Colts’ Week 16 QB Analysis: less passing, better outcome

Thanks to the nflFastR project, Pro Football Focus and NFL NextGen Stats for the timely sources of data.

For those of you new to this, I will publish key QB stats each week judging how well the upcoming opponent QB has performed. Yes, O-Line, receivers, and play-calling impact these numbers but they are primarily QB measures. I will probably modify the charts throughout the season. Commentary will be brief but feel free to let me know in the comments that stats aren’t everything. (click charts for larger view)

A single game is a small enough sample size, but when the QB has only 14 dropbacks, it’s tough to read anything into the numbers. Of course, I will do so anyway.

NOTE: None of these numbers include designed QB runs. Its becoming clear, that to fully judge Anthony Richardson (and other QBs), I will have to fold in designed runs into my QB stats (as much as I hate to do that). I won’t have time until the off-season to make those changes though.

HOW WELL?

6 positive value plays on 14 dropbacks is not a great success rate (42.9%), but flipping one of those incompletions into a completion would bump it up to 50% which is pretty good. That is too fine a line to mean anything.

The interception was pretty catastrophic EPA-wise, but Richardson made up for it on a couple of big throws, so he ends up in the positive EPA territory (0.10 EPA/d).

He certainly bounced back from the 3 previous games, where he posted below average numbers.

HOW FAR?

His completion rate finally improved, but one of them was a pick, so there’s that. He was throwing a lot shorter this week and the completions led to a good number of first downs (percentage-wise).

The overall depth of target was down from previous weeks but his average completion depth was up.

TO WHO?

Despite the limited number of passes, they were spread around pretty well. Josh Downs provided most of the YAC for the day off of a couple of completions behind the line of scrimmage.

If you are wondering why Mitchell isn’t in the next graph, it is because the EPA value on his sole catch was so high that he is literally off the chart.

HOW ACCURATE?

Even though AR’s 63.6% completion rate puts him in the average range for QBs, his cpoe was still very low. But again, flipping just 1 of those incompletions would have given AR a 72.7% completion rate and a positive cpoe, so I’m not going to read anything into it.

HOW FAST?

He didn’t have enough attempts to register a time to throw this week.

TO WHERE?

The interception torpedoed his overall deep passing value, but he was pretty successful within 10 yards.

DASHBOARD

(Use the right-left arrows to toggle between stats for the week and the season).

I’m going to breeze through this because the sample is just too small this week to make comparisons to other QBs worthwhile.

• The Colts run game was great, which is good because the Colts were 3rd in % of runs on early downs this week (6th arsr, 30th edp)
• Richardson wasn’t pressured much, so even though his abandoned play rate wasn’t very high, it was probably too high given the pressure (25th pr%, 10th aa%).
• He had the highest yards per attempt on the week, driven by the highest average YAC and that fed into the 2nd highest net yards per dropback.
• He threw a lot of first downs and with only 14 dropbacks, his 1 passing TD translates to a very high TD%. Unfortunately, his 1 INT does as well (4th 1st%, 7th td%, 3rd to%).

Even though it only ranks 20th for the week, his EPA/d of +0.10 is still pretty good. He just happened to do it in a week, when a lot of other QBs did really well.

Given the limited dropbacks, it’s hard to give an objective judgement on his play. There was some good and some bad and the good outweighed the bad. That’s as best as I can do.