I’m absolutely thrilled that someone is tracking this…click on the link to see the average length of time your favorite QB has held onto the ball before being sacked this season.
Quinn comes in at 3.29 seconds - let’s watch this as the season progresses.
We’ve been talking a lot amongst ourselves and in the comments section about just how well Brady Quinn (aka Adequinn) played on Sunday against the Vikings. Immediately after the game, Tim and I decided to grade him with a “F”. Dad gave Adequinn a “B-” before wanting to know what his Passer Rating score was and then subsequently downgrading him. Our grandpa chose not to give Adequinn a grade at all, choosing to lambast the offensive line instead. The Cleveland Plain Dealer broke down Quinn’s play and gave him a B- proclaiming him “slightly better than the numbers indicated,” which is personally hard for me to accept since 125 of his 205 total passing yards and his one TD came after his hilarious fumble in the 4th quarter, i.e. in garbage time.
I’m on the record saying I have my doubts about Quinn, but I’m also on the record saying that I hope he succeeds. We created this site to put forth an rational, progressive point of view on Cleveland sports - we’ll be as optimistic as possible when the facts support as much.
To be fair then, when I rated Adequinn’s performance an “F” I was probably just being a disgruntled bastard. It happens from time to time. I’m sorry. So let’s try to figure out precisely how good (or bad) Quinn was on Sunday.
The question is, how are we going to do that?
As Tim wrote, Passer Rating is far from an adequate measure of a quarterback’s performance. Like my grandpa said, the offensive line play has a huge effect on the QB as well - and so does the play of the people the QB is throwing the ball to. I would argue, additionally, that play calling is also a factor.
What we learn from saying Adequinn threw for 205 yards then, tells us something about him, but it also tells us something about all of the other elements he’s interacting with.
Having said that, as this excellent article at Advanced NFL Stats proclaims, traditional measures of a QB’s performance - like Passer Rating - give total credit to a QB for a reception when inevitably the O-Line and the WR have a part in that, as well.
Using this same sort of reasoning, we can’t completely blame the O-Line for sacks and pressures, as many of us have a tendency to do. In The Blind Side, Michael Lewis talks a lot about time in the pocket being a leading indicator of success for a QB. Using the play of Kurt Warner for the 2004 NY Giants as an example, however, he shows that sometimes when a QB gets sacked it’s on him.
Here’s the passage from the book, a footnote on page 101:
“One example relevant to this story: how much does the performance of quarterbacks vary with the amount of time they spend in the pocket? A critical part of any passing game - another reason for the extreme importance of left tackles - is the amount of time a quarterback has to throw the ball. The difference between a quick decision-making quarterback and a slow one is typically fractions of a second: a difference impossible to see with the naked eye. In 2004, for example, the New York Giants lost to the Arizona Cardinals, and Giants quarterback Kurt Warner was sacked six times. The New York sports press, with just a couple of interesting exceptions, vilified the Giants’ offensive line. Giants coach Tom Coughlin suspected another culprit. He stayed up that night reviewing game tape, and finally took out a stopwatch and put it on Kurt Warner. 2.5 seconds is a generous amount of time for an NFL quarterback to enjoy before he gets rid of the ball. Anything longer than 3 seconds is an eternity. On thirty of the thirty-seven pass plays the Giants ran against the Cardinals, Warner had held the ball 3.8 seconds or more. Coughlin left his line intact, but the next day he benched Warner and installed rookie Eli Manning in his place.”
If we’re going to give the QB complete credit for throwing a 20 yard completion, then to be fair, we should also give him complete credit for taking a sack. Neither is a totally accurate assertion, but if we want to try and look at the box score and judge how well Adequinn did, let’s look at the entire picture.
Just for kicks, I’ve plugged Adequinn’s complete Week 1 numbers into the formula in the Advanced NFL Stats article, which purports to be a more complete statistical analysis of a quarterback’s play than Passer Rating and Adjusted Yards Per Attempt (AY/A).
What comes out is this: 3.45 Total Yards Per Attempt (TYA)
That doesn’t sound very good - and indeed, it isn’t. Based on last year’s numbers, if Quinn finished the season with 3.45 TYA, he’d be the 31st rated QB in the NFL…which is, incidentally, exactly where Derek Anderson ranked.
