What player in the NFL, past or present, would you have wanted to see succeed so badly but due to injuries, off the field issues, or whatever happened just derailed their career? For me it was unfortunate to see players like Josh Gordon or Justin Blackmon have their careers end or never getting back on track because of off-field issues.

I took a couple year break from fantasy, which I've been playing off an on for over a decade. I quit paying in depth attention during that time frame. Draft rolls around and I'm seeing people I had on my team forever years ago

CJ Mosely Harrison Smith Calais Campbell Cam Jordan Bobby Wagner Randall Cobb Lavonte David Greg Zuerlein

To be fair...CJ is still absolutely tearing up. But I'm like how are most of these people still playing?

What would be your most creative puns for nicknames. For example, Zach Wilson aka Zach Milfson. I'll start.... as a Chargers fan..

Kellen Moore aka Kellen Less

Brandon Staley aka Brandon Stale

I’ve only been watching the NFL for a few years, but I’ve been nothing but impressed by Spags’ defenses. Especially 2022, when most of his squad was replaced by rookies. What specifically made him such a bad head coach?

Both players are fundamentalists to their core and both seem to be fan favorite players in each of their sports

ABC now is picking up MNF due to lack of TV content made during the writers strike. Just financially speaking wouldn't the NFL get more eyes on the screen without so many games played at the same time?

He's like the TE version of Trey Lance but he's actually good.

Introduction

Hello,

We are halfway through the 2023 NFL season, and I wanted to do a quick look into some metrics pertaining to the QB position.

The two main ones are Completed Air Yards ("CAY") and Success Rate ("Succ%")

Completed Air Yards are the amount of yards traveled past the line of scrimmage minus Yards After Catch. Success Rate measures if a play gains at least 40% of yards required on 1st down, 60% of yards required on 2nd down, and 100% on 3rd or 4th down.

I decided to look at CAY because it controls for Yards After Catch, and may be more indicative of a QB's passing abilities. For instance, if a QB throws a slant for 5 yards, but it goes for a 50 yard TD, that was less a consequence of the QB and more a consequence of the receiver and blocking by teammates. Granted, football is a team sport, and even just looking at that is not a comprehensive look at the greatness of a QB; however, that coupled with Succ% gives some insight I think.

Again, not comprehensive, and that is not really what I am trying to go for anyway, but this is more so just to share some interesting findings.

Methodology

All data was taken from Pro Football Reference. I only chose QBs with a minimum of 97 pass attempts. The different metrics I looked at include CAY, CAY/PA, CAY/Cmp, and Succ%.

After copying all the data, I found the Z-score for each individual and their corresponding metric. Then, I did a two-tail test to see which Z-scores were statistically significant. I set alpha to 0.05.

Findings

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Table 1

The table above is the dataset pertaining to each individual QB with their corresponding metrics.

Table 2

This table shows the Z-scores for each individual QB and their corresponding metric. The areas highlighted in green are Z-scores that were determined to be statistically significant.

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Table 3

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Table 4

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Table 5

Tables 3-5 just show the graph version of the datasets from tables 1 and 2.

Z-Score Discussion

The only areas that were found to be statistically significant were the following:

P.J. Walker - CAY (lower end of distribution)

P.J. Walker - CAY/PA (lower end of distribution)

Joe Burrow - CAY/Cmp (lower end of distribution)

Brock Purdy - CAY/PA (upper end of distribution)

Brock Purdy - Succ% (upper end of distribution)

Matthew Stafford - CAY/Cmp (upper end of distribution)

The higher the success rate, obviously the better, and with Purdy his success rate is statistically significant. Some QB's that are close to the upper end (but for whom we would not reject the null hypothesis for) in terms of success rate only really include Allen, Tua, and Goff. On the lower end, Watson, Walker, Wilson and Jones are close, but again, do not cross that critical value of -1.959964.

Limitations

This is not all-encompassing. As far as assessing the QBs, Completed Air Yards and success rate are only part of the equation. There are non-football stat related things to keep in mind, such as personality, experience, age, teammates, and coaches. Taking those into account can help explain why the data is the way it is.

Additionally, a QB can make a great play not through the air. They could very well rush for a big gain or even a TD. This analysis only views the QB position through the prism of passing.

Conclusion

Overall, I think this is interesting, but incomplete. Further inquiry can be made to give a more comprehensive view of the QB position. However, with the metrics we are examining here, I think it is a decent start. Another analysis of this, with more metrics and at the end of the season, would probably be more insightful.

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Buck and Aikman have been a team for 22 years now. They have exceeded the tenure of the legendary pairing of Pat Summerall and John Madden.

Just thought it was an interesting stat in almost four full seasons, every win has been closely competitive where a team was within 1-2 scores. Has any other team endured a stretch where they didn't beat a team by 3 scores or more for this long?

I don't think teams tank as much they are claimed to do so, probably because it is not as beneficial of a strategy as one might think.

Let me first define what I mean by "tanking." Tanking in this context means deliberately losing on purpose to get the best possible draft pick. I do NOT consider tanking to be the same thing as a rebuild, where you do not expect to get good enough value for the salary, and so you trade away assets or simply let them walk in order to bring in younger and cheaper talent to develop. In doing so, you accept poorer performance along the way until you can develop that talent. When I ask about tanking I'm asking if teams not only do that, but also lose on purpose to improve their draft position.

