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Guest Post: Marginal Drops

Munir Mohamed, a reader of Football Perspective, has agreed to write this guest post for us. And I thank him for it.


Regular readers are familiar with Adam Steele’s threepart series here on Marginal YAC; today, I want to look at drops, and marginal drops.  As Adam noted, Sportingcharts.com keeps track of dropped passes. [1]Some fine print: Unfortunately, that data is only recorded on a team level, not at the individual passer level.  As a result, I gave each quarterback his pro rata portion of his team’s dropped … Continue reading

Her’s how to read the table below, which is sorted by career Marginal Drops.  Over the course of this data set, Eli Manning completed 2,929 of his 5,008 passes, for a completion percentage of 58.5%.  Manning’s Giants dropped an estimated 299.4 of his passes; if we add those to his 2,929 completions, Manning was therefore “On Target” with 64.5% of his throws.  Relative to league average, Manning had 44 more drops than we would expect. Manning’s drop percentage — i.e., his number of drops divided by his total number of completions and drops, was 9.3%, which represents his percentage of catchable balls that were dropped. Manning lost 516.5 yards from his marginal drops, or 52.9 yards last from marginal drops per 300 completions. [continue reading…]

References

References
1 Some fine print: Unfortunately, that data is only recorded on a team level, not at the individual passer level.  As a result, I gave each quarterback his pro rata portion of his team’s dropped passes relative to the percentage of team incompletions for the entire team.

For example, let’s say the Jaguars have 30 dropped passes. Assume QB A for the Jaguars has 200 incompletions, and QB B has 100 incompletions. My methodology handled this by crediting QB A with 20 dropped passes and QB B with 10 drops. The numbers in this article are from 1992-2013. In the table below, “Marginal Drops” represents how many drops above average a quarterback had compared to league average rate. If a passer has positive Marginal Drops, this means he had more drops than expected.

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