again.
It's also true that Ken never got the chance to get the volume, because from 1974-1977, his team's record was 42-9, meaning he was ahead often, and ahead by a lot, which is not exactly an environment conducive to QB volume, nor is a 14 game season. Still, if we look at 1978-1980, Ken's volume went up a lot, and his accuracy numbers stayed approximately the same, so I think we're good there. His sack avoidance got a lot worse, but he also turned 33 years old in 1978, so there's more than one reason his feet could've been dropping off.
I think he carried his small sample greatness into big samples well enough, but of course nobody did that as well as Warren Moon did. 700 plays in seasons where the league was lucky if three people could get to 600 is ludicrous. These years should've produced the worst rate stats of Warren's career. Instead they were the best. It's probably the earliest example of passing > rushing, and if you put more responsibility on a QB, you may be helping instead of hurting. It's interesting that this peak lands in exactly the same spot as Ken Stabler's does. They're two players I would've never thought to compare.
Finally, onto the first paragraph. I suppose you're right about that Marc, although it infuriates me how these criteria can be so inconsistently applied sometimes. For instance, look at Tom Brady. He was drafted low (theoretical down), won a lot (up), but had his best years with likely the best group of WRs in the NFL (down), had a level of play that was all-time great, but not befitting a GOAT candidate (down), and I'm not sure if he ever passed the eye test either. He was always thought of as a checkdown merchant. At least that's how I remember it (down). That's four downs to just one up, and a very overrated player anyway, but in general I do think you're right about the formula though.
This is great. I could spend a lot of time just looking at this data and seeing what pops out. Looking at Elway for example, for his first several seasons it's almost like his estimated CPOE is negatively correlated with team success. The first season he had a positive CPOE was by far the worst record the Broncos had during his career. (Speaking of his career, that -8.4 his rookie season was a really deep hole to climb out of.) Obviously there's a lot more to a team than just good QB play, but I find that really interesting. Was Elway forced to throw better because his team was losing?
I'm going to have to think some more about whether I agree that CPOE and sack rate are sufficient to define a QB's tangible skills. One aspect I'll push back on a bit is the suggestion that receiver quality is the explanation for why a QB wouldn't see good YAC on his throws. That's part of it, but the QB decision making process is a factor too. Take Wilson for example. He often chose to throw (accurately) into situations where the receiver had no opportunity to get additional yards, where if he had thrown the ball sooner or to a different receiver the YAC would have been there. It's also a matter of where on the field Wilson would choose to throw. He rarely targeted receivers over the middle where they could make a move. He'd hit them on the sidelines where they could be forced out of bounds.
Anyway, this is excellent work. I'm sure a lot of people will find this incredibly useful.
For my money, John Elway in the 1980s has a real argument for the most overrated player in the history of the game. In the 1990s he got much better, so it keeps him as a whole from being the most overrated player in the history of the game, but it just wasn't great in the 1980s. Not from what I can tell. Let's go through the whole 80s (not including his rookie season in 1983) and see where the Broncos ranked in simple net yards per drop back as a passing offence:
1984: 18th
1985: 19th
1986: 13th
1987: 4th, which is still bad enough to make this a completely undeserved MVP award in my opinion.
1988: 12th
1989: 16th
There's a lot of winning in Denver, but as far as I can tell, this is an average QB running an average passing offence, with the exception of the outlier 1987, and I do feel comfortable calling it an outlier, because it was not unordinary in either fitted CPOE or sk%+, only in results. As you said, the first year John had a positive fitted CPOE in 1990, the team's record got dramatically worse, but John's contribution to it stayed approximately the same, as the team ranked 16th in NY/A again.
1991: 15th
1992: 18th
It's not until 1993 and beyond when the Broncos become a consistently good passing offence, and I don't think that's a coincidence when you look at John's CPOE figures before then, contrasting them with afterwards. It's not that John's performance had an inverse effect on team record before that. In my opinion, it's that John's performance generally had nothing to do with the team's record, as the Bronco passing offence was right there in that 12th-18th range all the way up until 1993, pretty much without fail, whether they were 13-3 or 5-11 or anywhere in the middle. The fluctuation was never going to be due to the passing offence. They were going to continue doing their 'not good, but not bad either' thing no matter what.
