Who's Throwing Deep?

There are a couple updates to the individual stat pages.

First, there's a new column for deep percentage for quarterbacks. 'Deep%' tells us the percentage of pass attempts that are deeper than 15 yds throw the air. Ben Roethlisburger and Charlie Batch are at the top of the list. Vince Young, Joe Flacco, Derek Anderson, and Bruce Gradkowski round out the list of most vertical passers. Deep% has always been on the WR page, but now it's there for QBs too. Depth data is only available for seasons since 2006.

The column for player WPA per play has been replaced with WPA per game. WPA per play numbers were so ridiculously tiny, it was impossible even for me to make sense of them. If Maurice Jones-Drew has a +0.0002 WPA/P, is that good? Bad? Who knows? But if he has a +0.03 WPA per game, I can wrap my head around that. WPA/G has been added for all offensive skill players.

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8 Responses to “Who's Throwing Deep?”

  1. Sampo says:

    Great stuff!

    We could also have an expected completion rate for QB's. Like catches for receivers, the completion percentage for QB is propably closely related to how deep he is throwing the ball. D. Brees leads the league in CMP%, but his %deep is 4th lowest in the league. Is that good? We could find out.

    Also it would great to have the difference of CR% and ExpCR on the WR page.

  2. SportsGuy says:

    I don't see Matt Stafford listed on that page.

  3. Brian Burke says:

    Stafford doesn't "qualify" b/c he doesn't have enough of his team's attempts. But you can go to the Lions' offense page and his numbers will be there. Find Sh.Hill's line, and click the DET link.

  4. Anonymous says:

    i prefer wpa/play to wpa/game - i thought wpa/play was a sort of interesting stat, whereas wpa/game, while obviously not a bad statistic, doesn't give us that much more information than just total wpa (since there's a lot less deviation in games played than in plays involved in, and since wpa/game is relatively easily to mentally/manually calculate.) i'm not sure i 100% understand the "nonintuitive" line of reasoning - sure, the numbers are small, but you can (a) compare them to league and positional average and (b) substitute in a given number of plays to estimate what this would accumulate to over a game. this is, obviously, just one person's perspective, etc. also, the deep% for qbs is a cool addition.

  5. tgt says:

    @Sampo, FO has done that, but it looks like it's premium only. Following up. Once ExpCR and the difference (CRoE? Catch Rate over Expected?) are determined, it would be interesting to see if there is enough QB/WR turnover to try to attribute CRoE to QBs vs WRs, either in general or in specific cases.

    @Brian,
    I second Anonymous. WPA/game is nice, but if one RB gets 20 carries a game, and another gets 10 carries a game, they can't be compared any more. It seems odd that you, of all people, would remove the rate stat.

  6. Brian Burke says:

    It still exists. It's just I need to make trade-offs about which stats make the cut on the player page. The rationale is that WPA is a narrative stat. In this application, WPA is more about what a player did, not what they are likely to do in the future, so rate versions of WPA aren't as important as totals.

    In the future, I'd like to add 2 or more 'layers' to each table. One for conventional stats, and another table or 2 for advanced stats.

  7. Anonymous says:

    WPA per X plays (say 100), might be a way to make the numbers more meaningful and keep it on a per-play basis. I like WPA per game as well, so maybe in addition.

  8. James says:

    ^ Good compromise.

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