by Chase Stuart
on April 16, 2013
Tyler Bray is this year's youngest quarterback prospect.
For the most part, age is rarely discussed when talking about college quarterbacks. Outside of the
Brandon Weedens and
Chris Weinkes of the world, you generally don’t hear much from the draft community about the age of a prospect. But we do know that age matters, and that all other things being equal, being
younger is better (or a sign that the player has a higher ceiling).
In this year’s draft, Tyler Bray is the neophyte, as he’ll be 21 years and 8 months old at the start of the season. He’s just weeks older than Matt Stafford and Josh Freeman were this time four years ago. It also means he’s 10 months younger than Geno Smith, the second youngest of the top prospects. On the other hand, Tyler Wilson will be 24 when the season starters, Landry Jones just turned 24, and Jordan “did you know Aaron is my brother” Rodgers will be 25 on August 30th. Do NFL teams generally ignore age — i.e., fail to measure younger quarterbacks against a lower bar? Or perhaps do they overemphasize age, thinking a young player has such high upside and can be taught anything that they ignore red flags? That’s what this post seeks to answer.
[continue reading…]
Tagged as:
Age,
Tyler Bray
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by Chase Stuart
on February 26, 2013
The Chiefs play the Baylor game on an endless loop for the other 31 teams.
A few weeks ago, I discovered
cfbstats.com, which has made available for download an incredible amount of college football statistics from the last eight seasons. Thanks to them, I plan to apply some of the same techniques I’ve used on NFL numbers over the years to college statistics. If you’re a fan of college football, you’re probably already reading talented writers like
Bill Connelly and
Brian Fremeau, but hopefully I can bring something new to the table for you to enjoy.
There are many differences between college and professional football, but many of the same stats still matter. For quarterbacks, Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt is still the king of the basic stats , and it is arguably even more important in college where teams play at varying different paces.
There’s a small problem, however, if you want to calculate ANY/A at the college level: the NCAA counts sacks as rush attempts and sack yards lost as negative rushing yards. I manually overrode that decision in my data set, so going forward, all rushing and passing data will include sack data in the preferred manner (keep this in mind when you compare the statistics I present to the “official” ones).
[continue reading…]
Tagged as:
Geno Smith,
Johnny Manziel,
Matt Barkley,
Tyler Bray
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