Stampede Blue
Thanks to Pro Football Focus, Pro Football Reference, NFL.com and the nflFastR project for being awesome sources of weekly data.
My plan for the rest of the offseason is to write individual articles predicting 2025 performance for as many QBs as possible before the season starts. I’ll start with Colts’ opponents and then—time permitting—I’ll add as many known starters as I can. To kick off the series, I’ll first revisit the predictions I made at the beginning of last season, which were based on a numerical analysis of pre-2024 data.
Specifically, I said his 2024 net yards per dropback (NY/d), which ranked third-best in 2023, would fall out of the top 10, and that his EPA per dropback (EPA/d) would drop below 12th. I was right on both counts—he had a drastic fall-off, ending up 26th in NY/d and 23rd in EPA/d.
My prediction was mainly based on 2 metrics from his 2023 season:
Yards After the Catch - YAC is driven by two main variables: passing depth and accuracy. Short, accurate passes typically generate much more YAC than deep or inaccurate throws. In Stroud’s rookie year, he had the second-longest average pass depth, yet the posted the ninth-highest average YAC. Now maybe a QB can sustain that if he is super accurate, but Stroud was 19th in Completion % Over Expected (cpoe), so accuracy was not a strength.
For 2024, I believed he would continue to throw deep, but that his YAC numbers would fall below league average — and I was right. In 2024, had the 12th-longest average depth of target and his YAC ranking dropped to 24th.
Deep Passing Success - When I removed all 20+ yard pass attempts from the 2023 data, Stroud’s numbers dropped outside of the top 10. In other words, his strong rookie year performance relied on great deep passing. He completed 50.8% of his throws of 20+ yards—an absurdly high number (league avg was 39%). He also threw zero interceptions on those passes.
A quarterback who is merely average at short passing, but excels at deep passing is often more lucky than skilled (see: 2024 Sam Darnold). I felt there was simply no way Stroud could continue that level of productionon on his deep passes—and he didn’t. In 2024, his completion percentage on deep passes dropped nearly 20 points to 31.3% (fifth-worst), and his interception rate rose from 0% to 9% (seventh-worst). He finished 30th in deep-ball EPA efficiency, which was an anchor on his overall efficiency.
Of course, other factors played a role—such as increased pressure from the 4th longest time to throw—but even a cursory look at the 2023 numbers suggested a likely decline. And 2025 isn’t looking that good for him either, but more on that in a later article.
This was kind of a “yeah, well duh” prediction, but...
