Real interesting stuff and in some respects, someone in the comments at the bottom gets somewhat what I was getting at the other night – if you take the pop rocket move to Austin (or someone else) running a jet motion out – how does that affect his numbers (also it’s a low risk pass, if Austin misses the catch it’s incomplete – if he catches it, it probably goes for an easy 10 yards so is that potentially easy value when trying to rank something?).

I know you wouldn’t run that move often during a game but possibly often enough (e.g. the Orange Bowl say 10% of dropbacks). Manziel and Mariota also both potentially project out well being ranked so highly as freshmen (I think statistically both have a drop off next year – gut feeling).

Also an interesting one to look at is Braxton Miller again – 100% completion of passes behind the line (the sack on 10% of dropbacks, poor completion rate beyond 10 yards, and the fact that he often took off than went through progressions in what was a run orientated offense) probably goes someway to explaining why despite going 11-0 he didn’t make the top 50 the other day. The data set might not be complete but it’s an interesting insight. Opta does this kind of thing for a lot of sports – one English Soccer team released a whole season of data to try and encourage the moneyball moment for Soccer (which hasn’t exactly happened yet).

Good stuff from Bill Connolly on Smith: one-third of his passes were behind the LOS

http://www.footballstudyhall.com/2013/2/28/4036850/adjusted-completion-percentages-collin-klein-matt-barkley