Before 1993, that's exactly how I would describe John Elway. Not good, but not bad either. Very rarely a top ten QB, but very rarely lower than 16th. This makes more sense when you complement his negative CPOE figures with his very good sk%+ numbers (generally in the 110s in the 1980s before his feet slowed a bit as he got older), which generally combined to put him a little bit above the average in my QB skill rankings throughout the 80s. The league average score with the way I've scaled the formula is 112. A typical John Elway season in the 80s would be around 120, with Joe Montana and Dan Marino at the top of the league scoring around 200. That kind of thing, and with the Bronco passing offence consistently placing in the teens. I'm happy that my skill formula produced this result. It seems right to me.
Onto your second paragraph.
I tend to believe there's a degree of correctness in what you're saying, but the fact remains that passing accuracy and sack rate are the two things in the game that the QB has the very most degree of independent control over. Putting them together, and not looking at results at all, you can predict a QB's EPA/Play in a season with an accuracy of 65 percent. I challenge you to find just two other non-results numbers that correlate with results so well.
65% still leaves 35 percent of a QB's results to be determined by other stuff than his individual skill. Some would argue that this is still too much, and that QBs have more than 65 percent control over their own results, but I tend to think 65/35 is a fairly good split between controlled and uncontrolled in a game as circumstantial as football. Aaron Rodgers' average EPA/Play difference between one season and the next is about a third of his career average EPA/Play. This is just one example of course, but it indicates to me that 65/35 may not be too bad a number.
I'm just not sure what else I need to see to determine that a QB is really good or not. CJ Stroud can't throw the ball accurately, nor can he avoid a sack, so CJ Stroud sucks. Jared Goff can throw the ball extremely accurately, and has a track record of being great at avoiding sacks too. Jared Goff is great. I'm not sure it needs to be more complicated than that.
I'm open to be convinced, but what other skill is there for a QB, that's also quantifiable, that I could include in my analysis? I'm not sure there is one.
The debate is still open as to whether YAC is a QB skill or not. It's one of the few things in the football data world that is not yet completely settled. Stats like ESPN QBR assume that YAC has nothing to do with the QB at all, simply giving them credit for the expected YAC on every ball, but I'm not sure if that's the right approach or not.
When I was doing the Tom Brady vs Peyton Manning debate, I came across the fact that Tom never passed Peyton in total EPA, the most important QB results metric, so Tom doesn't even really have volume over Peyton, which is something that I never would've expected, but I bring that up in this context because I found in the course of that research that Tom Brady got about 150 more total EPA over his career from YAC than Peyton Manning did. That's a whole season's worth of EPA, even for a top QB.
If you're a type that thinks YAC is completely QB agnostic, this 150 EPA difference from YAC is close to being a debate sealer in favour of Peyton. If you're the type that thinks YAC is something the QB has a significant amount of control over, this is something (pretty much the only thing) that Tom is better than Peyton at. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but then the question becomes what portion of the credit for the YAC the QB gets credit for? There is no consensus.
I hate having no answers to give to somebody who took the time to leave a comment, but I'm going to have to plead the fifth. I have no idea how much of the credit a QB in general should get for the YAC of his receivers.
Thank you for the comment my friend! I know I've been pouring over the data to find interesting little stories for more time than I'd like to admit. Marc and I in the comments above this talked about Brian Sipe. In the post I talked about Ken O'Brien and Steve Pelluer, and I'm sure there's countless others that I just haven't noticed yet. Thanks for taking the time to look.
Commenting on your posts is a pleasure. Your responses are always well thought out, and I very much appreciate that.
I think there has to be some credit given to QBs for YAC in some cases, but I agree it's really hard to quantify that. Sometimes it's all the receiver. I was watching these clips of Lil'Jordan Humphrey a couple days ago (https://x.com/FrankiesFilm/status/1862153063626133804) and on some of those it wouldn't have mattered what the QB did - Humphrey was fighting for every inch he could get. We've all seen plays where the QB throws it to someone who has no chance of getting more yards, yet somehow they do. I don't know that even the most detailed player tracking data can account for that. Maybe a stat that's Expected YAC for the QB component and YAC Over Expected for the receiver? Something like that.
Quantifiable is the key word in the discussion about QB quality. Obviously there are intangibles like leadership ability that matter a lot but can't be quantified. But are there any true skill elements that can't be easily measured but have a real impact on performance? Mental processing? Skill at reading and manipulating defenses? You make a good argument that if there are, it shows up in the two stats you're considering.
