Stats Gripe: QB rating is for the birds

Wildo7 · Oct 5, 2015

Bobsyouruncle said:
Good point, Aaron Rodgers not getting his team in the red zone proves he's better.

when you have a coach who thinks "balanced offense" means "throw half the time, pass half the time," it is pretty understandable.

Wildo7 · Oct 5, 2015

Bobsyouruncle said:
A ten point come from behind is what won the SB.

O RLY

upstater1 · Oct 5, 2015

Bobsyouruncle said:
Good point, Aaron Rodgers not getting his team in the red zone proves he's better.

Montana is 4-0!

borg · Oct 5, 2015

Winners get the supermodels...losers get Magic Mike's booty call bimbos. (aka........beard)

lurker1965 · Oct 5, 2015

upstater1 said:
So I looked at the QB stats this morning:
http://espn.go.com/nfl/statistics/player/_/stat/passing/sort/passingYards/year/2015/seasontype/2

Couldn't figure out how Aaron Rodgers has a higher rating.

Brady is at 9 TDs and Rodgers at 11 TDs with one more game. About even (in terms of TDs per game). If anything, Brady is a bit better at 3 TDs per game.

Comp. % is about even with AR at 72.4% and TB at 72.2%. And this is even with Brady throwing a much higher volume.

Brady is at 8.36 YPA while AR is at 8.06. Brady is much better here.

But where Brady really excels is his 371 YPG to ARs 249.

THAT'S HUGE!

Whatever QB rating is supposed to measure (efficiency I suppose) it really fails to tell us anything at all.

There are 2 "QB" ratings. The one from the NFL is "passer" rating and is legit if limited and kinda stupid (143.7 or whatever not 100 is top and the bottom is not 0. wha...?) This often gets misused, even by smart people on this board, as "QB" rating. Easy mistake to make. Probably writer on NFL.com get it confused.
E!SPN uses "QB" rating. It is supposedly better because, um, well, they say so. They won't give out the formula, but it goes from 0 to 100.
Your link is to E!SPN, so I bet they used their mystery rating. (Hey, Rodgers might have a better passing rating to0, I don't know.)

Ice_Ice_Brady · Oct 5, 2015

I agree that passer rating is a flawed stat because it puts equal emphasis on all four categories when some are more important than others.

Deus Irae · Oct 5, 2015

Ice_Ice_Brady said:
I agree that passer rating is a flawed stat because it puts equal emphasis on all four categories when some are more important than others.

Football is too much of a synergistic sport to really find a perfect 'stat' without investing a ridiculous amount of money in a computer program that breaks down ever millimeter of every play. Finding consistent metrics that have a reasonable correlation with the 'eye test' is about the best we can do right now.

Palm Beach Pats Fan · Oct 5, 2015

A quarterback gaining yards or first downs by his OWN rushing ability is also a factor in the ESPN QBR formula. That's why it is not just a "passer rating" and it is also why one of the highest QBR games ever was a game by Michael Vick, when he ran for a huge number of yards while also passing for a lot of yards.

AR scrambles more and further than TB, so I imagine that this contributes some to this contrived statistical advantage.

robbomango · Oct 5, 2015

Efficiency has a massive weight in the calculations, particularly attempts/Yardage . It's strange because if you take Bradys SB and give him 20 completions to 30 attempts his qbr jumps to around 120, if you lower those attempts even more it goes higher. Oddly enough a 15 to 25 pass attempt game would never work against that Seahawks D unless you have a killer ground game which we didn't.

I remember looking at Bradshaws SB stats some time back and he manages a 101 qbr throwing 2TDs to 3 pics but he threw 14 passes for over 300 yds.

I use the eye test more and more these days...

Fencer · Oct 5, 2015

In evaluating the success of an entire offensive (or defensive unit), I think three criteria tell a fairly complete story:

Points.
Starting field position.
Ending field position.

To expand:

Points is the obvious criterion. It is best viewed, however, in terms of points per drive rather than points per game. Ideally, you could subtract out bogus drives such as kneeldowns, but that's not easy. What would be easier would be to adjust for placekicker screwups.

Starting field position obviously matters. Scoring a FG on a drive that started in the red zone is no accomplishment.

Ending field position is the one people don't talk about enough. If you throw an INT into the end zone, and the defenders take a touchback, that was a drive on which you failed to score. But it's like any other drive on which you failed to score. By way of contrast, if you throw a Pick-6, or turn over the ball at midfield, that's worse than just failing to score.

