I think Dak is a very good QB but I see a weird narrative about the Eagles-Cowboys game

Hurts had a higher passer rating than Dak did. Hurts had a 130 passer rating

Dak had more yards sure but the Eagles have given up 300+ yards to everyone. Sam Howell, Mac Jones and other guys have put up big numbers on the Eagles secondary

Hurts had a much tougher task than Dak did. The Cowboys had allowed the 4th fewest pass yards in the league at that point. The Eagles were 29th vs the pass.

You can't just say, Dak had more yards he played better

I was messing around with some adjusted passer ratings last week and a lot of the responses wanted Rushing contributions to be included. So I came up with a new method to do so, combining the adjusted Passer Rating (Passer Rating without Drops, Spikes, Throwaways) with Rushing production. That produced what I call QB CPR.

^(Full disclosure: I am a 49ers fan, but I did not do this to overhype Purdy. He was not atop this list a week ago (Cousins, Goff, & Stroud were 1, 2, & 3, respectively. Ignore my flair and you will still see differences like Goff, Wilson, and Mahomes vs their traditional rankings.))

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CPR

Adjusted Rating for Combined Passing & Rushing

GUIDE:

• CPR = Adjusted Passer Rating + Rushing Production
  • Adjusted Passer Rating = Passer Rating after eliminating Drops, Throwaways, & Spikes
  • Combined with Rushing Yds, TDs, & Fumbles Lost
• C-Yd = Combined Yards (Rushing + Passing)
• C-TD = Combined TDs (Rushing + Passing)
• C-TO = Combined Turnovers (Rushing + Passing)
• C-YPA = Combined Yards Per Attempt (Rushing + Passing)
• C-TD% = Combined TD% Per Attempt (Rushing + Passing)
• C-TO% = Combined Turnover% Per Attempt (Rushing + Passing)

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CPR2

While doing all this I was looking for another metric to account for players that were doing the majority of the work. That is to say, not benefiting strictly of YAC. So I came up with another metric for this. CPR2 takes the original CPR metric and strips the YAC.

• As an example, it is much harder to earn a perfect rating this way.
  • Keenan Allen is 1/1 for a 49 yd TD. Under both standard and my CPR Rating that would be a 158.3 Rating. However, with CPR2 that becomes a 142.2 Rating. In this rating, perfect means perfect. K.Allen would have had to throw 1/1 for 49 Air Yards on a TD.

Here you will also see the biggest boosts from the high-volume rushers like Hurts and Lamar.

Adjusted Rating for Combined Passing & Rushing, further adjusted away from YAC

Guide:

• CPR2 = Takes CPR and adjusts it toward the % of a player's total yards are not from YAC.
  • This is designed to give a more accurate picture of what a QB is doing (as both a runner & passer) separate from the receiver.
• AYPC = Air Yards Per Completion
• YAC/Cmp = Yards After Catch, per Completion
• CRAY = % of Yards from Combined Rushing and Air Yards
• Adj OnTrg% = % of Passes on Target, per Adjusted Attempt (no drops, spikes, throwaways)

DVOA means efficiency per play and DYAR is total volume. So by football outsiders metrics, Stroud is the 2nd best performing qb this year on a play by play basis and the most valuable overall.

His DYAR is 1031. on pace for 1964 DYAR over this season.

His DVOA is 36.8%, meaning he is 36.8% above a league average QB.

To give context to how impressive this is, I will list a few QB seasons with similar metrics.

Aaron Rodgers in 2020 in his 48 TD 5 INT season had a 33.7% DVOA and 1649 DVOA. Granted this was a 16 game season.

Mahomes 50 TD season was 39.9% DVOA and 2031 DYAR.

So Stroud is playing at a similar level to 2 MVP, HOF QBs best seasons

If you are skeptical about these advanced metrics, Stroud also grades well in traditional ones.

He is 3rd in ANY/A (and the 2 ahead of him have much better offensive rosters), 6th in passer rating and 13th in pass success rate.

He should be in serious MVP consideration, especially with the defenses he has faced so far.

Link to new Football Outsiders

Image of DVOA stats

https://preview.redd.it/xdiejvgnbl0c1.png?width=2844&format=png&auto=webp&s=0636eadaace723780629e3d2c2f9140fa9872ca5

Before I debunk the common arguments used against Sam Howell, I want to remind everyone that this is his first year starting. Even thought he’s not technically a rookie QB, it’s fair to asses him as a rookie. Typically for rookie QBs the most important factor is improvement week by week. Sam has been consistently improving over the season, and recently playing like a veteran Qb.

