Colts’ Week 4 QB analysis: Richardson + Flacco = Top 10 passing performance

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)

Flacco and Richardson combined to deliver an impressive passing performance in week 4. Prior to the Monday night games, their combined passing ranks 5th best in EPA per dropback and 11th best in Passing Success Rate. Richardson delivered the explosive plays and Flacco moved the chains by grinding out drives.

For my visuals, I am going to remove AR from week 4 to compare Flacco against what we have seen from Richardson.

DASHBOARD

This is only Flacco’s data.

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

• The rushing on Flacco’s snaps was pretty poor (28th arsr). You could probably blame that on not having a mobile QB for RPOs. Whatever the reason, the Colts switched to a pass-first game with Flacco under center (4th edp).
• Flacco saw less than average pressure, but part of that was because he had a quicker than average time to throw (19th ttt).
• The Colts still maintained a deeper target depth and Flacco’s accuracy helped ensure a longer completion depth (7th adot, 10th cpoe, 13th ay/c).
• Flacco’s yards per attempt was nowhere near as good as Richardson’s season numbers (7.1 vs 8.8), primarily due to inferior deep passing. Flacco also had a higher abandon attempt rate (16.7% vs. 14.0%). He threw the ball away more than AR, but had a lot more sacks. That all combines to Flacco’s overall yardage efficiency being a whopping 2.5 yards lower than AR’s season number (5.6 ny/d vs 8.1 ny/d).
• However, Flacco was very strong in critical categories that AR has not been, specifically getting first downs (10th 1st%) and being careful with the ball (0 turnovers).
• Flacco had a higher TD rate as well (6th td%), but AR has not been deficient in that measure (8th on the season).

Flacco’s pros outweighed his cons and he ended up with an epa efficiency that is the 10th highest this week (so far) and far better than Richardson’s 22nd rank season number (+0.26 epa/d vs 0.00 epa/d). Flacco’s consistency was much better too, earning a 46.7% Passing Success Rate (15th) vs. Richardson’s season 39.5% (29th).

HOW WELL?

Flacco limited his mistakes, with no big negative EPA plays and delivered on multiple 3rd and long plays. That is the kind of consistency that I would love to see from AR.

In the next set of graphs, the last data point is just Flacco and all the preceding weeks are Richardson. You can see the big bounce in all metrics but Net Yardage efficiency.

The lesson here is that deep completions are great, but you can replace those with consecutive first downs and get more value.

HOW FAR?

The difference a decent completion rate makes is like night and day. Flacco had no deep completions, but he had a lot of completions that were deep enough.

Completion depth clearly fell, but was still above average.

TO WHO?

Downs and Pittman did the heavy lifting while Pierce missed Richardson’s arm.

HOW ACCURATE?

Flacco’s accuracy was a big improvement over AR’s.

HOW FAST?

Flacco’s Time to Throw was longer then AR’s week 3, but below AR’s season average.

TO WHERE?

Flacco was hitting over the middle underneath. I thought NFL QB’s forgot how to do that.