First, research has shown that "top draft picks are significantly overvalued in a manner that is inconsistent with rational expectations and efficient markets, and consistent with psychological research." The basic reason is that there is a salary cap. No one can outspend any one else, and so you have to extract as much value for a fixed amount of money as possible. Top draft picks are better players than later picks, but they also command much higher salaries that tend to overcompensate them relative to others. The best value performance combo actually peaks in the LATE first round, and all picks after the first overall are on average better value until the early third round.

https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/61bbf4dd4aeb2e915f631832dc890f92a9a0c12c/58-FigureIV-1.png

source: 10.1287/mnsc.1120.1657

This has been dubbed "the loser's curse" because bad teams tend to pick good players but pay them too much, they cannot pay sufficient talent elsewhere on the field, and the team continues to perform poorly. And when you remove QBs from the calculation, this phenomenon becomes even more pronounced, because QBs are such high value and tend to be more reliable performers.

https://opensourcefootball.com/posts/2023-02-23-nfl-draft-value-chart/moo.png

source: https://opensourcefootball.com/posts/2023-02-23-nfl-draft-value-chart/

So it's better to just be mediocre or even good but not great. With the exception of an elite QB propsect, losing on purpose to go as high as possible in the draft is clearly a bad strategy because you are probably going to overpay. Even if there is an elite QB, the hype around that prospect could improve that player's negotiating position for him to demand more salary from you, increasing the risk of overpay.

Second, there is a cost to tanking. We as fans are only looking at the team as a whole. It may help the team to get a (nominally) better draft position by losing. But a team is composed of individual professional players and coaches, all of whom hope to continued to be employed as such. Losing winnable games certainly does not aid them in this pursuit. Even if losing on purpose was a good strategy, is it actually possible to get players to follow it, since it requires them to play worse deliberately, or frustrate the efforts of those who still play well? And how do you develop and maintain a winning culture and attitude while losing on purpose? Tanking is likely to cause you to alienate and waste the development of current talent, and fail to attract better talent from elsewhere in the league - all in favor of gaining an uncertain and likely to be overpaid draft pick.

Finally, I'm aware of only one situation in which someone inside an organization explicitly claimed that there was an aim to lose on purpose - Brian Flores's lawsuit, in which he claimed the Dolphins owner offered to pay him to lose. I don't know if these allegations were ever proven, but if true they are still illustrative - Brian Flores was so insulted by this offer he started a lawsuit (among other reasons). Deliberately losing is anathema to every single person who has poured a lifetime of blood, sweat, and tears into being a professional coach or player. I don't think enough players or coaches would accept it to begin with, simply because they are too disgusted by the idea.

In conclusion, I think the popular beliefs that this or that team are tanking derives from the disbelief that a team can really be as bad as it is. The truth is it's very difficult to win professional football games, so hard that some pros look like they are doing it on purpose. Especially because we love to be armchair QBs, HCs, and GMs, who think we know what a team should do, when in fact the vast majority of fans simply have no idea what they are talking about. And for fans of a specific bad team, it is copium. It makes you feel better to think your team has a strategy, when in fact they just suck this year, and may suck for the foreseeable future.

TL;DR - Although teams of course do rebuild, I don't think teams really tank, with perhaps rare exception of which I am not aware. It's questionable whether tanking actually works, and I don't think it's likely you'll get the players and coaches to actually sign on for a tanking campaign.

Additionally they have rostered the 2011 2nd overall, 2014 2nd overall pick, and 2018 1st overall pick. Does this mean anything significant? No but it’s interesting nonetheless I don’t think any other team has rostered this many top picks.

Pundits and fans are buzzing about the NFL levying a seemingly high number of fines for things like Unsportsmanlike Conduct and Helmet-to-Helmet hits on players this season. But are players actually getting fined more in 2023 than in the past? The answer is YES - in 2023 the NFL is projected to more than double the previous record number of fines levied on players in a season.

Excluding off-field fines (Missed Workouts, Detrimental Conduct, Personal Messages, and Off-Field Violations), the NFL is on pace for 524 on-field player fines over the full 2023 season. This would be 2.2X the previous record for the number on-field fines against players for on-field infractions:

Raw Data Source: Spotrac. Projected using a super sophisticated (18 weeks in a season / 8 weeks of data) multiplier

The sharp rise in the rate at which the NFL is fining players for on-field infractions in 2023 is also apparent in the actual value of on-field fines accrued. Even after adjusting for inflation or adjusting for changes in the NFL salary cap (which has outpaced inflation), players are set to lose the most money they have ever lost to player fines in 2023 at $7.6m:

Raw Data Source: Spotrac; FRED for Annualized US Urban CPI. *Projected using a super sophisticated (18 weeks in a season / 8 weeks of data) multiplier

The total number of on-field fines levied on players varies substantially across the 20+ years of actual data available . The Pittsburgh Steelers stand out - their 168 on-field player fines as a franchise are 64 higher than the second-place Baltimore Ravens and Tennessee Titans (104 each). The Los Angeles Chargers have the least fines against players over the available data at just 51 on-field player fines.

Raw Data Source: Spotrac.

Now for the fun part - a look at the players and teams that have set records for fines. Odell Beckham Jr., Deshaun Watson, Ndamukong Suh, and Robaire Smith all have earned distinguished NFL fine achievements in their times in the NFL. For teams, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Browns have out-penalized the competition to set records for the number and amount of fines their players have racked up since 2002. Unsportsmanlike Conduct remains the #1 fine levied against players, though Roughing the Passer (459 fines levied) will likely catch up in the next season or two.

Raw Data Source: Spotrac

TLDR: 2023 is going to be a blockbuster revenue year for the Professional Athletes Foundation and the NFL Foundation, the charities that are on the receiving end of all NFL player fines collected. The good news for NFL players is that they get to max out their charitable tax deduction this year.

Note: I found and corrected a few errors in the Spotrac NFL player fine database, so it is highly likely that a few more escaped me. It is also likely that I introduced my own errors.