Similarly, a defense that gets a takeaway deep in its own territory did well. A defense that gets a takeaway and hand the offense great field position did better yet.

And long as this is all too hard to do accurately, points and turnovers is a decent if imperfect proxy for measuring unit success.

That's probably why people make a big deal out of TDs and INTs in rating individual QB performance -- but yeah, a TD is a TD no matter how it is obtained.

upstater1 · Oct 5, 2015

lurker1965 said:
There are 2 "QB" ratings. The one from the NFL is "passer" rating and is legit if limited and kinda stupid (143.7 or whatever not 100 is top and the bottom is not 0. wha...?) This often gets misused, even by smart people on this board, as "QB" rating. Easy mistake to make. Probably writer on NFL.com get it confused.
E!SPN uses "QB" rating. It is supposedly better because, um, well, they say so. They won't give out the formula, but it goes from 0 to 100.
Your link is to E!SPN, so I bet they used their mystery rating. (Hey, Rodgers might have a better passing rating to0, I don't know.)

Are you thinking of ESPN's QBR? That's different from the passer rating I linked to.

Satchboogie3 · Oct 5, 2015

Wildo7 said:
Of course this is useless without looking at attempts:

Redzone attempts:

GB: 16 Rushing, 20 Pass - 2 TD, 9 TD ~ 30% TD
NE: 22 Rushing, 24 Pass - 5 TD, 8 TD ~28% TD

Of course Brady has the higher QB rating on Redzone attemps (116 to 108), but Rodgers has the higher rating inside the 10. What this doesn't still account for is the situation. Are the pats running 4 downs to kill the clock? Plus the whole small sample size issue
Even with the extra game Rodgers has had less TD opportunities and has done more with them than Brady.

As for the argument that Rodgers isn't allowed to throw, it's moot. Brady has thrown so much since the The AFC Championship game because the running game simply wasn't going to get it done vs the defenses we've played.
So far this season:
NE: 261 rush yards (27th), 3.7 y/c (26th)
GB: 535 rush yards (3rd), 4.4 y/c (7th)

Plus NE has faced tougher defense (though not great, still better than the trash GB has faced outside of Seattle)
Average defense rank NE has faced: 15
Average defense rank GB has faced: 24.8
NE has faced much tougher defense so far and that's including the nearly 12ppg MORE that NE has dumped on those teams than GB. You take the NE and GB games out of the equation and it looks even more impressive for NE.

Anywho, it's a small sample size so you can't take much value from anything. But if you want a larger sample size: 2014 in the Red Zone
NE: 25% TD rate
GB: 20% TD Rate
and TFB had 7 more TDs on 4 less attempts. But I will note Rodgers has the slightly better career QB rating in the Redzone.

Rodgers is an incredible QB, but there's no reason to rank him above Brady. I don't care if you want to put him right next to Brady. I think Brady has the edge overall, it's about a wash in stats (obviously Brady wins in both career stats and playoffs), but you can't ignore the post-season success and after watching Brady completely carry this team to a SB victory last season... there's no one who has played the game at a higher level.

jmt57 · Oct 5, 2015

I think that back when the Passer Rating formula was first introduced, it was fairly accurate.

Then over the years the game changed. The NFL wanted more scoring. Bill Polian and his buddies on the competition committee tweaked rules and 'points of emphasis'.

With all that has changed in the way that NFL football is played, is it any wonder that apparent glitches in Passer Rating rankings and stats are now occurring?

As for BSPN's alleged improved QBR rating, I have never paid much attention to it. From what little I have seen, it seems to me that they place too much weight on a quarterback's running stats.

Deus Irae · Oct 5, 2015

jmt57 said:
I think that back when the Passer Rating formula was first introduced, it was fairly accurate.

Then over the years the game changed. The NFL wanted more scoring. Bill Polian and his buddies on the competition committee tweaked rules and 'points of emphasis'.

With all that has changed in the way that NFL football is played, is it any wonder that apparent glitches in Passer Rating rankings and stats are now occurring?

As for BSPN's alleged improved QBR rating, I have never paid much attention to it. From what little I have seen, it seems to me that they place too much weight on a quarterback's running stats.

The passer rating formula is still pretty accurate, within limited time spans. Just take what's happened so far this year as an example:

Rodgers
Dalton
Brady
Roethlisberger
Mariota
Weeden
Palmer
Rivers
Taylor
Ryan

It'll toss in some outliers, now and again, but it's a good general starting point. What's it's not doing is giving us an exact method of adjusting for changes between eras. That's something we have to do on our own.

