I also think the cap should be taken out of the current passer rating formula. Sure, there may be no one that completes 77.5% (or whatever the upper limit is) of their passes, but why the cap to begin with? Not just the upper limits, but the lower ones as well. This goes for comp. %, Yds/Att., etc.
Well, I think you’ve stumbled into the “too much information” and “subjective” areas you were talking about. While I tend to agree with you, one could argue that a tipped pick would have been a catch if it were a better throw.
I don’t see a need for a total retooling of anything. Keep the passer rating as is. Simply create a new QB rating that adds in all the other quantifiable activities of the QB: getting sacked, scrambling, and fumbling.
If done, I think most people would rapidly marginalize the passer rating and focus on the QB rating, as it is simply not possible to judge guys like Vick with the passer rating. It’s not misleading, or a bit off. It’s fundamentally irrelevant when it comes to measuring his performance as a QB. On the flip side, the QB rating would end up being basically identical to the passer rating for the pocket passers.
A win win!
I have to say, when I first saw the first post I thought the OP must have been drunk or something because it didn’t make sense.
Then I realized that this thread is about a football player and not punk rock.
What are you talking about, they drafted Favre, right? 
As a rabid fan of seriously in-depth baseball statistics that track mind-numbingly small minutae, I tend to think there is no such thing as too much information. If the data exists and can be used in a way to lead to more accurate, timely, and useful decisions than there should be formulas and processes that aid in those decisions. Baseball is the sport most associated with this, but in reading and looking at a lot of the metrics that are starting to show up in basketball and football, I think those sports are really closing the gap in amount of data looked at. It’s just that at this point, very few people have adopted the new statistics so a big leap to general acceptance is still necessary.
He’s done it again. From Yahoo! Sports:
That was from the game today (10/30) against the Chiefs. Tomlinson is simply the most disgusting player in the game today.
I was thinking that very same thing.
“Quarterback rating” is a garbage stat; it’s a wholly arbitrary formula that produces a number that does not actually refer to anything that happened on the field. It’s the height of insanity to attribute meaning to small differences in QB rating, or to attribute any meaning at all to QB rating over a small data sample (like one game.) Over the course of a season you can fairly assume that a guy with a 72.5 rating is way worse than a guy with a 99.8 rating, but frankly, a glance at the major stats will tell you that anyway. There’s no real justification for the way QB rating is put together. Should TD pass rate and interception rate be of the same weight? Gosh, I don’t think so - it seems to me that avoiding interceptions is vastly more important - but has anyone done any sort of stody to see if it should be that way?
The problem with QB rating isn’t that it’s commonly adopted, it’s that it’s shit. Football is now where baseball was about 25 years ago, when statistical analysis was just getting started and the Baseball Digests were full of nonsensical stats like “runs produced” and “Game-winning RBI” and this or that average. Most of them were crap, but you had to go through that to produce the useful stuff.
While I agree with you about the worthlessness of QB ratings (in my opinion, they put WAY too high a value on completion percentage, which mean dink quarterbacks in a system that requires only safe, short passes are unduly rewarded), there are numerous differences between baseball and football, and those differences can make statistical comparisons close to meaningless.
Football teams can and do run vastly different systems. A mediocre QB on a pass-happy team (pretty much anybody at Texas Tech or BYU, for instance) can put up phenomenal numbers, while a superb quarterback in a grind-it-out, run-oriented system (Bob Griese, for instance) may pass very little, and may put up underwhelming numbers.
In baseball, a guy with 49 homers, 110 runs scored, 149 RBIs and a .356 batting average is good. He’s definitely more productive than a guy with 8 homers. 40 runs scored, 36 RBIs and a .238 average. End of story. But a quarterback who throws for 4000 yards and 20 touchdowns in a season is NOT necessarily better than one who throws for 2500 yards and 12 touchdowns. It’s possible that the latter quarterback is doing EXACTLY what his team’s system requires, and is much better than the former. It’s also possible that the former quarterback plays for a lousy team, one that’s always trailing by wide margins, which in turn means he HAS to throw the ball a lot more than the latter QB.
