Justin Fields Player Profile: Scrambles and Sacks

Author: Billy Jones

Inspiration: Paul Sabin (@SabinAnalytics/SumerSports)

Introduction

Hey football analytics fam, I'm excited to be back with another football analytics blog! Today's blog is another part in my Justin Fields series. In the first part of the series, I claimed that Justin Fields was a 'scrambling man' as his rushing production was highly driven by scrambles and his scrambling rates were much higher than those of his peers. Additionally, his sack rates were really high, which is concerning about his ability to read the defense pre-snap (there have been many studies about how sacks are a quarterback stat). In this blog I take a look into Justin Fields sack and scramble rates to see how he compares against the quarterback population as a whole, and not just his elite rushing quarterback peers. I am excited to see if the ‘scrambling man’ name will hold for Justin Fields as we expand the population so let's delve into data and see what insights can be unearthed.

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. Additionally, I want to note a bit of light data cleaning was needed before getting into the data. NFLFastR is great but there is some funkiness in there that needs to be handled. An example of this is the naming convention of Josh Allen in the dataset. We see him listed as both J.Allen and Jos.Allen. We are able to identify this by the player id but to aggregate by name this needs to be cleaned up. Not hard work to do but another reminder of preliminary data cleaning being an essential part of working with any data.

Visualizations and Analysis

With that now explained, let’s see how Justin Field compares to other quarterbacks from 2018 through 2022. Below there are visuals summarized for the entire time period as well as showing each season individually. 

Analysis: Justin Fields has been the clear leader in scrambles per dropback over the last 5 NFL seasons. This is shown in the visuals as Justin Fields has the highest aggregate total and 2 highest individual season scramble rates. We can see this in the gradient and bar charts as well as the scatter plots where Justin Fields stands out from the rest of the quarterbacks in the population.

When I look at the list of top scramblers, I see a lot of appealing names (Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson, Deshaun Watson, Marcus Mariota, and Josh Allen). As such, I wanted to extend the review to look at another metric. This next metric is sacks per dropback. While scrambling for yards is great, another key piece of the quarterback puzzle is avoiding sacks, which can come from scrambling but also can come from throwing the ball away. Either way, getting sacked isn’t good and so I wanted to see how Justin Fields measured up over the last 5 years. 

Analysis: Justin Fields’ sack rate is again the league worst over the last 5 years. In aggregate Fields has the worst sack rate and has the worst and 5th worst sack rate seasons by any quarterback (note: Fields sack rate got worse in his second season). If you review the names atop the sacks per dropback leaderboards, the names are a lot less exciting than what we see from the scrambling leaders (Josh Rosen, Marcus Mariota, Dwyane Haskins, & Zach Wilson). While sacks are not entirely the quarterback’s fault, it is pretty clear Justin Fields is not putting his offense in a position to protect him with pre-snap adjustments.

Conclusion

In conclusion, after analyzing Justin Fields' scrambling and sack rates, it is clear that he heavily relies on scrambling to produce rushing yards. While scrambling has shown to be very efficient, his high sack rate is concerning and suggests that he may struggle with pre-snap processing and making quick decisions under pressure. While the sample size is small on Justin Fields, these figures raise some questions about his ability to lead the team and put them in a good position to succeed. Moving forward, it will be interesting to see how Justin Fields develops as a quarterback and whether he can improve on putting his team in a better position to succeed. The Bears have finally put together a roster around him which should alleviate some of the pressure on him to perform which has me closely watching if Justin Fields will take the next step up with this new support cast. Thank you for reading this blog, and I hope you found this analysis informative and thought-provoking. Stay tuned for next week as I look forward to talking about Justin Fields passing production as well as a bonus post on the predictiveness of scramble and sack rates!

Bonus Visualizations – Scramble Rate X Sack Rate

*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.*