Colts’ Week 2 Anthony Richardson analysis: so far, no good

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)

In week 1, I tried to describe what the passing game without the crazy deep completions would look like. This week was it.

DASHBOARD

• For the 2nd week in a row, the run game was highly efficient on a run-first offense even though the Colts are one of the most shotgun-heavy teams in the league (8th arsr, 27th edp, 3rd sg%).
• Richardson held the ball a lot longer than average without a lot of pressure (2nd ttt, 21st pr%). He again attempted the longest average pass depth for the week, but without the 50+ yard completions his avg. completion depth fell (1st adot, 7th ay/c).
• His accuracy was again very poor (29th cpoe). I said, without accuracy, YAC would probably fall and it did this week (25th yac, 16th yacoe).
• One improvement was that his abandoned rate was low, with an average amount of scrambling and only 1 sack (15th scrambling, 28th sack). This is what you want to see in an athletic QB, avoiding sacks by scrambling. Too many times, athletic QBs avoid passes by taking sacks.
• Without the deep passing success, his efficiency on attempts was poor, but his excellent scrambling lifted his overall yardage efficiency to above average levels (25th ypa, 14th ny/d).
• He improved his ability to get first downs, but his turnover rate was a drive killer (13th 1st%, 3rd to%).

He finished 24th in overall efficiency (epa/d) and 21st in success rate (psr).

HOW WELL?

For the 2nd week in a row, he had a 41.7% Pass Succss Rate, which is pretty bad. His 11 yard scramble on 4th down was his highest value play. The first 2 interceptions were by far his most negative plays and the last hail mary INT had a negligible impact to his overall EPA.

He simply doesn’t have enough postive plays and that is primarily driven by too many incompletions.

Without the deep passing his EPA efficeincy fell off a cliff which was pretty predictable. Obviously, there are too few data points to claim a trend, but it’s not a good start.

HOW FAR?

Well, I guess 51.5% completion is better than last week’s 47%, but still . . . c’mon man. Richardson completed only 1 pass over 20 yards, unless you count completions to the other team. He did have 10 passing first downs, though, which is a big improvement and a critical stat going forward.

He continued to throw far.

Not YAC-reliant . . . which means nothing.

TO WHO?

Pierce continues to be AR’s go-to guy, but I do like how the ball was spread around a lot more this week.

HOW ACCURATE?

Accuracy continues to be the most glaring number. A QB can make up for poor accuracy with other aspects of his play, but not accuracy that is this bad. He simply has to complete more passes.

HOW FAST?

Time to throw sky-rocketed this week. But when accounting for passing depth, it’s not more than expected. I would rather a QB throw quick and short, but slow and far works too . . . AS LONG AS YOU COMPLETE PASSES!!

TO WHERE?

He was pretty bad at all depths, with passes <10 yards adding the least amount of damage.