The 2014 Miami Dolphins' number of yards per pass attempt is currently 6.73. Since 1994 (the first year of the salary cap), there have been 62 NFL teams with numbers of yards per pass attempt between 6.6 and 6.8. The average win percentage of those teams is 49.8%. The Dolphins' current win percentage is 50%. During the same period (1994-2014), there have been 184 NFL teams with yards per pass attempt of 7.2 or higher. The average win percentage of those teams is 63%, which translates to 10 wins in a 16-game season.
Eh, let's be content to complete 66% of our passes for mediocre yardage instead of risking the possibility for fewer completions but more yards. We've run an inefficient offense for so many years why stop now?
YPA is one of the best stats for predicting wins. ANY/A is a little better, but harder to find. Trouble is...Tannehill has never had an above-average ypa, even going back to college. He ranked around 65th in the country in 2010 and 2011. He's been in the bottom of the NFL for the past three seasons. It was one of the red flags on him during the draft process, and he hasn't done much to improve it. Is this just who he is? This is one of my reservations about extending him now as the franchise guy. People can make supporting cast excuses all they want, but the fact is this guy has played QB for 5 years and has never finished a season as even proficient in this key measure of the position. It's a concern.
Great post! Our problem pushing the ball down-field is too glaring for anyone not to see. If Lazor and Tannehill are together next year, I think we'll see the team make this issue priority #1 in training camp and the preseason. Something is clearly impeding our ability to attack down-field, but I'm not sure the answer is simple...our O-line is a limiting factor, our QB resists doing it, our play-calls are not dialing it up and our game-planning is not pushing it.
In this way, I do wonder if Jarvis Landry is a little bit of a trap player. He is not a YPA-expanding influence. He's a little bit of the opposite. Typically your wide receivers are the highest-YPA targets in your pass offense. Tight ends tend to be lower, backs out of the backfield the lowest. Contrary to popular belief there isn't a very strong historical bias of YPA toward or against slot receivers versus perimeter receivers. Slot receivers tend to have higher catch percentages but lower yards per completion than perimeter receivers, however the two nearly balance one another out. What I worry about with Jarvis Landry is he's got a very low yards per completion figure of 9.4 yards. That is probably 5 yard shy of a more typical wide receiver yards per completion figure. The good news is his yards per ATTEMPT is actually decent at 7.5 yards. But this is mostly because Landry has an absurd (and to be honest probably unsustainable) combination of catch percentage (80%) and YAC average (5.7). Why is this all a problem? Because if Landry begins suffering some reversion to the mean in combination of catch percentage and YAC average, then his general usage will dictate that 7.5 yards per target (which as it is, is only "ok" not exactly good) will start sinking way back down to areas a quarterback should not be averaging. And if Tannehill is using Landry too much as a crutch, rather than pushing the ball up the field, then we're going to continue seeing bad YPAs from Tannehill.
Pro-Football Reference is the football bible. http://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/T/TannRy00.htm 5.65 this season, good for 26th: http://www.pro-football-reference.com/years/2014/passing.htm
In truth, I don't really see those numbers as being all that compelling. That 49.8%, which for all practical purposes is 50%, is the same as the NFL average. So all else being equal, those 62 teams with those bad YPA numbers have, on average, performed at an NFL average rate. Similarly, the 63% win percentage for the 7.2+ YPA teams is not that compelling either. I'd have expected it to be higher. I suspect that there is a reasonably strong correlation between YPA and interception rate and between YPA and completion percentage, in that teams with good QBs tend to have high YPA, high completion percentages and low interception rates. It may well be that completion percentage and interception rate correlate better with winning percentage than does YPA and that, therefore, makes that 7.2+ YPA winning percentage higher.
Cool, thanks. Yeah some like NY/A better than ANY/A as well (treats sacks and sack yards differently, the latter has sort of INT penalties and TD bonuses). Here's a writeup on it: "Correlating Passing Stats with Wins" http://www.footballperspective.com/correlating-passing-stats-with-wins/
Keep in mind, though, that among the NFL QBs with 350 attempts or more this year, there are 15 who have a YPA above 7.2, and four of them have a YPA above 8. 7.2 isn't out of this world; what it looks like OTOH is that 7.2 is the lowest number associated with a playoff record (10-6) on average.
Maybe Landry is the crutch not because he runs short routes, but because he catches everything, and makes plays? People take everything to do with the offense and try to make it something negative about Tannehill. It might be, it might not be.
I think you may be a little oversensitive about that. Virtually every post I've seen of yours has been defending Tannehill, often in cases where he wasn't even being criticized in any significant way.
Expounding on this a bit, YPAs between 7.2 and 7.5 are associated with a median win percentage of 62.5% (a 10-win season) since 2004, covering 21 teams with at least 350 pass attempts on the season. YPAs between 6.6 and 6.8 during that period are associated with a median win percentage of 46.7% (a 7.5-win season), covering 29 teams during that period.
I'd like to say something else...It's not that I'm a complete Tannehill homer, it's more that I can't stand the completely one-sided arguments trotted out against Tannehill. There's two sides to every coin, but some can't, or won't, see that. I really just want to have realistic discussions about Tannehill and the offense.
Nobody has said anything negative about Tannehill in this thread. One poster expressed hesitancy based on the metric referenced in the OP.
