Now that summer is here, I’ve decided to scale back the posts a bit. Ideally, this will mean continued daily posts, though of a shorter variety. There’s less relevant information to discuss, and I’d rather not just ramble every day (I try to make every post interesting/thought-provoking/or in some other way valuable). However, that may mean an occasional day without a post; I know you’re all heartbroken. I’ve assembled a lot of data and want to do some higher level things that require more than a few hours work. On days without posts, you can rest assured that I’m spending some time on these larger projects.
We’ll obviously ramp back up as the season approaches.
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In the meantime, I’m working on my articles for the Almanac. Here are a few notes to come out of that:
– Eli Manning has a career Passer Rating of just 82.7 and a TD/INT ratio of 1.47.
– Jason Campbell’s career Passer Rating is 82.5 and his TD/INT ratio is 1.46.
– Donovan McNabb’ career Rating is 85.6 and his TD/INT ratio is 2.0.
Eli Manning is likely headed to the Hall of Fame. You may commence vomiting now…
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There is no statistic more important for evaluating college QBs than completion percentage. I’m straying dangerously close to my Almanac stuff now, but obviously that will be more detailed. For now, I’ll just give you a chart, with Pro Passer Rating on the Y-axis and College completion % on the X-axis:
The correlation value is a moderate .324. Given the difficulty of projecting human performance in addition to all the other variables involved, that’s actually an extremely strong indicator.
Kyle Boller had a college completion percentage of just 47.8%.
He was selected #19 overall in the 2003 NFL draft.
27 Pro Bowlers were selected after him (7 more went undrafted, including Tony Romo).
Eagles Rewind 
Great observation about Eli; his reputation speaks to how folks value “clutch” without ever defining it, and also to the way we value (for example) two Super Bowl wins over five conference championships, even though both scenarios require a lot of “clutch”. I’d enjoy seeing any ideas you have on defining and measuring “clutch”. The paradigmatic example I’ve heard is from baseball: If player A hits 250 in the regular season and 275 in the playoffs, is he more or less clutch than player B who hits 325 in the regular season and 300 in the playoffs. A improves in the playoffs, but B still performs better there. Love to hear your thoughts, and thanks for the consistently interesting posts!
My assumption is that, in general, the concept of “clutch” in sports is bullshit. It’s most often just a result of the comparatively small sample size (playoffs versus regular season). I’ll look into this in some more detail, however it’s tough to do in football.
People also forget that we should expect QB’s to perform worse than their lifetime averages purely as a result of facing harder competition in the playoffs (bad teams don’t make it). It’s very difficult to equalize for the level of competition. I’ll take a look and see if I can find any definite “clutch” guys, i.e. players who performed well above their career averages given a reasonably large playoff sample size. Again, I think it’s more instructive here if we find players who IMPROVE, rather than those whose performance declines. Put more simply, CLUTCH players may be more easily identified than “Chokers”.
In the end, I dont think Eli makes to the HOF unless there goes a lot of time. QBs who will go in before Eli with no doubt, Peyton, Brady, Bress and Rodgers, all 4 got SB wins and all 4 are smashing passing records. Kurt Warner will most likely end in the HOF and we got a good list of young QBs who could end in the HOF in Luck, RG3, Matt Ryan, Wilson, Kaepernick.
Also somebody compared McNabb’s stats to Steve Young and McNabb actually got very compareble stats.
We’ll see. However, when it comes to QBs, SB rings seem to count for A LOT. McNabb, purely on stats, belongs, but I really don’t see any way he makes it.
Eli’s not stopping anytime soon, so I don’t think he’ll have to compete with Peyton, Brady, or Brees, who will all retire before him and get in quickly.
Also, Eli’s just 32 and hasn’t missed a game to injury from what I can see. That means he’s probably got at LEAST 5-6 seasons in him and maybe more than that.
I should note that Eli over the last 5 years has been much better than Eli over his first 3 years. In light of that, if he keeps playing at his current level, his Passer Rating and TD/INT ratio will both improve.
On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Eagles Rewind
Peyton Manning hadnt missed 1 single game before his neck injury.
If Manning keeps pace of what he is doing, he will still be far behind most other QBs and yes sadly QB wins matters unless you are Dan Marino
I think there’s also likely to be a lot of ‘what have you done for me lately’ in the HoF voting. With RG3 in the division and my blatant homerism telling me that Chip is gonna beast it with the Eagles, I don’t think it’s a hugely unreasonable projection that the Giants might not make the playoffs again before Eli retires. Not necessarily the most likely scenario, but one I could see happening if things work out the way they appear right now.