Tony2046 · Oct 6, 2015

Wildo7 said:
Aaron Rodgers is saddled by Mike McCarthy, possible the stupidest coach in the NFL, who barely lets him pass. Rodgers has 123 to Brady's 133 attempts this season and has played one more game.

I could see an argument that says Brady has been as good as Rodgers so far this season, but in general, Rodgers crushes Brady in every reasonable metric.

Also, I think that the rating systems are flawed but the simple fact is that Rodgers has been a more effective QB over the course of his career with an ANY/A of 7.79 to Brady's 6.99. And if you think your eyetest of watching Brady every single week and watching Rodgers ~sometimes is a more reliable, less biased approach then lol at you.

Also feel free to critique ANY/A if you can rather than just giving emotional responses or Deus-esque one-liners, it basically just tells you who does better when asked to throw:

"ANY/A. adjusted net yards per passing attempt: (pass yards + 20*(pass TD) - 45*(interceptions thrown) - sack yards)/(passing attempts + sacks). Note that we are now using 20 yards per TD instead of 10, because of research by Chase Stuart at the p-f-r blog."

People here always want to (rightfully) trumpet Belichick as the best coach ever and then explain away Brady's statistical shortcomings to Manning and Rodgers with team accomplishments and bah humbug eyetest over stats comments, but it's not really a reasonable debate except on First Take or whatever

Emotional response? Does ANY/A or Rating include Clutch factor? How about when the QB audibles into a run? How about reading the defense pre and post snap? You would have to watch the game to get that info.

According to PFR ,http://www.pro-football-reference.com/boxscores/201502010sea.htm, Brady and crew had a 4.1% chance of winning the Super Bowl. Guess what? They won. But how did that reflect in TB's overall QBR? It doesn't and that was as clutch a performance I have ever seen.

Aaron Rogers OTOH, had a 99% chance of winning in the NFCCG, and guess what? They lost. Huge choke. 55.8 Rating. But does that rating reflect the coaches decisions etc...? Nope.

Does ANY/A or Rating reflect when a receiver ran the wrong route? Nope. Better watch the game.

Does ANY/A or Rating reflect how fast the QB gets rid of the ball? Nope. Better watch the game.

Does ANY/A or Rating reflect an Amendola circus catch? Nope. Better watch the game.

Stats are great but they only put you in the ball park. If you want to know who the best QB is you would have to watch the games.

NashuaPats · Oct 6, 2015

Per his posts, I was wondering if Wildo7 is a troll so I looked at his former posts. I still can't tell, but he is either a very devoted troll (nearly 9 thousand posts) or the only Patriot's fan in existence who hates Brady.
Here are some of his posts from the past year:

"It is straight up embarrassing that we have a sizable population of fans that think Brady is anywhere near as good as Manning let alone better than him."

"Brady is a bottom 5 QB"

"Brady is finished and belichick has turned into a conservative moron punting on 4th and 1 in their half of the field for like 25 yards of field position that's immediately given up on the next play. Worried doesn't cover it, it's rebuild time."

"Brady is awful, have to lol at scapegoating the WRs, coordinators"

"It's not hard, this WR corps is fairly bad and Brady also sucks."

So, I'm not taking his analysis on this subject seriously. Lol.

Canuck · Oct 6, 2015

upstater1 said:
So I looked at the QB stats this morning:
http://espn.go.com/nfl/statistics/player/_/stat/passing/sort/passingYards/year/2015/seasontype/2

Couldn't figure out how Aaron Rodgers has a higher rating.

Brady is at 9 TDs and Rodgers at 11 TDs with one more game. About even (in terms of TDs per game). If anything, Brady is a bit better at 3 TDs per game.

Comp. % is about even with AR at 72.4% and TB at 72.2%. And this is even with Brady throwing a much higher volume.

Brady is at 8.36 YPA while AR is at 8.06. Brady is much better here.

But where Brady really excels is his 371 YPG to ARs 249.

THAT'S HUGE!

Whatever QB rating is supposed to measure (efficiency I suppose) it really fails to tell us anything at all.

There are 4 categories to QB rating and each category is capped. The max you can get in any 1 category is 2.375. So 2.375 x 4 = 9.5. This is then divided by 6 which equals 1.5833. This is then multipled by 100 to give you the max QB rating of 158.3 rounded off.

