The Manning Index (and The Brady Effect)

January 23, 2013 Data Dump

Eight years ago — almost to the day — our old PFR colleague Doug Drinen wrote a Sabernomics post about “The Manning Index”, a metric designed to roughly gauge the clutchness (or chokeitude) of a given quarterback by looking at how he did relative to expectations (he revived this concept in version two, six years [...]

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Reviewing the Divisional Round of the Playoffs

January 14, 2013 Review

The Best Weekend of the Year lived up to its reputation this weekend, as the divisional round of the playoffs gave us three outstanding games. Here is my reaction, with a disproportionate amount of time spent on the Denver-Baltimore game, because, well, if you saw it, you’d understand. Baltimore 38, Denver 35 One of the [...]

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Previewing the Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs – Saturday

January 12, 2013 Current Events

I was on vacation last week, so I provided just a bare bones set of NFL playoff predictions. Technically, my picks went 4-0 on Wildcard Weekend, but that doesn’t count for much when you pick the favorite in every game. With a little more time on my hands, here’s an in-depth preview of Saturday’s games. [...]

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Checkdowns: Career passing stats in wins and losses

January 5, 2013 Checkdowns

Last weekend, I looked at career rushing stats in wins and losses; today I will do the same but for quarterbacks. I looked at all games, including playoffs, from 1960 to 2011, for all quarterbacks with at least 5,000 career passing yards over that time period. The table below lists the following information for each [...]

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NYT Fifth Down: Post-week 17

January 2, 2013 Checkdowns

At the New York Times Fifth Down Blog this week, I explain my choices for the major awards this season. Offensive Player of the Year: Adrian Peterson, Minnesota Vikings Generally, the Most Valuable Player award is given to the best quarterback, while the Offensive Player of the Year is usually the player with the most [...]

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Checkdowns: Broncos complete 4th largest improvement ever

December 30, 2012 History

In 2011, the Broncos scored 309 points and allowed 390 points. Despite being outscored by 81 points, the Tim Tebow express still made it into the post-season. In June, I speculated that the 2012 Broncos might set the record for the largest increase in pass completions in one year, and they did just that on [...]

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Checkdowns: Quarterback Yards Above Bench (QBYAB)

December 21, 2012 Checkdowns

After posting about SRS-style quarterback ratings on Monday, I was thinking about other things we can do with game-by-game data like that. In his QBGOAT series, Chase likes to compare QBs to the league average, which makes a lot of sense for all-time ratings — you want to reward guys who are at least above-average [...]

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Adjusting team sack rates in the NFL for SOS

December 17, 2012 Defensive Players

I’ve got sacks on the mind today. A few hours ago, I looked at the single-season sack records by various players in both the 3-4 and 4-3. Today I also want to look at things from the team perspective. In 2012, which team is the best at getting to the quarterback? You might think that’s [...]

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Trivia of the Day – Sunday, December 16th

December 16, 2012 Trivia

What do you give to the man who already has everything? How about a Comeback Player of the Year Award? Right now, the choice for AP Comeback Player of the Year is a two-horse race between Peyton Manning and Adrian Peterson. If Manning wins the award, it will put him in pretty rare territory: he’d [...]

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The Greatest QB of All-Time IV, Part III: Playoff Results

August 31, 2012 G.O.A.T.

On Wednesday, I explained the methodology for grading each quarterback in each season. Yesterday, I came up with an all-time career list of the best quarterbacks based on their regular season play. Today, a look at playoff performances. Using the same formula, we can grade each quarterback in each game and adjust for era1. However, [...]

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