You're exactly right about the intangibles thing. They matter, but it's not truly possible to measure their impact., because there's no way to impose a consistent standard on everybody. Inconsistency and bias really get my goat. I'm obsessed with grading everybody in exactly the same way, so it's an intentional choice to leave out things like that.
Most skills people bring up are either nebulous, and/or have no impact on results at all. For instance, the ability to throw a great deep ball. Kyle Boller had one of the best deep balls I've ever seen. Kyle Boller sucks. Why? Because he couldn't accomplish anything 20 yards and in. How about the ability to work the quick game? Lamar Jackson is terrible at the quick game. Lamar Jackson does not suck. Why? Because his feet are good enough that he doesn't need to throw the ball quick.
There are things that would be good to have, but can be gotten around (i.e. Lamar's inability to run a quick passing game, which has been limiting Baltimore's RPO potential for years, and likely will forever), and then you dig one level deeper, to the skills that cannot be gotten around. If you suck at them, you suck at being an NFL QB. To me, accuracy and sack avoidance are the only two skills that are in this category.
These are purposefully vague terms, because there's more than one way to be great at them. If you're Peyton Manning, your ability to avoid sacks comes from your prodigious ability to know what the defence is doing, and pre-empt them, either by running bootleg or by just throwing the ball quickly. If you're Anthony Richardson, your ability to avoid sacks is likely more of a physical element to your game.
You've actually touched a nerve when it comes to the mental stuff being included in the numbers. It leads me to make the same warning that I make to other people. Don't use NFL NGS's version of CPOE. It's not good, and it doesn't do what CPOE is intended to do.
The NFL NGS version of CPOE includes the distance to the closest defender in its calculation, which turns it into a much more strict measure of arm talent, compared to the NFLFastR version of CPOE, which is a much more holistic measure of the ability to complete passes, which rewards (and doesn't punish) players for not throwing into coverage.
For instance, according to NGS, I don't think Patrick Mahomes has ever had a positive CPOE. Why? He sucks as a tight window thrower, and always has. NGS sees him throwing to wide open people all the time(bottom three in total tight window passes every season of his career), and doesn't interpret that as something that takes a lot of talent, meanwhile according to NFLFastR's version, Patrick is 21st all time, because it doesn't punish QBs for throwing to open players.
I'll rephrase. The NGS CPOE is not a bad metric. It simply doesn't do what we became accustomed to CPOE doing. It doesn't measure the same thing. Those who get caught thinking the two CPOE figures are interchangeable end up with a lot of headache. The NGS version is a lot more physical, meanwhile the NFLFastR version allows a lot more variance in the method in which the players complete their passes.
Anyway, that was a side tangent. You touched a nerve Nick LOL. Generally, all of the mental stuff ends up coming out in either the accuracy metrics, the sack metrics, or both. There are amazing physical specimens that can't can't avoid a sack to save their lives (Justin FIelds, Michael Vick). There are people with feet made of lead that never get sacked (Peyton Manning, Tom Brady). There are people with the best arms in the world who cannot throw the ball accurately (Ryan Leaf). There are players with a wet noodle who can always seem to get the ball to their receivers anyway (Chad Pennington). That's where the mental end comes in.
I would assume NGS CPOE would've absolutely despised Chad Pennington, because I have trouble imagining a worse tight window thrower, but he could find the open guy better than almost anybody else, and get the ball there. Is this a proxy measure for mental processing? That seems like a leap in logic, but nevertheless, it can capture that Chad Pennington was good, and Ryan Leaf was bad, despite the immense gap in strictly physical talent between the two.
Warren Moon has one of the lesser known great peaks. From 89-92, he had projected CPOE of 4.1, a Sack%+ of 113, and a NY/A of 116. He also claims back to back number 1 slots on your QB tiers. His only weakness was fumbling (0.81 fumbles per game).
It is fitting to see Stafford and Eli both at -1.3 career CPOE. Page 9 is my favorite. Andrew Luck has the same CPOE as Mitch Trubisky, and CJ Stroud is in between Justin Fields and Alex Smith. Imagine people trying to rationalize that.