You can compute the QB rating by inputting the stats at this site http://www.primecomputing.com/

Edit: Basically the difference is the 2 TD difference. If 2 of those 4 rushing TDs in the Jax game had been converted into passing TD's, Brady's QB rating would be right up there with Rodgers.

lurker1965 · Oct 6, 2015

upstater1 said:
Are you thinking of ESPN's QBR? That's different from the passer rating I linked to.

Yes. I've seen it and passer rating used interchangeably. I have not read the link -and won't because it is ESPN. Since it is ESPN I do not believe it is accurate and I bet (but might lose) that it is their own BS stat.

Edit: apparently it is passer rating based on other posts in this thread.

Oswlek · Oct 10, 2015

Didn't know where to put this, so here it goes....

I used to argue with Bill Barnwell on FO because, while he could unearth some interesting stats, his understanding of context was usually flawed. He's improved a great deal since moving to Grantland, but old Bill poked his head out with this commentary on Brady/Rodgers during his picks column:

The rate statistics are basically a dead heat. Brady’s volume is impressive, given how he’s managed to outproduce Rodgers in yardage despite playing one fewer game. Obviously, they both have ridiculous runs of touchdowns without interceptions. It’s hard to imagine quarterbacks playing any better than Rodgers and Brady have over the first month, and I wouldn’t blame you for picking either guy.

The difference, for me, is supporting cast. They each have a fantastic slot receiver, with Edelman in New England and Randall Cobb in Green Bay, but Brady has Gronk. He certainly makes Gronkowski better, but there are plays where Gronkowski is just uncoverable in a way that nobody else in football is uncoverable, in the way that a bear mauling your picnic site is unstoppable.

Rodgers, meanwhile, is doing this without Jordy Nelson, the closest thing he has to a Gronkowski. His no. 2 receiver is James Jones, who was cut by the Giants in September. He has made some ridiculous catches this season, but Jones is a guy in a bear suit rummaging around your picnic site. He’s still scary — because why on earth is there a guy in a bear suit foraging for food in your camp? — but he’s not Gronk.

Brady would still be a good quarterback without Gronkowski, but we’ve seen over the past few seasons how his ceiling falls precipitously without his star tight end available or even at less than 100 percent, as was the case over the first four games of the 2014 season. Brady can’t be this Tom Brady without Gronk. Rodgers is playing this well without Nelson. For me, that’s enough to open up the tiniest of differences between the two best quarterbacks in football. But let’s check back in a month to see if that’s still the case.

I have no problem with anyone choosing Rodgers over Brady, nor do I object to the idea that Brady has better weapons right now. Where Barnwell dives off the road is with the nonsense about Brady's falling ceiling. There is no doubt that Gronk makes Brady better, but Barnwell's example is decidedly flawed. He apparently thinks that the struggles during the first four games of 2014 is attributable entirely to Gronk not playing well. Oddly enough, he's discussed the early OL issues, so he clearly knows this isn't the case yet wrote it anyway.

If pressed, I suspect Bill would then point to Brady's slow start in 2013, completely ignoring how well the team played without Gronk later that same year. But that's old Bill for you. Piece together some solid stats and then force them to fit whatever narrative he preferred at the time.

josh24 · Oct 11, 2015

robertweathers said:
QB rating and BSPN's Total QBR are attempts to try and statistically quantify how good a QB's play is.

Here is mine. It's a point system.

Wins as a Starter-6 points
Wins when tied or trailing in 4th Qtr-4 points
Touchdowns Scored By The Offense-3 (per TD) points
Team 1st Downs-2 (per 1st down) points
Interceptions/Turnovers- Minus 2 points

I could care less about TDs thrown, comp %, etc. Every offense is different. Every team is different.

If you don't throw picks, you make 1st downs, you get your team in the end zone, you score touchdowns, you lead your team to victory when it counts and consistently, you are a good QB.

aluminum seats said:
You should apply this to a few QBs careers and see how it turns out...

Including all games, regular season and playoffs, up to the end of Week 4, 2015, here is the list for the current 32 starting QBs in the NFL applying @robertweathers pts system, sorted by most pts per QB start.

Expanding it for more details,

NOTES:

For rushing TD, I used the games in which that QB started to determine the total (sum of all team rush TD in those QB starts), since there is no data on which QB hands the ball on each RB carry, so there might be a few missing (if the QB didn't start) or in excess( if was QB start, but was benched at the moment).
Error is probably low for usual starters and franchise QBs.

The same reasoning applies for total first downs.

The rest of the data is accurate: total QB starts & record, game-winning drives, pass TD and turnovers (INT thrown by QB + fumble lost by QB).

Stats Gripe: QB rating is for the birds

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