I’m hardly the first to say this, but the single most telling stat in football is one that gets very little attention from TV color analysts: yards per attempt. If you show me that stat, and that stat alone for the two quarterbacks in a football game, I can probably tell you the winning team about 90% of the time.
If quarterback A was 10 of 18 for 196 yards, while quarterback B was 34 of 51 for 300 yards, I’d bet almost anything that A’s team won the game. The fact that B’s completion percentage was higher is utterly irrelevant. The stats suggest that, since A averaged nearly 11 yards per attempt, he burned the defense, built up a big lead, and didn’t have to throw much in the second half. Meanwhile, B was passing constantly in a futile attempt to catch up… but could never find anybody deep, and piled up a lot of meaningless yards.
Which is precisely the problem.
The baseball equivalent to football statistics is fielding statistics, which are so heavily team-dependent that they independently mean almost nothing except in the most extreme circumstances.
But that depends what you mean by “phenomenal numbers.”
A QB in a pass-crazy system will post monster raw numbers - 4000 yards, 30 TD passes. But you would not expect his interception rate to be lower than a quarterback in a rush-heavy offense, would you?
If you wanted to start to really crunch QB numbers, here’s what you have to do;
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Run some genuine analysis to determine how important the critical numbers are. Is pass completion percentage as important as yards per attempt? What’s more important, interception rate or TD rate? How do these measurables relate, in real terms, to offensive success? What about variables not presently part of QB rating, like first downs, scrambling stats, 3rd down conversions, red zone figures?
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Determine the right measurement of opportunity. Should we be measuring QBs by attempts (which QB rating does) or by total downs of offense, to determine the value of a team’s passing game as an overall percentage of its offense? Or should passing offense be measured by time of possession? Or not?
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Figure the overall context. How do you account for teammate skill?
while a superb quarterback in a grind-it-out, run-oriented system (Bob Griese, for instance) may pass very little, and may put up underwhelming numbers.
In baseball, a guy with 49 homers, 110 runs scored, 149 RBIs and a .356 batting average is good. He’s definitely more productive than a guy with 8 homers. 40 runs scored, 36 RBIs and a .238 average. End of story. But a quarterback who throws for 4000 yards and 20 touchdowns in a season is NOT necessarily better than one who throws for 2500 yards and 12 touchdowns. It’s possible that the latter quarterback is doing EXACTLY what his team’s system requires, and is much better than the former. It’s also possible that the former quarterback plays for a lousy team, one that’s always trailing by wide margins, which in turn means he HAS to throw the ball a lot more than the latter QB.
I’m hardly the first to say this, but the single most telling stat in football is one that gets very little attention from TV color analysts: yards per attempt. If you show me that stat, and that stat alone for the two quarterbacks in a football game, I can probably tell you the winning team about 90% of the time.
If quarterback A was 10 of 18 for 196 yards, while quarterback B was 34 of 51 for 300 yards, I’d bet almost anything that A’s team won the game. The fact that B’s completion percentage was higher is utterly irrelevant. The stats suggest that, since A averaged nearly 11 yards per attempt, he burned the defense, built up a big lead, and didn’t have to throw much in the second half. Meanwhile, B was passing constantly in a futile attempt to catch up… but could never find anybody deep, and piled up a lot of meaningless yards.
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… with his 63.0, Vick has worst QB rating in the entire NFL, link.
Well, #1 may be impossible due to #3. But you’re definitely on to something with #2. Not sure where, (maybe in this very thread), but I clicked a link recently that brought me to an interesting QB rating website.
Unlike all other measures, which are founded on a “per attempt” basis, this site rated QBs on a “per drive” basis. That seemed like the ideal way to go. Yards per drive, points per drive, etc… The idea was that a QB who passes up and down the field and then hands off to a bruising back on the 1 gets discredited in any “per attempt” system simply by virtue of playing on a team with a bruising goal line back on the roster.
The site also factored in down and distance situations, but the “per drive” basis of the stats really stood out as relevant and meaningful, at least IMO.
Regarding statistical analysis of players, please see www.footballoutsiders.com