At the beginning of the season I mentioned that I was in an expert league organized by Junkyard Jake. At the time I thought my draft went very well.  There was a huge run on running backs, so I picked up a lot of other quality players.

We’re almost halfway through the season and I’m proud to say that I’m winning the league at the moment.  My team is 6-1 so far, mostly riding the coattails of Drew Brees and the surprising Steve Slaton.

Good

Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers have obviously both been amazing.  It might be time to trade one of them though and shore up another position.

My flier pick of Steve Slaton paid off big time.  Definitely great value for a 13th-round pick.

Bad

As I feared, Westbrook got injured and unfortunately my waiver priority was low and I couldn’t pick up Buckhalter.  Luckily, Steve Slaton has been a fantastic fill-in.

Santonio Holmes has been a disappointment.  Not officially a bust yet, but my patience is wearing thin with him.

Future

I think I can hang on to first place throughout the rest of the season, although I’ll probably try to trade one of my QBs since I have depth there.  The league has an interesting 3-division structure, so the playoffs should be a lot of fun.  The league is very competitive, so I expect that it will be tough to win the whole championship.

Everyone knows that it’s important to protect the quarterback.  Teams spend millions of dollars on the best offensive linemen in hopes that they will give their quarterback enough time to tear up the opposing secondary.

Since passing is so important in the NFL today, how can we measure the effectiveness of protecting the quarterback?

Sacks and Win Percentage

As a simplistic measure, let’s use sacks as a measure of protecting the quarterback.  Below is a plot of win percentage for every quarterback in the league that’s played at least 4 games versus their average sacks per game:

There seems to be a clear trend that fewer sacks per game improves a team’s chances of winning.  The R-squared value for that trend is 0.29, which isn’t large, but is significant as far as football statistics go.

Sacks and QB-Rating

On the other hand, there is no correlation between sacks per game and quarterback rating:

On the extremes here are Kerry Collins with only 1 sack in 7 games with a 74.2 QB rating and J.T. O’Sullivan with a bone-crushing 29 sacks in 7 games and a 75.5 QB rating.

Using sacks per game may not be the best measure of how well an offensive line protects the quarterback.  I used it here because it’s the easiest to measure. A statistic that incorporates sacks, hurries, and knock-downs would be a better indicator of how well a quarterback is protected.

Quarterbacks Perform Independent of O-Line?

If J.T. O’Sullivan were traded to Tennesee and played behind their offensive line, would he be transformed into a superstar?  I don’t think so.  My guess is that his QB rating would have a slight but negligible increase.

This isn’t a conclusive study, but I think this indicates that a quarterback’s performance is almost entirely independent of their offensive line.  There are a lot of uncontrolled variables here such as the quality of the rest of the offense and the strength of schedule, but I’m not too surprised by this result.

O-Line and Running Backs

What about Frank Gore?  Would his yards per carry increase if he were traded to Tennesee?  I bet it would. Running backs seem to be more interchangeable than quarterbacks and depend more on their offensive line.

Sacks allowed is somehow related to win probability, but perhaps not through quarterback performance.  I’ll look into the effect of offensive line on the running game in a later post.  There is probably a reason that teams invest heavily in offensive lines, and there should be a way to measure how effective that strategy is.

(Follow-up 12/19: Drew Brees is still close to Marino’s record.)

In my last post, I outlined four players on track to break records this year.  In just two short weeks, however, that list was cut down to one:

Drew Brees

Brees is holding steady at 332 yards per game, which will give him 5,315 for the season if he can continue that pace.  But can he?

The Saints have had an easy schedule so far.  He’s already lit-up the league-worst Broncos for 421 yards, and  the toughest pass defense he’s seen so far was Washington, the 13th best in the league.

Adjusting for Strength of Schedule

The graph below shows Brees’ passing yards versus his opponent’s defensive passing rank.  The blue dots show his actual performance in the past six games and the red dots show his predicted performance for the next 10 games.

As you can see, not only has he faced a lot of bad defenses, he’s scheduled to play even more bad defenses including San Diego (31), Detroit (30), and Atlanta twice (24).  He only has three games against above average defenses: Carolina twice (2) and Green Bay (7).

Adjusting his average yards per game for opponent difficulty, he is projected to finish the year with 5,111 yards.  That’s a hair more than Marino’s 5,084 yards in 1984.

Conclusion

Drew Brees has played a cream-puff schedule so far and has a cream-puff schedule ahead of him.

After adjusting for strength of schedule, he is on pace to break Dan Marino’s single-season passing record, but just barely.

Don’t expect a big game from him this week against Carolina, but he will stay within reach of Marino’s record down the stretch.

It’s difficult to know when to sell high on a player. They may continue to perform well or they may just be on a hot streak.

However, when a player is on pace to break an NFL record, that might signal that they will drop off soon.  So far this season, there are four quarterbacks and receivers on track to break single-season records.

The fact that no running backs are at record-setting pace indicates that the league is continuing its new passing trend that I wrote about earlier.

Here are the outstanding passers and receivers so far. The projections below are their per game averages multiplied by 16 games:

Passing Yards

NFL Record: 5,084 (Dan Marino)

Both Brees and Cutler have looked good so far, but there is a good chance they will slow down to less Marino-like paces.

Receiving Yards

NFL Record: 1,848 (Jerry Rice)

Obviously Marshall’s performance is closely tied to Cutler’s above, and they’re both on track for big seasons. However, just one or two bad games will throw them off this pace.

No Running Backs

It’s not surprising that after only four weeks some players are above record-setting pace. What is surprising though is that they are all in the passing game. Running backs are completely absent.

The leading running back in the league is Michael Turner, who has 422 yards through 4 games. That’s only on pace for 1,688 yards, which is well off the record of 2,105 yards.

Sell High or Let It Ride?

Is it time to sell high on Brees, Cutler, Marshall, and Jennings? Or do some of them have a legitimate chance at maintaining their pace?

Perhaps Jay Cutler and Brandon Marshall can knock off the passing and receiving yardage records similar to how Brady and Moss broke the single-season touchdown records last year.

However, if you think they are more likely to slow down, then now is the time to trade them away.