QBs & 4th Qtr Comebacks: an analysis
 

Some surprising results...

http://www.footballoutsiders.com/200...analysis/3978/

This kinda analysis is what I believe BB comissions his contacts in academia to do.

Thanks to MIT guy Rich Carreiro on the Pats mailing list

I've always felt the 4th Q comeback stat was something that was often taken out of context

If I'm not mistaken, Drew Bledsoe has more 4th quarter comebacks than Joe Montana - and no offense to Drew, but which one of them is the better QB?

And howabout giving a QB credit for building a lead and holding onto it? I'll take that over a 4th quarter comeback any day.

I just did a cursory read but it appears to reward opportunities rather than performance. How else do you explain a higher rating for Peyton 39% successful at comebacks versus Brady's 62%? I think a more correct analysis might be either percentage of successful comebacks or a normalization factor of number of successful comebacks divided by starts . Othereise you penalize a QB who has been in the league for less time than someone who has been around a while like Plummer or Manning...
Just my $0.02,

I thought that the article was totally over-analyzed and came to the wrong conclusions. Brady flat has a better % than those other guys, and it would take a lot of games to change his % to Manning's %.

I think at the very least, you have to look at 'game count' experience as one factor, and actual real stats and % as another factor.

Because I like it when Brady tops the list, of course.

Bad Stats
 

This guy has lost the handle. Comparing p-values is stupid. There is a reason why he said that professional statisticians should not use his method. (As though a professional would so blatantly misuse t-tests.) The p-value only tells you the subjective probability that the observed differences are not products of sampling variation. At best, the p-value gives you confidence that you are observing a real difference. It does NOT tell you whether that difference is big or small.

If this smells foul, it's because it is.

This is the more telling stat:

"Tom Brady is next on the list and, remember, these numbers do include the postseason. Brady is one of only a handful of quarterbacks with a winning record in more than three games with a fourth-quarter deficit. The others are Marc Bulger (10-5), Ben Roethlisberger (7-2), Steve Young (7-4) and John Elway (7-6). Bulger, who ranks eighth by this metric, is the only one in that group that has yet to win a Super Bowl."

Someone posted this in one of the comments, in case any readers missed it:

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As Jason notes, this isn’t really how a t-test is meant to be used. What the p value tells you is how confident we can be that a person’s above average performance (or below average performance) is not just due to chance. The fact that we can be more confident about Peyton Manning than about Tom Brady (two pick two quarterbacks at random) that the above average comeback performance is not due to chance does not mean that Manning is better at comebacks than Brady. It’s mostly just a consequence of sample size, the same way that you can be very very confident that a coin is weighted if you flip it a billion times and get 51% heads, even though it’s only slightly biased.

Another way of ranking comeback QBs, analogous to PAR or VOA, is to look at how many extra wins a QB earned for his team, compared to how they would have done with an average QB. Just take the number of comeback wins a team got minus the number of wins that they would have been expected to get with an average quarterback, given the number of comeback chances that they had. The number of expected wins is just 31.3% of the number of comeback chances (since there were 603 successful comeback attempts and 1322 failed comeback attempts). Here are those numbers for the 20 quarterbacks whose records are given in the article. The quarterbacks’ records and their rankings using the p value method are in parentheses.

+6.4 Brady (13-8, 4)
+5.3 Bulger (10-5,
+4.3 Plummer (19-28, 1)
+4.0 Manning (19-29, 2)
+4.0 Testaverde (19-29, 2)
+3.5 McNabb (12-15, 7)
+3.1 Delhomme (10-12, 9)
+3.1 Fiedler (10-12, 9)
+3.1 Kitna (15-23, 5)
+2.3 Collins (17-30, 6)

-2.0 Holcomb (3-13, 154)
-2.2 Banks (5-18, 157)
-2.4 Rattay (1-10, 153)
-2.5 Warner (5-19, 159)
-2.6 Brunell (14-39, 162)
-2.8 Kanell (1-11, 155)
-3.0 George (2-14, 158)
-3.4 Ramsey (0-11, 156)
-3.5 Griese (4-20, 160)
-3.8 Beuerlein (5-23, 161)

What struck me the most was how bad Kurt Warner was and how good MArc Bulger was. I know Warner has been on quite a few teams lately, but for the majority of each's career they shared the same team. Just goes to show you how GREAT Marshall Faulk was in the late 90's to make Warner look as good and comfortable as he was.