(S25) - Ultimus Week

[AW13]

Code:

6) Write 800 words or more on something that interests you. It could be related to statistics, to a league issue you take seriously, or a niche part of history that doesn’t fit neatly into either of the above categories. This must be directly related to the league, so don’t wax 800 words about your team’s Werewolf server. Be warned that freedom comes with risk, and this category will be judged especially stringently for anyone trying to spew complete nonsense.

Okay, so this has been on my mind for a week or two now and it all comes with creating as a quarterback once again in the ISFL or DSFL I guess, at least that is where Joliet Christ Jr. will get his starting point in his career in a draft that is steadily approaching! 

The quarterback position is the primary position on a football team. The quarterback is the face of the franchise and the player that, at least in real life, makes the most money, and while I think it would be cool to tier contracts based on position I am not sure exactly how that would fare and it would not be super fair on a limited position already, but then maybe you can talk about multiple QBs per team and carrying backups for a certain amount or something but that is not the point. The QB makes your team good or makes your team bad is essentially the point and the statistics for a quarterback are plentiful and without the eye test that people could get watching an actual game of football, it is what we have. However, we don't have great statistics still available with our index but the more important stats can still be found in the actual sim file itself which can be a big help!

To me, after researching this a lot there are kind of the big 5 statistics when it comes to determining a QB's overall success through his statistics. Those stats in no order are touchdown rate, interception rate, completion percentage, yards per attempt, and passer rating (which pretty much includes all of these anyways) and aligning those with the overall counting stats such as passing yards, touchdowns, interceptions and the amount of completions and attempts, can help paint a picture of who is the better players at the position. Touchdown rate tells us what percentage of a quarterback's passes go for touchdowns and at the time time, interception rate does that for interceptions out of all the attempts. Completion percentage is pretty standard and is just how many passes out of all a QB's attempts are completed to a receiver. Though honestly, we could take this one a bit further and eliminate any passes that were throwaways and receiver drops to get more of a gauge on how accurate a QB is. Yards per attempt is the amount of yards divided by the amount of passing attempts and is used mostly to gauge the ability to get the ball down the field and orchestrate the offense and there have been many studies showing the importance of this stat and it's correlation to wins. The last is passer rating which is pretty much a formula that uses touchdown rate, interception rate, completion percentage, and yards per completion/attempt to come up with a single number. We can look at all of these to try and determine the best QB in the league and of all time.

My plan is to come up with some kind of article series and database to link the best QBs and QB performances of all time using more stats than just the general index lets out. We will go back to all-time and see how the passing game has changed over the years and try to compare and contrast the all-time great players at their respective position. We should be able to give justice to some of the greats who were more efficient than others even though attempt wise, they were lacking based on a run-first offense. We can look at league wide pass attempts over the course of the league's history and see what the QB rating averages are from Season 1 to present and detail how the passing game has changed and if a great QB from the old days looks the same as a great QB from today's game. The options are limitless and the project will be awesome and I would love to have some sort of advanced stat department for the league. I think statistics are the best part of the game and especially in sim leagues where that is pretty much all you get aside from watching dots move. I would have to refresh my statistics background a bit but would also love more detailed graphing and things like that using programs such as R potentially. I can't wait to start the article series and start building a database of all-time QB statistics!

What I will start out with is a general overview of passing over the years most likely and see how the game has changed from season 1 to this past season which will probably take quite awhile to compile in general. We can take the total number of passing attempts, completions, yardage, touchdowns, and interceptions, and use those to calculate the league wide average for passer rating, completion percentage, yards per attempt and yards per completion. As far as all-time stats go, it will take a very long time I believe to gather things such as drops and throwaways affecting completion percentage and sack percentage and things like that so we will see how that goes but that may be something that has to start with this next season or after everything is set up so we can start recording that. Once a system is set up in place, we can go back and update previous statistics and such to see if Mike Boss or Cooter Bigsby is better or whatever we need to do with it! 

As an example:

Season 1 League Wide Passing Averages:

Completion Percentage: 56.01%
Yards Per Attempt: 6.12
Yards Per Completion: 10.93
Passer Rating: 72.32

Season 1 League Wide Per Team Averages:
Completions: 255.5
Attempts: 456.17
Yards: 2793.33
Touchdowns: 14.83
Interceptions: 14

Number of QBs (Team in the case of multiple QBs) over average Completion Percentage: 4
Number of QBs (Team in the case of multiple QBs) over average Passer Rating: 3

Hopefully this shows what we can at least start to think about and I hope anyone reading this is ready for a lot of QB stats!