Sam is Turnover Prone: It’s easy to look at the season stats and come to that conclusion. Most Sam Howell/commanders fans were cringing during the Bills game. Other than week 4 against the Bills where Sam had 4 interceptions, he has not thrown more than 1 interception in any other game. 40% of his interceptions on the season are from ONE stinker game, which also happened to be his 4th NFL start. Since then, his interception numbers have trended down. Only throwing 4 interceptions in the last 7 weeks. Meaning Sam had the same amount of interceptions in one game, than he had 7 weeks after that game. He’s also has thrown 1 more interception than Pat Mahomes and Jalen Hurts. Yet, Interceptions are only brought up for Sam Howell.

Sam is Taking a lot of sacks: It is very true that Sam started the season as a sack machine. Some of the Sacks were on the O line, and a large percentage were on Sam. Like interceptions, his sack issue has trended down as he has gained more experience. Young QBs take a lot of sacks, which is true for future STAR qbs as well. Now, examining the last 3 weeks his sack rate has dropped to top #7 in the league. Sam is now getting the ball out quicker, and is more willing to throw to check downs. His sack issue is slowly being fixed as experience is gained by him and his 27th ranked offensive line.

He passes so much his stats are inflated: He does pass a lot. But, that doesn’t hurt an argument for him being a good QB. Other important passing metrics are high or trending in a good direction. Check this out:

• Cmp%: current rank: 15.
• he’s higher than CJ stroud, who the media praises, and is one behind Joe Burrow (14) and two behind Justin Herbert (13). Passer rating: rank 15.

Yet another Stat for him that would be higher if not for a few stinker games.

• higher than Joe Burrow, Trevor Lawrence, Derek Carr, Deshaun Watson.

Source for stats: https://www.nfl.com/stats/player-stats/

Reminder: he’s in his first year starting and has shown TONS of improvement from his first game.

He’s behind so he has to throw a lot: Eric Bienemy has a Pass happy scheme. He wants to pass if he is ahead or behind. Commanders record 4-6 is certainly not great. Again, Bienemy runs a pass happy scheme. If the commanders lead or are behind, he’s going to pass. He’s actually put up his best numbers when EB ran the ball at a typical rate for an NFL, as it left the defense guessing. Sam passing so much likely hurts his numbers as the defense can expect the pass. Compared to a more balanced attack where a defense is left guessing.

It’s all EB at not Howell: While we don’t know exactly how EB has developed Sam, one thing is clear. EB is developing as a play called and OC along side same. EB has had PLENTY of questionable play calls, and sometimes not the best game plans. As I mentioned earlier EB does not run the ball. Ever. A more balanced rushing attack would likely IMPROVE Sam stats (other than yards) as it will keep the defense guessing. Sam in-spite of up and down play calling, is playing at a high level.

Sam isn’t a winner: The commanders have one of the worse defenses statistically this year. Sam led game winning/tying drives against the eagles and Seahawks, for his defense and coaches to let him down. Seeing a QB play his BEST football at the end of games screams winner. Even tho the commanders lost those games, it’s hard to put it on Sam…

Conclusion: I conclude with the commanders have found there guy for the future. Clearly the commanders need to build around sam, and not even think about drafting a QB. You draft a QB HOPING it would look as good in 11 starts as Sam has looked this year. Give him a defense and Oline, and see what he can do.

Yeah, we know Bill Parcells said "You are what your record says you are."

But which to teams do you feel are not what their record says they are?

Better than record: Cardinals only because Kyler Murray is back

Worse than record: Steelers whose luck will run out any week now. Right guys? Any week now.

Yeah, we know Bill Parcells said "You are what your record says you are."

But which to teams do you feel are not what their record says they are?

Better than record: Cardinals only because Kyler Murray is back

Worse than record: Steelers whose luck will run out any week now. Right guys? Any week now.

The obvious answer to the title is that 3rd down conversion rate should only look at what a team actually did on 3rd down. But nobody actually cares about a team's 3rd down conversion rate. What people are really talking about when looking at that stat is how often can an offense keep the drive alive for another set of downs.

Below is my attempt at ranking every team by their adjusted 3rd down conversion rate. All I did was simply add a team's 4th down conversions to their 3rd down conversions, then recalculated their 3rd down conversion rate.

Not too big of a surprise at the top and bottom. The Eagles, Bills, and Cowboys are great at getting a fresh set of downs and the Jets are awful at doing so.

But there are some interesting results in the middle. The Lions for example are only 15th in 3rd down conversion rate, but when you account for how many times they are then able to convert on 4th down, they are 7th in keeping drives alive.

The Chiefs on the other hand are 4th in pure 3rd down conversions, but have only converted 3 4th down attempts all season dropping them to 10th in adjusted 3rd down rate.

Yes, I was very bored when I decided to look this up on Pro Football Reference's play finder.

The exact parameters I used were: years 2002-2022, regular season only, 40 seconds or less in the 4th quarter, play type field goal, everything else set to default.

