If you’re trying to predict next year touchdowns, you could just use this year touchdowns as a variable and that will explain about 42% of the variance in next year touchdowns. But a variable that has equal predictive power is a variable that I’ll call “Not Quite Touchdowns + Touchdowns” or NQT+T for the purposes of this post.
I’ll define a Not Quite Touchdown for quarterbacks as a pass play that results in a completion, but ends up at the 1 or 2 yard line instead of in the endzone. I used 1 or 2 yard line because when I backtested, that was the limit that I could use before NQT+T dropped below the predictive power of just simple touchdowns. So if we look at those Not Quite Touchdowns and add them to actual touchdowns, we get the measure NQT+T. Rather than giving you the prediction that the regression would have for 2013, I thought a more intuitive way to look at things would be to simply order 2012’s QBs by NQT+T. I’ve done that in the table below.
| NAME | TDS | NQT+T |
| Drew Brees | 43 | 50 |
| Aaron Rodgers | 39 | 42 |
| Matt Ryan | 32 | 42 |
| Peyton Manning | 37 | 42 |
| Tom Brady | 35 | 41 |
| Tony Romo | 28 | 34 |
| Andy Dalton | 27 | 32 |
| Josh Freeman | 27 | 32 |
| Matthew Stafford | 20 | 32 |
| Eli Manning | 26 | 31 |
| Philip Rivers | 26 | 31 |
| Ryan Fitzpatrick | 24 | 31 |
| Ben Roethlisberger | 25 | 30 |
| Andrew Luck | 23 | 29 |
| Matt Schaub | 22 | 27 |
| Russell Wilson | 26 | 27 |
| Sam Bradford | 21 | 27 |
| Robert Griffin | 20 | 26 |
| Joe Flacco | 22 | 25 |
| Carson Palmer | 22 | 24 |
| Christian Ponder | 18 | 24 |
| Cam Newton | 19 | 22 |
| Jay Cutler | 19 | 21 |
| Brandon Weeden | 14 | 18 |
| Ryan Tannehill | 12 | 15 |
| Alex Smith | 13 | 14 |
| Mark Sanchez | 13 | 14 |
| Michael Vick | 12 | 14 |
| Chad Henne | 11 | 13 |
| Colin Kaepernick | 10 | 11 |
A few notes:
- You can see that Matt Ryan had a number of completions on plays that ended at the 1 or 2 yard line.
- All of Andy Dalton, Josh Freeman and Matthew Stafford are 26 years old (or younger in Staff and Freeman’s case) and also placed in the top 10 in the league on NQT+T.
- Russell Wilson squeezed almost every last drop out of his pass attempts. He really didn’t leave anything on the table (or his receivers didn’t).
- If you add Alex Smith and Colin Kaepernick’s NQT+T together, you would get 25, which is Flacco range. That’s just the indicator for passing TDs and doesn’t take rushing yards into account. It would be better than Cam Newton on NQT+T.
- For the counter-view that Aaron Rodgers is actually on his own tier above the others, check out Jonathan Bales’ article.
I knew going into this exercise that Stafford would look decent on this metric, but I didn’t realize that Matt Ryan would come out looking this good. His 42 NQT+T is solidly in that tier that people are leaving him out of right now. Also, Julio Jones is just entering his third season in the league and he came into the league fairly young to begin with. If you look at Fantasy Football Calculator ADP, Ryan is currently sandwiched between Ahmad Bradshaw and Rashard Mendenhall, which makes it easy to pull the trigger on a QB in that range even if you think that’s early. By that point in the draft, there’s still value sitting out there, but a lot of guys will largely be the same while Ryan might be a real step up over the next QB drafted. It’s something to think about.
