I’m still accumulating thoughts and perspective for my blowout pro football article (which is currently titled “Is Football the Sport Where Intangibles Matter?” so you have a sense of where I’m going with it), but in the meantime, I wanted to drop in for some debate about the value of a quarterback’s completion percentage.
When a QB drops back to throw, his job is to accurately fire the football at an open receiver. There are variables to this like what happens if no one’s open, the amount of pressure from the defense, how far a QB can throw the ball, and how precisely he can place it, i.e. what qualifies as “open” is different for different QB’s.
Whether or not a QB’s pass is complete is not entirely up to the QB. Receivers drop the ball or don’t get both feet in bounds. Linemen blow assignments or receivers run the incorrect route.
Sh!t, in other words, happens.
There are, on top of this, additional concerns. The ultimate goal, more often than not, is to complete passes in order to score touchdowns. But sometimes even that changes like, for instance, when the most important thing becomes either stopping the game clock or keeping it running.
Looking at the passing game with this kind of wide lens begins to expose one of the underlying characteristics of football, which is that achieving success is contingent on an extensive amount of variables on both of sides of the ball on each and every play.
This is a large part of what makes stats in football a poisonous fountain of information.
Having laid all of that out, as far as the topic of this post goes, what do we really learn from studying a QB’s completion percentage? If a QB completes above the league average (about 60%) is he an above average QB (and vice versa)?
Making that argument, I think, is a dubious proposition to say the least.
According to data cited in The Blind Side - Michael Lewis’s book about the importance of the Left Tackle in the NFL in general and about Michael Oher, specifically - overall completion percentages in the NFL started to increase when Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense infected the rest of the league.
The reason was that Walsh’s offense - which I personally find boring as all hell to watch - was mechanical as opposed to artistic (to borrow language from the book). Its focus was eliminating risk by keeping passes under 12 yards, spreading the field horizontally, minimizing decision making at the line of scrimmage, and throwing precisely to spots. 10 yard passes were deemed the ideal because passes over 12 yards, statistically, are more prone to being picked off.
It should be noted that Walsh created this offense because the QB he had in Cincinnati, where he was Offensive Coordinator under Paul Brown, was terrible.
Walsh won some Super Bowls so his way became the way and it’s now the reason average QB completion percentages are where they are - because most offenses are geared around high percentage passing routes.
If the offense isn’t orchestrated in that fashion, like the Browns offense was’t in 2007-08, then the QB’s completion and interception rates should be below average.
Which kind of offense wins games?
I think that’s a debate NFL coaches will continue to have far outside of our realm of comprehension.
