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)
Prior to this game, there was a lot of talk about how Joe Flacco limits rushing and that a return to a mobile Anthony Richardson under center against a horrible Jets run defense would let Jonathan Tayor run wild. That didn’t happen.
But let’s look at what did happen.
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(Use the right-left arrows to toggle between stats for the week and the season).
- The Colts leaned heavily into the run game even though the rushing was very inefficient (31st edp, 25th arsr)
- As usual with Richardson, the Colts ran the offense primarily from the shotgun, but the Jets did not utilize a zone heavy pass defense (6th sg%, 23rd oz%)
- Richardson faced a lot of pressure and while some of that was certainly due to how long he held the ball, the numbers relative to each other imply poor pass protection (4th pr%, 10th ttt). Preliminary PFF data backs that up (8th worst weighted grade)
- However, he responded to that pressure well, by primarily throwing the ball away (3rd ta%). He still took a few sacks instead of scrambling (28th scr%, 12th sck%), but under the high pressure, he kept the overall abandoned rate in check (13th aa%). This is the one area that he has been pretty good at all year and its a critical measure for a QB.
- As usual, he threw a lot of deep passes, which boosted his average depth of completion (5th adot, 4th ay/c). What was different this week, was that his overall completion rate was much, much better. In fact, when adjusting for depth (and other factors), he had the 10th best completion % going into Monday night (18th cmp%, 10th cpoe).
- Usually, longer than average passes earn shorter than average YAC, but in prior weeks, AR has broken that norm as his big passes earned a lot YAC. I have previously called that “unearned” YAC as is shouldn’t be repeatable and week 11 numbers agree with me. Receiver YAC fell below average (22nd yac). In fact, given passing depth, it fell a little more than expected (22nd yacoe). Basically, instead of hitting wide open receivers downfield, he was finding and throwing to more contested receivers. That’s not a bad thing.
- Because he was able to finally complete a lot of his passes, he earned the 5th highest yards per attempt for the week. That gets tempered a bit when adding in sacks and...
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