1-32: Who Ya Got?
- Thread starter soxfan121
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Yup I responded to that in the game thread as well. He was great today. Got a little help from the picks and fake field goal but he won that game today nearly by himself.
It is, in my opinion, generous to Newton to say the two QBs are performing at similar levels. But the answer to your question is obviously field position. And I don't mean the average field position that is affected by Seattle's superior return game. I mean the type of field position that translates into easy scores: that is, turnovers. Going into yesterday, the Panthers had forced 28 turnovers to the Seahawks' 11. Interception return yards were more than double for Carolina, and remain at around double.
When one team (and one QB) is significantly better than the other at yards per game and per play, rushing and passing, and that qb turns the ball over less frequently, it's pretty lazy to just point at the scoreboard. Carolina's defense is its MVP by a good margin. Not Cam Newton.
Getting to this thread recently, but one of the noticeable aspects of the QB population is the weird age divide. There are some good old QBs, some good young QBs ... and not a whole lot in between.
Here are the QBs drafted from 2006-2010 that were their team's opening-day starter this year:
Jay Cutler (06)
Matt Ryan (08)
Joe Flacco (08)
Matthew Stafford (09)
Sam Bradford (10)
Meanwhile, the 04-05 years had Eli/Rivers/Roethlisberger/Romo/Smith/Rodgers/Fitzpatrick. And the 11-12 years have Newton/Kaepernick/Dalton/Taylor/Luck/Tannehill/Wilson/Foles/Cousins. 13 was a complete wash, but 14/15 have some promising guys (Bortles, Bridgewater, Carr, Winston, Mariota).
Of the top 20 in ANY/A right now, there are only 7 in the "prime" ages of 27-32: Dalton, Wilson, Cutler, Rodgers, Hoyer, Smith, Ryan.
For five years we basically did not see a star QB enter the league and had only five even average QBs enter the league. Eventually the older guys are going to drop off and there's not really anyone in line to take their place.
Here are the QBs drafted from 2006-2010 that were their team's opening-day starter this year:
Jay Cutler (06)
Matt Ryan (08)
Joe Flacco (08)
Matthew Stafford (09)
Sam Bradford (10)
Meanwhile, the 04-05 years had Eli/Rivers/Roethlisberger/Romo/Smith/Rodgers/Fitzpatrick. And the 11-12 years have Newton/Kaepernick/Dalton/Taylor/Luck/Tannehill/Wilson/Foles/Cousins. 13 was a complete wash, but 14/15 have some promising guys (Bortles, Bridgewater, Carr, Winston, Mariota).
Of the top 20 in ANY/A right now, there are only 7 in the "prime" ages of 27-32: Dalton, Wilson, Cutler, Rodgers, Hoyer, Smith, Ryan.
For five years we basically did not see a star QB enter the league and had only five even average QBs enter the league. Eventually the older guys are going to drop off and there's not really anyone in line to take their place.
Heh. I made a similar post on the first page of this thread, also noting that five year talent gap, so I guess we're thinking along similar lines.
As your last line suggests, we may be about to enter a period of unusual scarcity in terms of QB talent. If I'm a bad team without a QB to build around, this makes me want to roll the dice on a guy like Paxton Lynch or Jared Goff in this upcoming draft even more than I normally would.
That's certainly part of it - the Panthers are getting the most production from defensive turnovers of any team in the league. Some of the statistical basis of this discussion has shifted since we started talking about it due to Wilson's big game Sunday, but we can use EPA to isolate how much the passing offense contributes to team scoring. The Seahawks have now nosed ahead of Carolina in passing offense EPA, 69.11 (11th in the NFL) vs 63.20 (12th). I don't have historical stats, but this time last week Newton certainly would have been ahead in this stat, despite trailing him in many of the traditional passing stats you mention.
That's really my point in this discussion of statistics: the Seahawks passing attack is not putting as many points on the board as the stats you quote would suggest, and Carolina's is scoring more. This is true to the extent we are able to isolate the contributions of passing attack. I would not dismiss this as a fluke or irrelevant without further study and understanding why. Some of those who've looked deeply into the film have found flaws in Wilson's game and strengths in Newton's that may partly explain what we're seeing.
And all football stats are team stats, of course, and trying to boil them down to the individual's contributions is an imperfect science. None of the stats we quote account for strength of receiving weapons, strength of offensive line, strength of schedule, environmental impact, etc. Hell, we are not even getting into the impact of the quarterback running even though that is a big part of both Newton's and Wilson's game.
I'm certainly not trying to suggest we should just look at points scored and force rank on that basis. That would be pretty lazy.
I started this discussion by pointing out that the film people tend to like Newton and the stats people like Wilson. You seemed pretty dismissive of the film-based approach, so I have been trying to demonstrate that the statistics you're quoting aren't capturing the whole story. At the end of the day, games are won and lost on points. Statistics draw a lot of their validity by how well they correlate to and predict points scored. That's why on-base percentage has more merit than batting average - by including walks, we explain more of runs scored. Most football statistics are nearer to BA than OBA in terms of their relevance to scoring. When we see a case where the relationship between statistics and scoring is weaker than we expect, it behooves us to ask what the stats might be missing.
And again, the other massive difference between baseball and football statistics is that it is much harder and perhaps impossible to isolate the contributions of individuals to team events.
Well, yeah, but this time two weeks ago, and for many weeks before that, he would not have. I think I mentioned upthread that Newton's still mediocre stats were being inflated by one game. You can throw out Wilson's outlier game if you like as long as you do the same with Newton.
It also might mean we'll see more experimentation in styles/schemes, because there won't be enough competent passers to go around to run traditional passing offenses. I'd love to see more teams really commit to making a running QB an important part of their offense. Obviously the whole read-option thing isn't going to blow away the league again like it did in 2012. But Carolina and Seattle have shown that if you have a QB who's a real run threat, committing to making that an important part of your offense -- in terms of developing the concepts and having prepared counters to likely responses to them, spending significant practice time installing it, and then actually using those sequences in games -- can have significant benefits on the rest of your run game and on opening up play action. But they're really the only ones doing it: only five QBs are averaging 5 rushing attempts/game (Newton, Wilson, Tyrod Taylor, Alex Smith, and Kaepernick), and Newton/Wilson are the only ones over 6. As an SF fan one of the big disappointments with how the team handled Kaepernick this year was that the coaches spent so much time/effort trying to make him into a pocket passer that they basically ignored his rushing.