Absolutely. If Warren's career weren't weighed down by all the bad years at the very beginning and very end, I think his peak would be remembered more. He's another one of the guys that tried to fill the gap in the early 90s when all the great players left, but just like all the rest, he failed to fill it all the way. His 1992 in particular deserves more historical look. It gets entirely disregarded because of the horrifying comeback loss to the Bills that will forever be plastered on the end of it, but his 4.9 CPOE on 116 sk%+ makes this the best individual season of the 1990s out of a player not named Steve Young, Troy Aikman, Jim Kelly, or 1999 Kurt Warner. Note that taking out all those players makes this barely a top 15 season of the 1990s, but on a player by player basis, few could match Warren's 1992. John Elway never could. Brett Favre never could, etc..
Even in that playoff game against the Bills, Warren still gets a 'good' on my Tom Brady scale. He didn't exactly snatch it by the neck, but the loss is nowhere near his fault. I often wonder how much impact that singular loss has on his legacy, because who's beating the 1992 Oilers if not the Bills? Nobody until the Cowboys, in my opinion, and if Warren Moon makes a Super Bowl, I think people would remember him a lot better as a player. He's in the Hall of Fame, but he's mostly in it for being the first black QB the NFL allowed to stick. Kind of like an honourary builder.
It's all too forgotten these days that the Oilers drafted a QB third overall in an effort to replace Warren Moon. I remember, because that QB turns out to be Jim Everett, and we've walked that path many times on here. Somehow, in the wake of this, Warren becomes a dramatically better player, and never plays as bad as he did before 1986 ever again.
All roads lead to Jim Everett LOL, because I was literally having a conversation the other day with David Harris about how Jim Everett gets viewed as not worth all that it took to get him (two firsts plus a fifth to pry him out of Houston, once they realised that Warren indeed was their guy), meanwhile Andrew Luck, for some reason, avoids that reputation.
We need not mince words. The Andrew Luck draft pick was a colossal failure. He never performed. He was top ten in EPA/Play once. Top ten in CPOE never. He started too many games to be labelled a bust in my opinion, but as a player, he was never as good as RG3, never as good as Russell Wilson, never as good as Kirk Cousins, never even as good as the best of Nick Foles. All these men were drafted after Andrew. All these men would've (in retrospect) been preferred by the Colts over Andrew, except Robert, who may never have been injured like that if not forced to play on the worst team in the league in Washington.
When you mix that into the fact that the Colts essentially traded the man who would move to Denver and immediately prove that he was still the best QB in the league for all this, you get one of the worst roster moves in the history of the NFL in my opinion. I have no idea how Andrew Luck gets away with this without being labelled one of the biggest busts in history, because as a number one overall pick QB, he is one of the biggest busts in history. Compare his career numbers (-0.9 CPOE, 110 sk%+) to Jeff George's (0.3, 90). You'll see that this is an argument between these two players as far as skill goes, and if we allow results to factor in, Jeff George got better results than Andrew Luck ever got. Specifically from 1995-1999, Jeff George showed he could actually be a top ten QB in the NFL consistently, including finding himself top five in EPA/Play in 1999. Even Jeff George had a level Andrew Luck never showed.
Andrew Luck was a disaster. No question about it. For some reason though, he does not get remembered this way.
I suspect the same may end up being true for CJ Stroud. His tenure so far in Houston has been an unmitigated disaster, covered up for two thirds of last season by great teammates. Imagine if the Texans benched this guy and got themselves a real QB. We could have a real AFC contender.
I don't know why some people get off light and others get such a heavy hand in terms of the public talking about how bad they were. Using the same example as above, Jeff George did not hurt the Colts anywhere near as badly as Andrew Luck hurt them, yet Jeff gets labelled a big time bust, and Andrew gets viewed the way he does. In my eyes, they are roughly the same level of player. In terms of passing accuracy, Andrew gets lapped.
I'm not sure why people have so much issue rationalising the way things really went. Is it because Andrew won a couple of playoff games in his career? That's not his fault, and it's not Jeff's fault that at the end of his best season, he ran into the 1999 St Louis Rams. He did score 37 points against the league's best defence, but when you're playing the 1999 Rams, there's only so much you can do.
So yeah Marc. People's memories can be wildly off sometimes. We're seeing a modern example unfold right in front of our eyes in CJ Stroud. There've been plenty throughout the course of history. This CPOE table reveals a lot of them.
QB play makes up 1/5th of the QB reputation pie. Where you were drafted, how much you won (both in terms of awards and games), the perceived strength of your surroundings, and if you have a big arm/passed the eye test are all pieces of the pie. Players become over- or underrated based on the last 4 factors relation to the first. Luck was a #1 overall draft pick, won a lot of games early in his career, had a reputationally weak roster, and "passed" the eye test. Trent fails in all boxes except for level of play, which is why he needs to pumped up.
