Comments on: Is good luck driving the low interception rates of Joe Flacco and Colin Kaepernick? http://www.footballperspective.com/is-good-luck-driving-the-low-interception-rates-of-joe-flacco-and-colin-kaepernick/ NFL History and Stats Sun, 03 Feb 2013 09:01:16 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: Mon http://www.footballperspective.com/is-good-luck-driving-the-low-interception-rates-of-joe-flacco-and-colin-kaepernick/#comment-9033 Sun, 03 Feb 2013 09:01:16 +0000 http://www.footballperspective.com/?p=6427#comment-9033 “Assume that …if [a quarterback] throws an incomplete pass, then he has no control over whether or not that pass is intercepted.”

Your whole argument rests on the validity of your premises (as all arguments do). Your premise is false. This one, at least. So, the rest of your article doesn’t matter in the slightest. I kept reading since I’m a numbers junkie and it’s 2:55am, however:

1) Sometimes Quarterbacks put the ball where no one can get it so they don’t get sacked or throw an interception. I don’t just mean balls thrown away (which is the most obvious example where your premise is false), but also balls thrown in the dirt, or thrown to open space.
2) Sometimes Quarterbacks put the ball where only their receiver can get it and here is where it gets tricky. “Assume that quarterbacks have control over completions” — they don’t. Why? Drops. A quarterback could exercise every iota of his control to completely harmony and precision making the most perfect of calculated risks throughout the duration of a play as if Deep Blue himself were going through the QB read progressions/timing/reading of defenses and a laser-guided robot could deliver the ball perfectly to a receiver and…he could still drop it. This affects incompletion rating. But here’s an interesting paradox.

It also affects, sometimes, interception percentage. A QB throws a perfect pass, the receiver drops or rather “props” the ball up, and a defender intercepts it. This happens more often than one might think, and it happens enough to influence metrics.

Meanwhile, the important part is that your argument is rubbish because your premises are invalid. No point.

]]> By: Bryan http://www.footballperspective.com/is-good-luck-driving-the-low-interception-rates-of-joe-flacco-and-colin-kaepernick/#comment-8991 Sun, 03 Feb 2013 04:01:24 +0000 http://www.footballperspective.com/?p=6427#comment-8991 The observation that one of the responders made about Joe Flacco and his deep passes rarely being underthrown is true of Colin Kaepernick as well. My feelings on this issue is that there are three different reasons why any given pass play could result in an interception. It could be a poor decision by the quarterback, it could be an inaccurate throw by the quarterback, or it could be simply bad luck (short term variance) where a pass is deflected in some nature into the hands of a defender.

I really think the key here is the fact that we have in play Kaepernick’s predecessor, Alex Smith, who also excelled by throwing an extremely low number of interceptions. While the sample size isn’t large enough to tell with any absolute certainty, I believe the system has a lot to do with these low number of interceptions that Flacco, Kaepernick, and Smith have thrown. And could it be any coincidence that these two teams are almost exact mirror images of each other as far as strengths and weaknesses go? And that they are coached by brothers with very similar offensive philosophies?

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