Deep Passing Study - Intro

Author: Billy Jones

Introduction

If you're a football fan, you've probably been bombarded with tweets and comments about the NFL combine recently, the annual event is where top prospects showcase their skills in front of scouts, coaches, and analysts. One of the most talked-about segments from this year’s combine was the quarterback throwing drills, especially the deep ball section. Every year, the media and fans alike overreact to combine performances, but for me it had me wondering does throwing deep actually matter? Is it worth taking the risk of a long pass, or are shorter, more consistent throws the more efficient route? Is that assumption of short routes being more efficient even true? As a football analytics enthusiast, I was curious and wanted to investigate.

In this first blog post, I'll do some visual investigation of the different types of passes thrown in the NFL. In later posts I’ll look at the efficiencies of passes by location. So, buckle up and get ready for some passing game analytics.

Statistics

We are introducing a new statistic in this blog series. It’s pretty straightforward, but worth defining. “Air yards” refer to the distance the ball travels through the air from the quarterback's hand to the receiver's hands. It measures the length of a pass without taking into account the yards gained after the catch.

Ground Rules:

Before we jump back into the analytics, I would like to remind the readers of the ground rules we will be playing with. The data used for this analysis was obtained from NFLFASTR for 2018 through 2022.

Visualizations and Analysis

Let’s start off with some basics. A visual distribution of passes by air yards distance in the NFL from 2022 and the last 5 years. 

Analysis: To better understand pass distribution in the NFL, we grouped passing attempts into five categories: negative passes (black) (behind the line), short passes (grey) (0-5 yards), intermediate passes (dark red) (5-10 yards), chunk plays (light red) (10-20 yards), and deep passes (three tones of blue) (20-30, 30-40, and 40+). As we can see in the chart, the volume of passing significantly drops off after 20 yards. This is consistent between 2022 and the last 5 years.

Now let’s visualize completion percentage (attempts vs completions) by air yard category. In this visual each dot on the scatterplot is a players pass attempts and completions by air yard category and only players with a total of 200 total attempts in the year were included. In this step we look to ensure that the groupings we created are homogeneous in terms of volume of attempts and completion percentage.

Analysis: As we can see in the visual, the vast majority of passes fall into the short and intermediate distances, with only a small number of passes beyond 20 yards. Additionally, completion percentage decreases as the distance of the pass increases, with the highest completion percentage in the short pass category and the lowest completion percentage in the deep pass category. While there is variability in each group, the groupings we are using are supported by the visual clusters. Side note, these might be my favorite visualizations to date based upon pure aesthetics.

Conclusion

This wraps up my part one of my study on football passing efficiency. I look forward to expanding on this topic as I dive deeper into the effectiveness of deep passing in the NFL. Stay tuned!

*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.*