My takeaway from all of this is that it’s difficult to completely separate a QB’s play from that of his teammates and the decision-making of his coaches. I have no doubt, for instance, that if Tom Brady had been on the Browns in 2007 he wouldn’t have looked like the same QB and his stats would’ve been lower.
This is why using stats alone to grade the job Quinn did is a dicey proposition. They can help tell the story, but they don’t completely explain it; football is very, very much a team game and should be looked at within that context.
In conclusion (being formal can be funny), now that I’ve looked at the stats and thought more completely about the game with the added benefit of distance, how would I rate Quinn’s performance?
Well, it still gets a “F” from me.
The bottomline is that he turned the ball over twice and helped the offense chip in two FG’s when the game mattered, once on a very short field.
If nothing else, there’s room for improvement this week in Denver.
Our challenge to Brady Quinn, starting quarterback of the Cleveland Browns…
…escape the nickname “Adequinn” referring to the fact that you appear to be potentially adequate at almost everything and great at nothing.
From here on out, we will refer to Quinn as Adequinn on this page until he, you know, escapes the nickname.
Let’s hope he does.
For most of the media in Cleveland, speculation about who the starting quarterback will be when the Browns run out of the tunnel on Sunday has ended: Brady Quinn should and will be the guy.
While I don’t necessarily disagree, I’m not sure my reasons for feeling similarly are the same as theirs. I believe the Browns have an asset in Quinn that the previous regime spent assets to acquire - the organization needs to determine the value of this asset, something that probably entails Quinn playing the entirety of a substantial amount of games.
As with many things in life, however, there is a counterargument to this point of view, and it revolves around the value of the unknown, the depth of the team’s weaknesses, and how Alpha Dog sees the future of the franchise.
Like I’ve written in the past, we don’t know much about Brady Quinn. There’s no firm body of work to analyze and discussions about his future performance are merely speculation. The coaches know more than we do because they see what’s going on in the huddle and in the infamous classroom. I’m sure they have a sense of how well he’ll do based on past experiences, but they can’t really know.
And I’m sure they’re smart enough to be aware of this.
This raises an interesting question. Could Quinn’s potential be more valuable than his actual production? In other words, could he be a more valuable asset for the Browns now when no one really knows how good he is than once he starts playing and his true worth is determined?
As we know from observing numerous pro drafts and reading books like Moneyball, player personnel executives have been making decisions based on potential for pretty much all of history. It’s a consistently risky practice that rarely pays off - but this doesn’t stop execs and scouts from going down that road because talent evaluators make their name spotting diamonds in the rough and “creating” players, not by objectively analyzing the same concrete information that everyone else has access to. It’s a high risk high reward gambit.
Inevitably, this means Quinn’s potential has value - how much, of course, is hard for us, as outside observers, to say. And whether or not it’s higher than his actual value is impossible to say since that’s a complete unknown.
But what if Mangini thinks the rest of his team is so weak that it really doesn’t matter who’s playing quarterback?
As footnoted in The Blind Side by Michael Lewis, football stats analyst Ben Alamar argues that “time in the pocket and the rate at which the quarterback is under pressure are the two most important aspects of a team’s performance (both offensively and defensively).”
So what if the offensive line isn’t any good? What if the defense can’t pressure opposing quarterbacks? Further, what if Alpha Dog believes the QB position is overvalued, that it’s really all about the system and how the different pieces fit within that system?
We can certainly be sure that one player does not make a team in the NFL.
Taking this logic one step further then, let’s imagine that maybe the most valuable QB to Mangini is the one that can get him the most in return from some other team. If we’re to believe that Quinn’s potential is the biggest selling point of any of the three QBs that are currently on the roster than it makes no sense to play him with flawed players, lose games, maybe see him get hurt, and watch his value deteriorate. It makes more sense to play Anderson and trade Quinn to a desperate franchise that could be fleeced by the allure of his potential.
Let’s not forget that there’s also the distinct possibility that Mangini believes Brett Ratliff is the future QB of this franchise - he didn’t trade for him for the hell of it - and whoever has the spot now is merely a placeholder, at least for this year and maybe for next season as well.
