Colts’ Week 13 QB Analysis: The numbers tell the story.

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)

Overall, this was a good game for Anthony Richardson but it was far from perfect. His strengths and weaknesses continue to be revealed in his numbers.

DASHBOARD

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

• The Colts leaned on the run against a pretty good Patriots run defense and the Colts rushers delivered (29th edp, 4th arsr).
• AR, again, ran the offense from the shotgun and this time faced fewer zone defensive looks (1st sg%, 14th oz%).
• Richardson faced a lot of pressure, but part of that was due to him holding the ball longer than normal (9th pr%, 6th ttt).
• Once again, he has one of the longest average depths on his attempts (2nd adot), but he completed only 1 pass over 10 yards. However, because I add in accepted Defensive Pass Interference calls as completed attempts, he ends up with a 29 yard “completion” that boosts his avg completion depth (5th ay/c).
• Due to 2 DPI calls, I have his completion rate at 53.8% (29th cmp%). Adjusting for depth and other variables gives him a cmp% that is still -2.9% below expected (24th cpoe).
• YAC was extremely low, but adjusting for target depth, it was only -0.2 yards below expected (29th yac, 18th yacoe).
• The low YAC and low completion rate pulls down the completion depth to give a pretty dismal 5.9 yards per attempt (25th ypa) and that is after excluding throw-aways and including the 2 DPIs.
• However, AR did not abandon many pass attempts (29th aa%) and when he did, he earned excellent yardage off of his scrambles (1st yaa). This actually lifted his overall yardage efficiency to 6.0 net yards per dropback, so even though he had a poor ypa, he was about average for the week in ny/d (16th).
• He still had trouble moving the chains (25th 1st%), but the run game helped out with that and he was very effective at getting into the end zone (td%).

He had an excellent passing success rate (8th PSR), which describes his improved consistency. Unfortunately, his turnover problems resurfaced (3rd to%), which drags that consistent play down when measured in raw value (14th EPA/d).

Overall, it was a very good effort. He was consistently good on the shorter passes, with some high value plays sprinkled in. However, some of these numbers demonstrate the same issues I have seen from him all year.

He doesn’t complete enough passes to allow him to reliably move the chains and before you protest, even if I remove all throw-aways, all dropped passes and limit the data to only passes <20 yards, he still has the league’s worst completion rate. He also has the highest turnover rate of any QB this year with 9 INTs and 2 lost fumbles (4.6% of dropbacks) in basically 8 games.

On the other hand, he has been very good at not giving up on the play while avoiding sacks. On the season he ranks 21st in abandoned attempts (low = good) and when he does give up on the play, he scrambles and throws the ball away instead of taking the sack, which is why he has the 27th sack rate under the 5th most pressure. Because of his ability to avoid sacks, he has the 7th most yards per abandoned play, which helps improve his overall yardage efficiency. This sets him apart from most running QBs who tend to abandon a lot of plays and take a lot of sacks worsening their relative efficiency.

The bottom line is that he is a good, smart runner but still a developing passer. He makes some spectacular plays, but just isn’t that great at the vanilla stuff. When he is not pressured, he ranks only 30th in adjusted yards per attempt and that has to get better if the Colts offense is to succeed.

HOW WELL?

Looking at the green bars, you can see he was much more consistent this week. He had very few strings of negative plays. The interceptions removed a lot of overall EPA.

His conversion rate fell off, but fortunately the run game made up for that.

HOW FAR?

He only missed on one pass within 10 yards, which is much better than last week (8 for 15). Unfortunately, the only success he saw on attempts over 10 yards was 1 completion and the 2 DPI calls.

This should illustrate how important short passing is. Even though he missed on the mid to long range throws, he still packed a lot of value into the short passes (first downs, TDs).

I really don’t think building an offense on the deepest attempts in the league with an essentially rookie QB is a winning strategy.

TO WHO?

Pittman was really the only threat on the field and almost all his yards came from YAC.

The Colts mostly avoided the upper right quadrant in the next graph. Unfortunately, that is the quadrant you want to be in,

HOW ACCURATE?

Accuracy continues to be a problem. Going into the season, CPOE was my main concern and that hasn’t changed after 13 weeks. He’s under-performing the league in all depth ranges.

HOW FAST?

His Time to Throw edged up this week. That’s not great but also not a huge concern given the depth of passes. It does invite pressure, but he handles it well.

TO WHERE?

His passes under 10 yards were responsible for almost all of the value this week.