Mariota is taken down for another sack.
Of course, it’s important to know which statistics to examine. Mariota has completed 70.3% of his passes; before this year, his career best was a 62.2% rate as a rookie. But there are two factors that make his completion percentage meaningless: one, completion percentage is rising league-wide, and more importantly, Mariota has taken a ton of sacks.
He has a 12.8% sack rate this year, easily the worst of his career. What’s really remarkable is the interplay between his completion rate and his sack rate. Mariota has thrown just 71 incomplete passes all season, while he’s taken 35 sacks. That’s nearly a 2:1 ratio of incomplete passes to sacks! By way of comparison, AFC South rival Andrew Luck has a ratio of nearly 13:1 — he’s thrown 138 incomplete passes and taken only 11 sacks.
There have been seven games this season where a quarterback had more sacks than incomplete passes: Mariota is responsible for 3 of those 7, and all 3 were losses (all other quarterbacks are 3-1 in such games):
| Passing | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rk | Player | Pos | Age | Date | Lg | Tm | Opp | Result | G# | Week | Day | Cmp | Att | Inc ▲ |
Cmp% | Yds | TD | Int | Rate | Sk | Yds | Y/A | AY/A | |
| 1 | Eli Manning | QB | 37.319 | 2018-11-18 | NFL | NYG | TAM | W 38-35 | 10 | 11 | Sun | 17 | 18 | 1 | 94.44 | 231 | 2 | 0 | 155.8 | 4 | 35 | 12.83 | 15.06 | |
| 2 | Philip Rivers | QB | 36.352 | 2018-11-25 | NFL | LAC | ARI | W 45-10 | 11 | 12 | Sun | 28 | 29 | 1 | 96.55 | 259 | 3 | 0 | 138.4 | 4 | 23 | 8.93 | 11.00 | |
| 3 | Marcus Mariota | QB | 25.027 | 2018-11-26 | NFL | TEN | @ | HOU | L 17-34 | 11 | 12 | Mon | 22 | 23 | 1 | 95.65 | 303 | 2 | 0 | 147.7 | 6 | 43 | 13.17 | 14.91 |
| 4 | Marcus Mariota | QB | 25.019 | 2018-11-18 | NFL | TEN | @ | IND | L 10-38 | 10 | 11 | Sun | 10 | 13 | 3 | 76.92 | 85 | 0 | 1 | 61.4 | 4 | 19 | 6.54 | 3.08 |
| 5 | Dak Prescott | QB | 25.123 | 2018-11-29 | NFL | DAL | NOR | W 13-10 | 12 | 13 | Thu | 24 | 28 | 4 | 85.71 | 248 | 1 | 0 | 115.5 | 7 | 40 | 8.86 | 9.57 | |
| 6 | Marcus Mariota | QB | 24.349 | 2018-10-14 | NFL | TEN | BAL | L 0-21 | 6 | 6 | Sun | 10 | 15 | 5 | 66.67 | 117 | 0 | 0 | 90.1 | 11 | 66 | 7.80 | 7.80 | |
| 7 | Derek Carr | QB | 27.218 | 2018-11-01 | NFL | OAK | @ | SFO | L 3-34 | 8 | 9 | Thu | 16 | 22 | 6 | 72.73 | 171 | 0 | 0 | 95.1 | 7 | 32 | 7.77 | 7.77 |
This is most evident on third downs, where Mariota has a whopping 20% sack rate, the highest rate in the NFL (Derek Carr, Aaron Rodgers, Josh Allen, and Dak Prescott are the only other quarterbacks with a sack rate over 15% on third downs).
Mariota has thrown just 25 incomplete passes on third downs, compared to 19 sacks. That’s a 1.3-to-1 ratio of incompletions to sacks, the lowest in the league; Prescott and Matt Ryan (1.8) and Carr (1.9) are the only other players with a ratio below 2:1.
If Mariota’s current ratio stands (49% as many sacks as incomplete passes), it would go down as the second highest in NFL history, behind only Randall Cunningham in his 72-sack season of 1986, when the young Eagle was still learning how to play the position in the NFL. Mariota, as a veteran quarterback, shouldn’t be regressing. But based on his 2018 performance, it sure looks like he is.