Isn’t that an awesome play on words? Huh? Huh?
I’m a little late on doing this because of some traveling, but I wanted to look a little bit more closely at how D.A. played on Sunday. I’ve seen a lot of comments at Cleveland.com assailing him for throwing the interception at the goal line without giving him any credit for the fade he tossed to Mohamed Massaquoi (who Tim has nicknamed “The Prophet”) that brought the offense to the goal line, the TD he slipped in to Steve Heiden, etc.
I agree that the pick was crucial, but based on what Bernie Kosar said to Michael Reghi it was a “perfect” throw that Heiden should have curled back for. More importantly, one play never makes a football game - or any game - as we talked about ad nauseum after the Magic beat the Cavs in the EC Finals. More importantly, the idea that Anderson - or any QB - is never going to throw interceptions…well, that’s not very realistic.
If we look at the interception leaders from last year, we find that two of the league leaders in picks played in the Super Bowl (Roethlisberger aka John Kruk threw 15 and Kurt Warner threw 14). That’s nearly one INT a game.
Also, it’s sort of silly to look at INT without looking at number of pass attempts. For instance, Brett Favre led the league in picks with 22. He also averaged one INT every 23.7 pass attempts. Jay Cutler averaged one every 34.2 attempts, and Drew Brees threw a pick every 37.4 he flung the ball.
To put things in perspective, D.A. threw the ball 48 times on Sunday.
Kosar essentially told Reghi that when he re-watched the game tape from Sunday, his opinion of Anderson’s performance went from “really good” to “great.” He used the word “phenomenal.”
To give some support to early arguments made here, Kosar also credited the way D.A. was throwing the ball with helping out the run game.
Finally, I used a stat called Total Yards Per Attempt when rating InadeQuinn’s performance earlier in the season, so I figured I’d do that again here.
D.A. came out with 4.35 TYA or .9 yards better than the Quinn game. Last year that would’ve been 24th in the league. Certainly this is at least somewhat of a counterpoint to what Kosar said. In analyzing the stat more closely just now, I’m becoming a little hesitant about it because the highest weighted stat in the equation is INT, which is valued at 45 times the number of picks and is subtracted from the total number of yards thrown.
Weighting INT so high, obviously, contradicts my opinion that picks aren’t always that important, e.g. on balls thrown deep down the field, Hail Mary passes, etc.
If nothing else, TYA gives the D.A. haters and the InadeQuinn lovers a reason to rejoice.
From here on out, obviously Anderson needs to perform at this level - or higher - consistently. We’ll see how the offense looks without Braylon Edwards on Sunday…
