The Saints recently agreed to terms with Derek Carr, signing him to a four-year contract worth up to $150 million. Carr is already 32 and is coming off arguably his worst statistical season since 2017. But does he represent an upgrade for the Saints? And is New Orleans a better situation for Carr? The RotoViz tools have a trove of advanced data to help us get a clearer picture of the situations in Las Vegas and New Orleans and whether Carr is a good fit for his new team.
The Raiders’ and Saints’ Passing Attacks
There’s little question that Carr struggled last season as a Raider, even when you compare that to whichever QB the Saints were putting on the field. According to the RotoViz Advanced Team Stats Explorer, the Raiders ranked in the bottom half of the league in passing points earned per play, points above average per play, percentage of positive EPA passing plays, passing points above replacement (PAR), and passing wins above replacement (WAR). The Saints, by comparison, were a top-10 unit in every one of those metrics.
If you don’t know what all these metrics mean, don’t worry. They are all different (but related) ways to measure how successful a team is on a per-play basis. What’s important to note at this point is that they don’t quite tell the whole story. There are a lot of ways for teams to achieve these numbers. By themselves they don’t tell us much about the differences between the two teams — only that the Saints were, in general, more successful when passing the ball. But why is this? One possible reason is the offensive lines.
The Raiders’ and Saints’ Offensive Lines
When we look at the relevant offensive line stats, we see that both teams were top-10 units in passing points earned per snap, though the Saints were better.
Points earned are a way to measure how much responsibility a player or group of players have for the total expected points added (EPA) that a team earns on a given play. According Sports Info Solutions’ glossary, blocking points earned refer to
the total of a player’s EPA responsibility while blocking using the Total Points system that distributes credit among all players on the field for a given play. Totals are scaled up to map to the average points scored or allowed on a team level, with the player’s snap count determining how much to adjust. For blockers, this includes accounting for blown blocks, yards before contact on running plays, and performance given the defenders in the box.
That definition introduces some new concepts that probably aren’t familiar, like “the Total Points system.” You can read a lot more about how SIS calculates Total Points on their website. But the key takeaway is this: the Saints had more success per passing play than the Raiders, and the Saints’ offensive line was a bigger part of the team’s success on passing plays than the Raiders’ line was.
In large part, this may be because only eight teams had a higher blown block rate on passing snaps than the Raiders.[1]
This led to a much higher pressure rate for the Raiders. While Las Vegas allowed a QB pressure on over 35% of their drop backs, the Saints allowed a pressure on only 28.7% of theirs, good for No. 4 in the league.[2]
How Much Impact Did the Quarterbacks Have?
Of course, not every passing play outcome is the result of offensive line play. For instance,
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Per Sports Info Solutions, a blown block refers to when a blocker does not successfully block the defender they attempted to engage with and, as a result, gives the defender an opportunity to negatively affect the play. |
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| ↑2 | A pressure is any play in which there is a quarterback hurry, hit, or knockdown. |
