The Weekly Gut Check - Vol. 97
A Projections Primer Part 2: QBs
7/19/07

The “Gut Feeling” is often synonymous with a sense of desperation resulting from a lack of preparation. The Gut Check is a huge proponent of studying the numbers, but there’s a point where one can place too much emphasis on the wrong information. This can result in the undervaluing or overlooking a player’s potential. Therefore, The Weekly Gut Check is devoted to examining the frame of reference behind certain number-driven guidelines that fantasy football owners use to make decisions.

Although The Weekly Gut Check doesn’t claim to be psychic, he does believe that he can dispel certain numbers biases and help you make the best choices for your team. We’ll keep a running tally of The Weekly Gut Check’s insights. This way you can gauge his views as something to seriously consider, or at least seriously consider running the opposite way as fast as you can!

The Gut Check has decided to provide a historical overview of fantasy stats that will help owners avoid the common pitfall or projecting player performance—extreme over-and under-valuation of players. Last week, yours truly profiled the running back position. This week the focus is quarterbacks.

Historical Stats For Fantasy Passers

The key components one must consider when projecting quarterback performance:

• Total Fantasy Points
  
• Attempts
  
• Completion Percentage
  
• Passing Yards
  
• Passing Touchdowns
  
• Rushing Yards
  
• Rushing Touchdowns

Pretty straightforward, but the way many people project stats they don’t bother to view how each stat influences the other. For instance, one isn’t demonstrating adequate knowledge of the position if one predicts a passer to sling it for 4000 yards but sets the attempts so low, the average yardage per attempt is 7 to 8 yards higher than the historical average or the completion percentage doesn’t jibe with the yardage figures. If one views the best performances with these stats, one should get a stronger idea of how to project performance.

Fantasy Points—These point totals are for a standard scoring fantasy league: 1 point per 20 yards passing, 4 points per touchdown pass, 1 point per 10 yards rushing and 6 points per touchdown:

The top 30 fantasy performances since the advent of the 16-game season predictably mirrors the averages just shown. There are only seven quarterbacks with prolific seasons from the 80’s that make this list. As a testament to Dan Marino’s greatness as a passer, he still rules the fantasy kingdom by the slightest of margins—coincidentally over a player that is likely to get cut just three years after posting two of the five best ever fantasy seasons for a quarterback in this era. The Gut Check would rather have a healthy Culpepper than a David Carr or Joey Harrington. Please don’t tell yours truly that Randy Moss is that much better than Andre Johnson and Roy Williams. The Gut Check is a Moss fan and believes New England’s new #6 is the arguably best deep ball receiver in the history of the game, but he knows the Pats new receiver is nowhere as versatile a player than either of the go to receivers that Carr and Harrington once had while starters for their respective teams. In other words, Culpepper may not be as great as his stats but he’s much better than the current public perception.

The average attempts for these top 30 performances are nearly 543 passes. Dan Marino’s 623 in 1986 were the most, and Steve Young’s 461 were the least. Young’s fantasy performance was just a few points less than Marino’s despite the huge difference in attempts. This is due to Young’s insanely high completion percentage of 70.28%. Young had nearly 800 fewer passing yards, but his completion percentage contributed to a high touchdown rate (more completions-more first downs-more touchdowns) and his 7 rushing scores put him within two total scores of Marino. But as much as Young and Randall Cunnngham were the precursor to mobile QBs one watches today, one has to be careful about projecting high rushing totals into an all-time great season.

Only five quarterbacks on this all-time great list had more than 5 rushing scores in a season—two belonged to Young, two to Culpepper, and one to Cunningham. In fact, only 22 times since 1978 did a QB rushed for more than 5 scores and fewer than ¼ of these rushing performances put the signal caller on this hallowed list. Only 9 QBS from the list had over 400 yards rushing. The combined total of average passing and rushing attempts from this list is 595 (543 passing-52 rushing) touches and the average QB from his list ran the ball once for every 10 passing attempts.