I looked at the number of field goal plays run when the scoring margin was exactly -1, and there were 89 such plays. I then looked at how many of those plays resulted in a score, and there were 64 such plays. This results in a success rate of 71.9%.

I did the exact same thing for a scoring margin of -2, but this time, kickers only made 35 out of 58 attempts, for a percentage of 60.3%.

Why is this? Could there be some kind of psychological effect where a kicker feels less nervous if they're only down by 1 and trying to go up by 2, than if they're down by 2 and trying to go up by only 1 (even though it's the exact same game situation)? I could stratify my results by remaining time or field goal distance or some other factor, but surely the sample size is large enough to account for these variables, right?

Out of curiosity, I decided to look up the success rate in tie games (where a field goal wins instead of sending the game to overtime) and in situations where the offense is down by 3 (where a field goal sends the game to overtime instead of losing). For those, I got 196/269 (72.9%) and 107/150 (71.3%) respectively, so it seems like it's the "down by 2" situation that's the outlier.

Thoughts?

Before we can address the question, we have to address the criteria that is unstated but very obviously true. The order of importance of how MVPs are selected goes by the following:

1. Your team has to be winning/playoff bound. (100% of MVPs in the last decade)
2. You have to be a QB. (100% of MVPs the last decade)
3. You have to be an extremely efficient QB. (90% of QBs were top 5 in EPA or ANY/A the last 10 years)
4. You have to have enough bulk stats to back up your efficiency stats. (60% of them have been top 5 in Yards)
5. You have to have fan recognition (be a big name/good story).

The only exception to the efficiency rule is Cam Newton in 2015, a year he had 10 rushing TDs.

The current leaders in EPA are:

1. Purdy
2. Dak
3. Mahomes
4. Allen
5. Tags

The current ANY/A leaders are:

1. Purdy
2. Tags
3. Stroud
4. Goff
5. Dak

Top 5 in yards per game:

1. Stroud
2. ~~Cousins~~(injured) Tags
3. Goff
4. Howell
5. Mahomes

(Dak is 6th, fyi)

Based off this, my initial thoughts are Purdy, Mahomes, Dak, Tags and Stroud.

Currently the top 5 for Vegas betting are:

1. Mahomes
2. Hurts
3. Tags
4. Jackson
5. Burrow

This tells me that stupid bets are on Burrow, Hurts, Jackson and the smart money is on Mahomes or Tags. The real value? Purdy, Stroud and Dak at +2000-3000.

Of the 5 that seem most likely to compete for the award based on efficiency/bulk stats, here are their remaining schedules:

• Mahomes: Eagles, Raiders x2, Packers, Bills, Pats, Bengals, Chargers
• Stroud: Cards, Jags, Broncos, Jets, Titans x2, Browns, Colts
• Tags: Raiders, Jets x2, WFT, Titans, Cowboys, Ravens, Bills
• Dak: Panthers, WFT x2, Hawks, Bills, Lions
• Purdy: Jags, Bucs, Eagles, Hawks, Cards, Ravens, WFT, Rams

https://twitter.com/TonyGrossi/status/1724850788684488966

For Jets and the Bears fans you have one legendary Super Bowl win decades ago that’s hard to brag about and followed by constant mediocrity and not competing for the playoffs that often.

For Vikings and Chargers fans, you are always at least competing for the playoffs, but have no ring and lots of miserable season ends. The average weekly viewing experience is probably more enjoyable though.

Just a genuine question I wondered,

I try to do this weekly during the season. Third year now. The previous edition can be found here.

#What is ANY/A and why does this matter?

ANY/A is a QB statistic which correlates extremely well with wins. Aside from EPA/play (which as far as I’m aware is much harder to calculate as an individual, I think it’s the best available (to us plebeians, that is). Its full name is Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt, and it’s basically a modification of yards per attempt in the following manner:

(20 x TDs + passing yards - 45 x INTs - sack yards)/(pass attempts + sacks)

A higher number is better.

Is it perfect? No, obviously not. It doesn’t account for a lot of things, like fumbles and rush yards and pick sixes and several other things like torrential rain games which skew stats in weird directions, but it is a pretty good stat and is not too terribly difficult to calculate by hand.

ANY/A is often computed over at least several games, but most often over a season or career. This is because it’s very prone to volatility. As you’ll see below, QBs can put up ANY/As in a single game that can be far better or worse than their career ANY/A.

So, why should you care about this? Frankly, if you don’t care than feel free to ignore this post. I just like statistics and thought it was be interesting to put up. But my argument for it is that even at a small sample size, the larger ANY/A in a game seems to win a lot (generally because it means the QB played better than the other QB). So maybe it’ll give you one more aspect you can pay attention to in a football game.

With all that being said, here’s the data I’ve accumulated.

