QBs are going deeper this year
Paul Zimmerman has covered the
NFL for Sports Illustrated since 1979. His exclusive online
column appears each
Friday.
Posted: Fri October 10,
1997
When a coach tells me,
I don't care about statistics. The only statistic that
matters is winning or
losing, I know two
things:
One, an important line of communication between us has now
ended, and two, he's a liar. These people always jump on
the league stats when they come out during the week, and
they study them and bring them in to their quality-control
guys and say, "We've
got to get our yards-per-rush numbers up." Or they're
worried about the third-down conversion rate, or red-zone
efficiency,
etc.
Yes, I'm a stat freak, and one of my favorites is a
quarterback's yards per completion. Not yards per attempt,
which the league uses in its quarterback ranking system,
but per completion—which
should be used but isn't. I've worn myself out trying to get
these people to change their modus operandi; it's like
trying to knock down a wall by throwing cherries at it.
Anyway, this stat tells me who the down-the-field throwers are and
who are the dinkers. It tells me about the system being
employed. A guy with a live arm and low
yards-per-completion numbers is playing in a safety-first
offense that's holding him back.
Moderate gun but big numbers means either that a quarterback is
being allowed to take a lot of chances or that his
receivers are doing a lot after the
catch.
And now I'm reading through the Week 6 quarterback
rankings, and I can see the yards per completion jumping
off the page. Of the 21 quarterbacks who have thrown enough
times to get themselves ranked both last season and this
one, 15 of them are
completing longer passes than they did last
year.
The top nine in the rankings are all up from '96, and this
is shocking because the rankings are keyed to a high
completion percentage. Dinkers are rewarded by this system;
lower percentage, down-the-field throwers are
not.
In some cases you can understand why yards are up. Jeff
George, playing in the Raiders' bombs-away system, is way
up from last year, when he dinked and dunked in Atlanta's
run-and-shoot, before he was canned. But some are real head
scratchers. How, for
instance, do you account for the fact that Steve
Young—minus his top long-ball guy, Jerry Rice—is up more
than two yards per completed pass, a huge number? Or that
Drew Bledsoe, who has been without his deep man, Terry
Glenn, is also up more than two
yards a shot? Jeff Blake, who has been struggling, is still a
yard better than he was in '96. Gus Frerotte, who has had
his ups and downs, is up almost two yards. Troy Aikman,
caught in that swamp of a Dallas offense, up. Brett Favre,
struggling, but up.
And on and on, but you get the point.
I think one reason for this is that the unsoundness of the
zone-blitz defense is being exposed by teams that did a
good job studying it in the off-season. Huge holes are
being discovered, particularly in the wide areas. Screens
and swing passes to the
backs aren't being covered right away, and the guy catches
the ball and runs and runs, as K.C.'s Kimble Anders did to
Carolina in Week
4.
Anyway, the other day I placed a call to one of my favorite
people to discuss football with: Phil Simms, who does the
NBC telecasts. Simms actually tries to break down what's
happening on the field, rather than giving all that drivel
about somebody's
mother's cherry pie. Even in his days as the Giants'
quarterback he took a keen interest in developments in the
game in general. So tell me, Phil, are these
yards-per-completion numbers as significant as I think they
are, or it is just a case of an aging
writer playing with the stat
sheets?
"Hell, yes, it's
significant," he said. "I see more people throwing down the field,
like we used to do in the old days, and I love it. When the
49ers brought in that horizontal passing game, it was a
thing of beauty, mainly because they were the only
ones doing it. Then everybody copied it, and it got to the
point where you'd see a pass more than five yards and you'd
say, 'Gee, that's
long.'
"The zone blitz was the perfect defense for that,
because it cut off the short areas, but teams have adjusted
to it. People are doing a good job picking up the blitzes,
and when you do that, the spaces widen, and you can get
good yardage throwing to
your running backs
outside.
"But here's another thing, and I didn't see it much
during the first two weeks but I'm seeing it now. Teams are
keeping an extra guy in for protection, and they're
attacking the zone blitz vertically. The Chiefs lost the
Miami game, but they just killed
the zone blitzes Miami threw at them by going at them
vertically, down the
field.
"It's kind of a return to the old days, and I'm very
happy to see it. And here's another thing: There are some
good young quarterbacks in this league, guys like Mark
Brunell and Trent Dilfer. If they get a coach who doesn't
hold them back, well, we're
gonna see a real upswing in the
position."
I'd really like to believe that, but I guess the memories
of last Sunday night's Chicago-New Orleans game are still
too fresh in my mind. I'll defer to number 11. He certainly
knows a lot more about the position than I do. And what do
I know?
Handicapping, although you might not believe it after some of last
week's picks. Honest, folks, I'll try to do
better.
Philly, coming off that convincing victory over Washington,
to take one on the chin in
Jacksonville. Ray Rhodes gets his guys way up for the division matches,
then they stink it up against the AFC teams on the road.
They're ripe for a real
letdown.
Ditto the Giants,
who played their Super Bowl in the Dallas upset last week, and
now must travel to Tempe to face the Cardinals and that
brutal desert heat.
The desert is where the Cards staged their only
fourth-quarter comeback of the season, to beat the
Cowboys.
Washington over Dallas in the
Monday-nighter. I'd go the other way if I thought the Cowboys had a
running game to punish the Skins the way Philly did. But
Dallas has an attack without punch—a tailback who's lost
his zip operating behind a banged-up
line.
Jets to control the ball against Miami and win it in the
Meadowlands. Note to Bill Parcells: Next time you want to pull another
nifty stunt like having your quarterback heave one into the
stands behind him for a deliberate safety (as Neil
O'Donnell did at the end of the Indy game), bear this in
mind: The statisticians,
in their wisdom, counted this as yards lost rushing, so poor
O'Donnell got one carry for minus 34 yards. If you want to
screw up your quarterback's, and your team's, rushing
stats, just keep flinging footballs
backward.
We've saved the best for last:
Atlanta to upset New Orleans in the
Superdome. A bold pick, I know. The Saints tried every way they
could to screw it up against Chicago, but the Bears
wouldn't let 'em. The Falcons, coming off a bye week, will
be well rested and thrilled to face an opponent they can
actually
beat.
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