But does the rate of passing attempts naturally dictate a great fantasy season or is this like attempts for RBs and not necessarily the case? The table below is a list of the thirty-most passing attempts ever made in a 16-game season. The players highlighted on this table are also among the top thirty from the previous list ranking the all-time fantasy scorers for a season. Although there were fourteen quarterbacks within the top 50 performances only seven of the thirty attempts leaders also made the all-time fantasy-scoring list. So the situation is similar to that of runners: quarterbacks have a greater chance of earning fantasy points with more attempts, but it is not an absolute by any stretch.

The all-time fantasy point leaders averaged nearly 60 fewer throws in a season than the attempts leaders, but their completion percentage is three points higher. This doesn’t seem to be a significant difference because the yardage difference is minimal between the two lists. Yet the difference bears out with touchdowns and fantasy points. Fantasy point leaders averaged an additional 8 scores—32 points in 4 points per passing td leagues—which constitutes roughly half the fantasy point differential between the two lists (65.5).

Still, nearly 16 of the 30 passers on this list had seasons equivalent to a top-five fantasy performance during this decade, and 27 of the 30 passers on this list had seasons equivalent to a starter in the top-12. This seems like an obvious correlation—much like running backs—but one must be careful to note the career completion percentage for a player in a situation where he will likely have to attempt a lot of passes. Take a look at Jon Kitna. The Bengals version of Kitna, a team lacking solid receivers—Chad Johnson wasn’t even starting yet—had a relatively poor fantasy season with a not-so-coincidentally bad, 53.87% completion rate. In contrast, the Mike Martz-Motor City version of Kitna sporting a 62.42% rate, a team with Roy Williams playing to his potential, had nearly 1000 more passing yards and 9 additional scores.

So The Gut Check believes a higher passing percentage has a factor, but the question is how much? To find out, here is a list of the top 30, 16-game performances for completion percentage. Although the stats bureau’s minimum attempt figure is 225 (14 attempts per game), the Gut Check set his minimum to 300 (18 attempts per game), which is still quite low for the more prolific passing offenses in the modern era.

Pct.—Although all-time accuracy figures don’t correlate with all-time fantasy points—only 6 all-time scorers appear on this accuracy list—there are 9 more QBs with at least 300 points. This means 50% of the list would be among the average top-7 fantasy signal callers during this decade and the top-5 QBs in the previous two decades. Another 5 QBs would be within the top-12 in this decade.

Clearly accuracy is an indicator of consistently good, season performances, however the most accurate fantasy QBs don’t match the performance of the most productive or the most prolific (attempts).

There’s no coincidence the most accurate performers of all time come from quarterbacks in west coast offenses—18 out of 30 QBs on the list started for a WCO. But 9 of the 15 300+ fantasy-point scorers play in vertical offenses. This doesn’t mean one should ignore QBs on west coast offenses, but considering the offensive system is important. One shouldn’t project Matt Hasselbeck as a top-five QB unless he suddenly acquires an elite receiver on the level of Terrell Owens or Anquan Boldin in a trade to pair with Deion Branch. Hasselbeck may be a solid starter, but historically his offense limits him from becoming an elite performer unless he has great receiving talent surrounding him. Montana and Young had the great Jerry Rice as well as John Taylor and Terrell Owens providing a vertical threat. Brett Favre had good receivers, but like John Elway, Favre had a knack for throwing the deep ball among the best in history and whether or not you like to make fun of John Madden, the Packer’s QB will be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. It is even more apparent when one combines passers in vertical offenses with a high completion percentage, the fantasy points come easily: Marino, Manning, Cunningham and Culpepper in Minny, and Warner all fit this profile.

So far it’s clear the best fantasy performers at this position have a high attempt rate (nearly 30 per game) and a solid, if not spectacular completion percentage (at least 58%). These players are generally in productive offenses that employ a vertical attack with at least one elite receiver in the fold that can stretch the field. Passing yards are obviously an integral part of fantasy production for QBs, but how does this fit into the equation? The Gut Check will exam the top-30 performers in this category and whether they show up on the other lists covered thus far.