#Data Table for Week 10

#Grades

Now, what are those little letters listed after the ANY/A? Well, those are my grades.

Before you start screaming at me about your favorite player’s grade, let me just say that it isn’t just random where the cutoffs are. Specifically:

An A grade corresponds to a single-game ANY/A greater than or equal to 10.

A B grade corresponds to a single-game ANY/A greater than or equal to 7.5, but less than 10.

A C grade corresponds to a single-game ANY/A greater than or equal to 4.5, but less than 7.5.

A D grade corresponds to a single-game ANY/A greater than or equal to 2, but less than 4.5

An F grade corresponds to a single-game ANY/A less than 2.

Now, these grades aren’t like those in school, where the average ends up usually being a B, and very few people get D’s and F’s. This is a curve where the average is intended to be a straight C. Similarly, the vast majority of single-game performances also are intended to be a C, because C’s should be enough to be competitive in most games. As such, B’s and D’s are somewhat unusual but not extraordinarily so, and F’s and A’s are extraordinary games, for either good or bad reasons.

Note that single-game ANY/As do not necessarily match up with season-long and career-long ANY/As. Single-game ANY/As are much, much more volatile and will yield a much larger spread than a typical season-long ANY/A spread. For that reason, you cannot treat them the same as you would a season-long ANY/A, where an exceptional, MVP-caliber season would be an 8+ ANY/A. It’s kind of like the PFF system, where a lot of consistently good performances will get you a higher grade than one great performance and a bunch of mediocre performances.

Well then, what do the grades mean? While they are certainly somewhat subjective, this is what I intended them to represent:

A: This grade represents an exceptional game through the air. This performance was nearly flawless and is incredibly difficult to replicate game in and game out. It’s nearly unsustainable, even for the best QBs. There should be no more than a few of these per week. A string of these would probably result in the greatest season of all time.

B: This grade represents an excellent game through the air. While some mistakes were present, the good vastly outweighs the bad. These are certainly more sustainable than the A-graded games, and the best QBs can sometimes have these games for long stretches at a time. A lot of these games will probably put you in the MVP race, and there should be a handful of these per week.

C: This grade represents a mediocre or satisfactory game. There were mistakes and success, but neither vastly outweighed the other. This kind of performance will put most teams in contention to win most games, and the majority of QBs in a week will have this kind of performance.

D: This grade represents a bad game. Many mistakes were made, enough so that they significantly outweighed the successes. A team with a QB playing like this will be hard-pressed to win games, and if your QB is playing like this often, it’s probably time to look for a replacement. There should t be too many of these per week, but there should definitely be some.

F: This grade represents a terrible game. The QB had essentially none or very few positives throughout the game, far outweighed by the negatives. With this kind of performance, it’s almost impossible to win a game. A string of these warrants a benching almost immediately. Just like for the A’s, there should only be a couple of these per week at the most.

My opinion is that my cutoffs do represent these grades well. The vast majority of grades fall between B and D, with the most in C, and A’s and F’s are few and far between. I didn’t just throw darts at a board either, I spent quite a few weeks looking at the numbers before coming up with these cutoffs, sometime last year (unfortunately I do not remember exactly when). Obviously you can always make slight changes here and there, but I’ve been using this system for a while and it’s easier for me to keep using it than to do some statistics with standard deviations and percentages and the like and figure out what the perfect cutoffs would be. [And actually, most of the time, these track pretty well with the idea of standard deviation - usually the number of C’s is pretty close to the amount within a single standard deviation of the mean, and usually there are only a couple A’s and F’s, which are ideally meant to be outside 2 standard deviations from the mean. While this hasn’t been numerically tested or anything, I feel pretty good about it in general].

If you don’t like them even after this explanation, feel free to ignore them. I just made them for fun anyway.

#Tl;dr

ANY/A is a QB stat that tracks well with wins; larger is better. This includes a list of the single-game ANY/A for any QB who played significant snaps (aka both meaningful in number and meaningful in value) this week. There are attached grades which are somewhat arbitrary (I set the cutoffs once in the past but I don’t make changes to individual grades). I think they make sense and fit my goal, but if you don’t like them feel free to ignore them.

Good Wednesday to you all, /r/NFL! Turkey Day is coming up and many pundits are already scoping out their playoff picture for teams currently winning in their division. The byes are another four teams this week, so two less games to watch. I had a good Week 10, going 10-4 and bringing me to 101-49 on the season. How did everyone else do? We have a whopping seven division games this week (half the matchups) with five inter-conference and two cross-conference games lined up. Let's get to it!

Byes: Falcons, Colts, Patriots, Saints

Those are my predictions, let's hear yours. Keep it civil and fun. Best of luck!

Deshaun Watson- 63,977,000

Dak Prescott- 59,455,000

Patrick Mahomes- 57,358,269