Also, peak Stabler and Moon are a interesting comparison. Replacing Stabler's outlier 76 CPOE season with 78, he has CPOE of 4.57 and a Sack%+ of 116 from 74-77, which is quite similar to Moon's 89-92 seasons. However, Moon had way more volume, even when accounting for era, and fumble struggles relate to Stabler's interception woes.
Bernie Kosar is remembered as the only good Browns QB of the SB era, but how about Brian Sipe. Career marks of 1.4 CPOE and 109 Sack%+.
You don't need to tell me about Brian Sipe my friend. On my all-time QB list (the order of which may be changing now with the new data, so this is tenuous, but take it for what it's worth), Bernie Kosar is 25th. Brian Sipe is 28th. Not quite a Favre to Rodgers transition in Cleveland, but only one step below that. Brian's 1976 (3.3 CPOE, 121 sk%+), 1977 (3.8, 106), 1978 (1.8, 107), 1980 (3.4, 119), and even 1983 (0.8, 117) all need to be talked about more, even if some of these years were held back results-wise by poor Browns teams. He did win MVP in 1980, but this hasn't kept him from falling into the dustbin of history, so to speak.
Transition Brian Sipe into Bernie Kosar, who was still elite as late as 1991, and the Browns had great QB play for a solid 15 years there. People who think the Browns have just had awful QB play forever discount the period of time from the merger up until 1991, where the Browns were probably one of the best ten quarterbacked teams in the league. They did not win very much, but we've talked a lot how team record gets less and less correlated with QB play as you go further and further back in history. The Browns are a good example.
Ken Stabler will never quit confounding me. He's the anti-Tom Brady. The one guy where the ludicrous passing accuracy never translated into an ability to avoid throwing the ball to the other team, pretty much strictly except for 1974, where merely being good at avoiding INTs got him a runaway MVP award. It's also fun to me that his 1976 was so ludicrous that it's better to just exclude it entirely, for fear of it messing up any real analysis we may try to do.
As far as my 55/45 skill metric, it is by far the best individual QB season the league has ever seen, not followed super closely by anything else. Ken's score is about 300. 1989 Joe Montana and 2000 Kurt Warner are duking it out for second place, with a score around 250. You have to go through 61 seasons to bridge the next 50 point gap. That's how wide Ken's gap is. Like I said in the Note, it really is 2023 numbers, except in 1976. The only chink in the armour is the INT% of 94. If he could've raised that even to the 113 of his 1974, this would've been the best rate-wise QB season of all time, and there would be no argument, even after 50 years.
Funnily enough, despite being the far and away number one guy all time as far as individual skill in one season in my opinion, he is one of very few players to be in the top 20 seasons of all time, without being there multiple times. He never got near 1976 again.
It's also true that Ken never got the chance to get the volume, because from 1974-1977, his team's record was 42-9, meaning he was ahead often, and ahead by a lot, which is not exactly an environment conducive to QB volume, nor is a 14 game season. Still, if we look at 1978-1980, Ken's volume went up a lot, and his accuracy numbers stayed approximately the same, so I think we're good there. His sack avoidance got a lot worse, but he also turned 33 years old in 1978, so there's more than one reason his feet could've been dropping off.
I think he carried his small sample greatness into big samples well enough, but of course nobody did that as well as Warren Moon did. 700 plays in seasons where the league was lucky if three people could get to 600 is ludicrous. These years should've produced the worst rate stats of Warren's career. Instead they were the best. It's probably the earliest example of passing > rushing, and if you put more responsibility on a QB, you may be helping instead of hurting. It's interesting that this peak lands in exactly the same spot as Ken Stabler's does. They're two players I would've never thought to compare.
Finally, onto the first paragraph. I suppose you're right about that Marc, although it infuriates me how these criteria can be so inconsistently applied sometimes. For instance, look at Tom Brady. He was drafted low (theoretical down), won a lot (up), but had his best years with likely the best group of WRs in the NFL (down), had a level of play that was all-time great, but not befitting a GOAT candidate (down), and I'm not sure if he ever passed the eye test either. He was always thought of as a checkdown merchant. At least that's how I remember it (down). That's four downs to just one up, and a very overrated player anyway, but in general I do think you're right about the formula though.