There’s no way to know for sure, but if Anderson ends up starting on Sunday and Cleveland Browns Stadium erupts into an earthquake of boos, this is at least one stab at what’s going on in the mind of Mangini.
In my mind, the Browns have an interesting decision to make at the quarterback position. And when I say “the Browns” I really mean Eric Mangini because let’s be honest, we all know who’s calling the shots.
On one hand, you have Brady Quinn, who had a very high completion percentage in the pre-season (67.7% through 31 attempts) with 1 TD and 1 INT but little regular season game experience and an arm that may not be capable of consistently throwing the deep out. Also, he apparently does not use MySpace.
On the other hand, you have the man Clevelanders love to hate, Derek Anderson and his below average completion percentage (54.6% for his career and 56.5% in his 2007 Pro Bowl season). In the pre-season so far, DA has hit 57.7% of his passes on 26 attempts with zero TD passes and 2 INT. There’s no question about Anderson’s ability to make the big play, but he’ll also make mistakes with inaccurate tosses and struggles to connect on passes shorter than 10 yards (54.2% last year and 57.9% in 2007 - league average is 67%). Anderson also helped the team win 10 games in 2007 before the implosion that was 2008.
If I haven’t written about it here before, I’ve thought about it and commented on cleveland.com - I’m wary of using completion percentage as a gauge of a quarterback’s performance. Not only can connecting on longer passes offset incompletions on short passes (the simple math: 1-3 for 40 yards vs. 2-3 for 15 yards), the difference between what Anderson actually completed in 2007 and what he would have completed had he thrown at 65% is pretty small - 2.8 completions per game (he averaged 32.9 attempts per game that year). The difference between Anderson’s percentage and the average - 60% - is even smaller: 1.1 completions per game.
Additionally, that same 2007 season Anderson led the NFL in yards per completion with 12.7 and was very good at yards per attempt with 7.2 (Tom Brady led the league at 8.3).
Yards per attempt is the key Anderson statistic, really - he’s beating BQE in the pre-season on this number as well. It’s the only number he’s ahead on.
What you’ve probably come to think at this point is that I’m trying to defend Anderson. Yes, I sort of am, but only because I think we tend to remember the interception he threw in the 2007 Cincinnati game - one play - above everything else he accomplished that season. 2008 I’m willing to write off the face of the earth due to the debacle that was the Romeo Crennel coaching program, which was only aided and abetted by the calamity of Kellen Winslow and Braylon Edwards - when sh*t started to go bad last season, there was no turning back. There was no one capable of pulling the whole thing back together.
I also don’t believe it’s fair for us to look at the pre-season and say, “well, if Edwards hadn’t dropped that pass in the Lions game, Quinn would’ve had another TD instead of another INT” and not acknowledge that Braylon dropped more passes than anyone else in the NFL last year, the majority of which were thrown by DA.
But really, the previous paragraphs only make one thing clear - we know a lot more about Anderson at this point than we do about Quinn.
Well, we do know he likes Bret Michaels. And…
We also know he voted for John McCain.
Aside from that, we don’t have much of a platform from which we can empirically discuss Quinn’s attributes. And simple stats are not great indicators in football because of the complexity of the game. They’re especially noisy in the pre-season, where they encapsulate a very small sample size and are jumbled by the level of competition, e.g. the Titans played their starters through the first half, the Browns into the fourth quarter, and broken situations and rhythms (Quinn and Anderson being shuffled in and out).
So let’s forget the stats. Let’s talk about the different offensive dynamics each quarterback provides.
I am not Eric Mangini. He also knows a lot more about football than I do, but as an outside observer, I can see the quarterback decision potentially coming down to what type of offense Mangini wants to play: does he want to concentrate on the big play or do he want long drives that burn clock?
The first scenario, obviously, means Anderson - the second means Quinn.
I have to wonder…if Braylon Edwards is the Browns’ best weapon on offense, and Anderson can utilize him better than Quinn, do you effectively limit your offense by making Quinn the quarterback?
It’s an interesting conversation, and one that’s also directly tied to the quality of the Browns defense as well as how Mangini sees the future of the team. I’ll write a little more about these issues later in the week - we’ve got time, after all, it’s not like Mangini is ever anxious to make information known.
