Mike Wallace's Effect on Ryan Tannehill's Downfield Passing

In 2012, Ryan Tannehill's rookie season, he threw 51 passes of 20+ yards in the air, completed 20 of them (43%), for 671 yards, 3 TDs, and 1 INT. His QB rating for those passes was 98.3.

In 2012, the same season, Brian Hartline was targeted on 25 passes of 20+ yards in the air, or 49% of the passes Tannehill threw of that nature. Hartline caught 11 of those passes, dropped 1, for 421 yards. Hartline caught 63% of the yards Ryan Tannehill threw for on passes thrown at least 20 yards in the air. Obviously Brian Hartline was Ryan Tannehill's downfield target in 2012.

Enter Mike Wallace in 2013. In 2013 and 2014 combined, Ryan Tannehill has thrown 109 passes of 20+ yards in the air, completed 29 (27%), for 971 yards (about 486 per year), 5 TDs, and 8 INTs. His QB rating for those passes is 49.

In 2013 and 2014, Mike Wallace has been targeted on 58 of the 109 passes of 20+ yards in the air Ryan Tannehill has thrown, or 54% of them. Brian Hartline has been targeted on 20 of those passes, or 18% of them. Hartline's involvement in the Dolphins' downfield passing game has dropped from 49% of its targets in 2012, to 18% of its targets in 2013 and 2014 combined.

During that same period of time, Mike Wallace on the other hand has been targeted on 54% of the passes in that phase of the game. I think it becomes clear that, with the replacement of Brian Hartline with Mike Wallace as Ryan Tannehill's primary downfield passing target, Ryan Tannehill's downfield passing game has not improved as may have been expected. In fact it's regressed considerably.

 

There wasn't a new scheme in 2013. Drops have been no more than the league norm. Percentage of pressured pass dropbacks hasn't changed significantly among the three years covered. Tannehill was actually sacked in 2.5 seconds or faster more times in 2012 than in either 2013 or 2014.

 

Drops on passes thrown 20+ yards in the air are what's relevant here.

 

Sure, and the point is that there was no such disjoint between Tannehill and Hartline in Tannehill's rookie season, when one would perhaps expect Tannehill to be worse at throwing downfield, not considerably better.

 

I think the better question is, what point are you trying to make? I think I've already made mine.

 

Why wouldn't roughly the same percentage of coverages be blown for Wallace as for Hartline?

And Hartline functioned very well as that #1 downfield option, whereas Wallace has not. If there is some sort of "context" that you can nominate that makes sense of that, let's hear it. The stuff you mentioned above didn't work.

 

There wasn't a different offense in 2013. If you have a problem with the thread, don't click on it.

 

There's plenty of context. However, that context wasn't different during the years covered. If you've run out of additional context to nominate, that's sure fine as well.

 

I'll tell you what -- you "spell out" everything you think is relevant to a deep pass, and I'll do the research necessary to tell you whether there were any differences in those areas among the 2012 to 2014 teams. In other words, you can sit back and imagine "context" to drive the bus on this, and I'll do the much harder work of actually finding out whether it did and then get back to you.

 

You tried to "explain simple football" above, and what you mentioned got flushed down the toilet immediately. I won't hold my breath.

 

In other news, Ryan Tannehill's number of yards per target on throws of 20+ yards in the air this year is 9.1. Brian Hartline's number of yards per target on such throws in 2012 was 16.8. If you replace the 2014 downfield targets with the same percentage of targets Hartline accounted for in 2012, and then adjust Tannehill's 2014 numbers in accordance with what Hartline did downfield in 2012, you come up with 171 more passing yards on the year, and Ryan Tannehill's QB rating goes from 93.2 to 94.5, with a corresponding jump in his YPA from 6.9 to 7.2. In other words, if the Dolphins' downfield passing game were as efficient in 2014 (with Wallace as its primary target) as it was in 2012 (with Hartline as its primary target), the pass offense would be playing in a way that's consistent with about 10 wins in a regular season on average. In that sense, Wallace's performance downfield in 2014, in comparison to Hartline's in 2012, could have very well been the difference between not making the playoffs this year and making it.

 

And that's the whole thing in a nutshell, and in fact it could've very well been the difference between a playoff berth in 2014 and what we actually did see. The Dolphins could win 9 games this year and miss the playoffs, and that simple third of a yard adjustment of Ryan Tannehill's YPA, from 6.9 to 7.2, is associated with one more win on a season on average in the NFL. What this suggests is that the team braintrust made a mistake in thinking it needed to improve on Brian Hartline as the team's primary downfield target. In fact it's safer to say the team would've accomplished a great deal more by keeping Brian Hartline where he was, and signing or drafting a receiver who could function effectively in the short to intermediate ranges, thereby keeping Hartline fresher as the downfield target. What's ironic is that after 2012, the chorus was that opposing defenses were cramming the Dolphins' offense into a short area passing game, whereas it's far more true that that's happening now, after Mike Wallace, the player who was supposedly going to address that, has been catching passes in the offense for two years. The Dolphins appear to be far more "short field" now than they were in 2012, and the numbers back that up a great deal.

 

I think it's the fact that he's been removed from that role and replaced by Wallace, as evidenced by the percentage of the team's downfield targets to him versus that to Wallace. And what's ironic about that is that Wallace is actually the receiver who is helping Tannehill function so much better than he ever has in the 11-20 yard range. So it would make a great deal of sense to simply have them swap roles, where Wallace is Tannehill's intermediate target, and Hartline is moved back to where he was in 2012, as the team's primary downfield target. Tannehill in 2012 wasn't anywhere near as good in the 11-20 yard range as he is this year, and ironically it's Wallace who is fueling that. The problem is that Wallace is still the downfield target, whereas Wallace could conceivably continue to function as he is in the intermediate range, and help Tannehill as he is there, while Tannehill regains what he had downfield in 2012 with Hartline.

 

On the contrary, the post you quoted is suggesting that Wallace, not Tannehill, is largely responsible for the remaining area of Tannehill's game that appears deficient, and that conceivably in itself kept the team from reaching the playoffs this year.

 

Now break that down by their yards per target on throws of 20+ yards downfield. I think you'll find that in the one season Brian Hartline was a starter for the full season and was a team's primary downfield target (2012), he performed better than Mike Wallace has in that area since 2011. The other important thing to consider there is that such a comparison would involve the team's current QB as a rookie. In other words, Brian Hartline performed better downfield with a rookie Ryan Tannehill than Mike Wallace has in the two subsequent years, with a further developed Ryan Tannehill.

 

If you have any objective support for the notion that Mike Wallace has been a better downfield receiver with Ryan Tannehill, let's hear it. I'm not seeing it in the post I quoted, and I suspect that rather than trying to present it, you'll say something flippant and useless, at which point I'll tune you out.