2022 QB Analytical Review part 1

Author: Billy Jones

Editor/Collaborator: Brendon Izower

Introduction

Welcome to the first part of my series where I perform an analytical review for quarterback fantasy performance from 2022. As a fantasy football enthusiast, I have always been fascinated by the intersection of data analytics and football. However, I have come to realize that sometimes data analytics can get a little over complicated, and the vast amount of information available can be overwhelming when looking for easy actionable insights. That's what this series is all about, clean and simple analytics to help fantasy football fans heading into the 2023 season. I will be using basic data analysis techniques to uncover trends and patterns in the performance of quarterbacks in the 2022 season and provide insights for fellow fantasy football enthusiasts. Whether you are a seasoned veteran or a newcomer to the world of fantasy football, I believe that this series will provide valuable insights and help you make informed decisions when it comes to your fantasy team, so let’s get started!

Ground Rules:

Before we jump into the analytics, it is important to set some ground rules about how we will be going about our analysis. The most common scoring system is as follows so that’s what we will be going with:

1. Passing Touchdowns: 4 points for each touchdown pass.
2. Passing Yards: 1 point for every 25 passing yards.
3. Rushing Touchdowns: 6 points for each rushing touchdown.
4. Rushing Yards: 1 point for every 10 rushing yards.
5. Fumbles Lost: -2 points for each fumble lost.
6. Interceptions (INTs): -2 points for each interception thrown.

Additionally, I want to note we will be focusing on a pool of 32 quarterbacks (shown below). The data used for this analysis was obtained from pro-football-reference.com, and all games where the quarterback had less than 60 offensive snap % were removed to mitigate games where the player may have been injured or playing in “garbage time”. This will help ensure that the analytics aren’t skewed by anomalous game results and allow us to gain comfort in the conclusions we draw from the results.

Aaron Rodgers	Deshaun Watson	Josh Allen	Mac Jones	Taylor Heinicke
Andy Dalton	Geno Smith	Justin Fields	Marcus Mariota	Tom Brady
Brock Purdy	Jacoby Brissett	Justin Herbert	Matt Ryan	Trevor Lawerence
Dak Prescott	Jalen Hurts	Kenny Pickett	Matthew Stafford	Tua Tagovailoa
Daniel Jones	Jared Goff	Kirk Cousins	Patrick Mahomes
Davis Mills	Jimmy Garappolo	Kyler Murray	Russell Wilson
Derek Carr	Joe Burrow	Lamar Jackson	Ryan Tannehill

This analysis only encompasses 32 quarterbacks and therefore it's possible that some of your favorite quarterbacks were excluded. The sole exception among quarterbacks with more than 9 starts is Zach Wilson, who was not included due to widespread agreement that he is not good at football.

Visualizations and Analysis

With the ground rules established and the data sources defined, we are now ready to dive into some basic analytics on the quarterback fantasy performance from 2022 season.

Our first visualization is a histogram of total fantasy points for all games from 2022. The population average was 16.91 per game with a normal-ish distribution. The x-axis is total fantasy points, the y-axis is frequency, and the bin size is 2 (e.g., 17-18 are grouped in 1 bar). Understanding the total population average and distribution is important context for the next part of the section.

Throughout the rest of this blog series, you will be seeing the “Non-Streaming Quarterback” pool referenced multiple times. The Non-Streaming quarterback pool is the following top tier quarterbacks that are drafted high in your fantasy football draft therefore won’t be seeing them on your waiver wires. For the purposes of this and future analyses, we will be removing non-streaming quarterbacks from any analysis related to “streaming” players from the waiver wire as the point of streaming is to identify favorable matchups and exploit them. By removing non-streaming quarterbacks from our analysis, we can focus solely on the impact of quarterbacks that will be available to stream, without our analysis being influenced by players that are not available for streaming.

“Non-Streaming Quarterbacks”

Dak Prescott	Kyler Murray
Jalen Hurts	Lamar Jackson
Joe Burrow	Patrick Mahomes II
Josh Allen	Tom Brady
Justin Herbert

 * Non-streaming quarterbacks were determined by being a top 10 ADP then removing Russell Wilson because of his clear early season struggles. *

If we compare the histograms of the non-streaming quarterbacks and streaming quarterbacks, there is a clear difference in production profiles. The non-streaming quarterbacks pool shows a higher level of fantasy production, with an average of 20.11 points per game compared to 15.76 for streaming quarterbacks. There are 2 key takeaways I have from these visualizations. If a fantasy football player were to “punt” the quarterback position during the draft then they would have needed to gain a 5 point per game advantage from foregoing the position to make up for not having a top quarterback. Another interesting point about the streaming quarterbacks pool is that their high-end production still exists, but much less frequent than the non-streaming quarterbacks. So, while streaming quarterbacks have the potential to produce high-end fantasy points, and therefore a potentially viable strategy for the hyper active fantasy manager, it is much more unpredictable and infrequent than the non-streaming quarterbacks.

In our last visualization of the day, we show a bar graph breaking down the average fantasy points per game by point type, color-coded with light red representing fumbles, dark red representing interceptions, light blue representing rushing touchdowns, dark blue representing rushing yards, light green representing passing touchdowns, and dark green representing passing yards. This simple visualization highlights the cheat code that is a mobile quarterback for fantasy football output.

Player specific quick thoughts: The true wonder that Patrick Mahomes II was on pretty average production from rushing stats. Jalen Hurts rushing TD production was way above the rest of the population. Is that sustainable? How high could Justin Fields’s ceiling be if he had a step up in passing? Josh Allen and Dak Prescott have 2-3 slots higher in the rankings possibility if they cut back turnovers. Their true offensive output took a big hit based upon turnovers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, statistics and visualization are fun, especially when used to gain insights on fun topics, e.g., fantasy football. Through this analytical review, we've taken the first steps in truly understand quarterback fantasy production in 2022. Join me next time as we delve deeper into our analysis of the quarterback position.

*This blog post was enabled by ChatGPT. The text was generated by me, and the content is my own, but some sentences and wording were provided by the model. I take full responsibility for all information produced in this blog. More information about OpenAI and their technology can be found at https://openai.com.*