I'm all in favor of letting Tannehill ride out next year, with the understanding that they might need to extend him before the year is over if he's having a good year. There have been a lot of big-looking deals for QB's lately that break down into a series of one-year deals (e.g. Kaepernick, Dalton), so that's not as big a problem as it seems, IMO. That said, I'm curious if any QB has made a significant jump in these statistical categories after at least 2-3 years in the league. I wonder because Tannehill is improving year-to-year, and I wonder if it's possible for him to make that last critical leap? I got curious and looked up 2008. Chad Pennington was 8th in Y/A and 3rd in ANY/A.
I'll admit, I didn't watch any of Tannehill's college games, but I do believe his problems in the NFL stem from poor oline, receivers who are allergic to catching/running after the catch, a queasy head coach, and a coordinator his first two years who was poor. Now maybe Tannehill wouldn't be any better without those impediments, but we don't know, and those who act like they know he wouldn't be better are blowing smoke up everyone's asses. I think Tannehill's improvements in all other areas points to him being able to improve, also factoring in the plethora of dropped deep balls.
Just stop it. It's another thread, in a long line of threads going back years, where he tries to prove that Tannehill is not good. The shtick is tired and old. And absurd.
So your participation in this thread is not actually relevant to the content of the thread, but instead a judgement of the poster themself?
No, actually, I made a relevant post in regards to the thread, and in regards to a comment made about Tannehill's relationship with a receiver in the offense. You, however, did make a comment purely directed at me...
Expounding a bit more, YPAs between 7.6 and 7.9 are associated with a median win percentage of 68.8% (an 11-win season) since 2004, covering 73 teams with at least 350 pass attempts on the season. So when you get a half-yard above the Dolphins in 2014, you go from 8 wins to 10, and when you get a whole yard above their performance, you go from 8 wins to 11 wins.
It should be obvious that YPA, much like passer rating, is indicative of a successful offense. But outside of some QBs that are truly elite at throwing downfield (Rodgers, etc.), plenty of good QBs have multiple years in the high 6s. It will take multiple things for Ryan to get there, play calling, play makers, and yes, him getting better at it.
Because, DJ, these guys don't debate anything. I've posted a bunch of stuff that shows a different point of view. Others have posted the same sort of stuff. Then, these guys continue to post the stuff, without ever addressing anything that we are saying. So we post stuff again. They ignore it, and repost. We post counters to it, again. They ignore it, repost. We disagree, and post counter stuff again. Then I get accused of only posting in Tannehill threads, not debating, being a Tannehill lover, etc. It's exactly what the issue was with everyone upset with Shouright his first time around, and then with Dolphans Unite!, and now it's repeating again with him under a different name.
But explain that in layman's terms. The message gets lost in translation. I dont think you will find anyone to disagree that we need to push the ball further down the field. But he can add a full yard and still not throw a ton of deep passes down the field. How many QBs that have a YPA in the high sevens have been sacked or hurried as much as Tannehill? There's a multitude of reasons why a QB has a particular YPA. One it takes two to complete a pass.
Res, debate the stats... so what if the poster chooses to bring up facts about the qb...their just simple facts, and until ryan shows substantial growth, there are a lot of not so nice stats out there about his game.. im not a stats guy, however, some of the stats show pretty much what he has shown over three years.. I also I think I'm a fair positive guy, but when the team results aren't there, then you have to start the analysis at the qb position..in isolation, being in the 15 to 20 range after three years doesn't make me wanna write threads about my excitement. can I win with him...yes, I can win 10 regular season games with his skill set and improvements all over the offense, after that, in the playoffs, Im not sure.
Im not concerned with the low ypa, I know he has a lot of arm strength to threaten, I would only worry about that stat when the qb has a weak arm..Im sure there was a conscious coaches decision after watching the tape, and that line, that the offensive strategy should be about getting the ball out ASAP.
High sevens isn't the cutoff for playoff contention (a 10-6 or better record) on average. 7.2 is that cutoff. Here is a list of QBs since 2004 who've been sacked at least as much as Tannehill is projected to be this year (43 times), and who have had 7.2 YPAs or better: http://www.pro-football-reference.c...pos_is_db=Y&draft_pos_is_k=Y&draft_pos_is_p=Y
How can you say that he hasn't shown substantial growth? I don't get it. It's like, on one hand you'll make a statement that with the oline we have, it makes sense that they throw short passes, then you turn around and agree with this the short YPA stuff, and seem to think that's on Tannehill. I'm just saying, I don't think that the statistics are as simple as "Tannehill can't throw deep" and that why the stats are what they are. I think that there a number of factors into that, that are out of Tannehill's control. I have tried to debate the stats, as have many others, but the same stats keep getting brought up, and the people bringing them up refuse to acknowledge what others have pointed out, and refuse to acknowledge that perhaps their stats don't say what they think they say. Also, why does the analysis start at the QB position? Why doesn't the analysis start with the offensive line? We all understand that having a less than average line will make any QB look less than stellar.
Hipster, 7 out of 12 of those QBs didn't even end up with records better (if we win our next two) than what we have this year. Also, two of those guys had negative TD/Int ratios. What exactly is that supposed to show us? If anything, it tells me that YPA doesn't really tell the whole story.
Yet when Tannehill throws the ball in more than 2.5 seconds (rather than in 2.5 seconds or less), his QB rating goes from 101.8 to 75.5. Five of his sacks have occurred in 2.5 seconds or less, while the rest have occurred after 2.5 seconds. So, when he gets "more time" to throw, his performance, in terms of QB rating, plummets.
