RADIO
Time's up! The 2021 fantasy season is done and gone for good. Whether you play in a redraft league or are part of a dynasty format, the days of sitting at the edge of your couch and biting your nails are over. We have a tough eight-month desert to walk through ahead of us, but hey, the real NFL players are this close to kickoff and we will still enjoy football for another month and change, so you better get to it while it lasts! With the numbers in place and the games finished, it's time to wrap up the series and take a final look at who was who during this 2021 longer-than-ever season.
To gain the biggest edge in your fantasy football league, it's necessary to understand how to apply the advanced statistics being used in sports nowadays. Back in the day, it was all about wins and losses, passing yards, and touchdowns scored. It's not that those stats are now worthless, they just don't offer enough information to savvy analysts. While football is still in its infancy compared to baseball in terms of analytics, the evolution the sport has seen lately in those terms is notable.
Each week, I'll be tackling NFL's Next Gen Stats, bringing you data from the previous week's games with notable takeaways you should consider when assessing fantasy players for the upcoming week. In case you're new to the series, or Next Gen Stats altogether, I recommend you read our NGS-primer. Now, let's get to the data!
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2021 Best and Worst Quarterbacks - Next Gen Stats
The season, at least for us fantasy nuts, is finally over. That is nothing good for our enjoyment of the fantasy game, but it is a time of calm and peace to enjoy the real NFL playoffs that we're also invested in. With all of the regular season numbers now in place, it is time to wrap up the Next Gen Stats series position by position.
Today, I will go through the quarterback position and provide a final update on how the league's passers have done in the different metrics we've already tackled during the season. I will only show a small number of names for each category, present its correlation with the fantasy points averaged by the player, then skip gory details and instead provide a new "combined" leaderboard at the end of the column.
As we'll be discussing quarterbacks and their passing stats, I will reduce the fantasy points per game averages to just those related to passing. That means I have removed the rushing/receiving fantasy points the qualifying quarterbacks have logged during the season. I've called this "new" metric paFP/G, which is to say passing Fantasy Points per Game. I have included the full fantasy points average (passing, receiving, and rushing stats included, labeled simply FP/G) for context. So let's dive in!
Note: The cutoff to qualify is set at 135 pass attempts.
Time to Throw
Correlation with Passing Fantasy Points: minus-15%
Leaders and Trailers:
Completed/Intended Air Yards & Air Yards Differential
Correlation with Passing Fantasy Points: 31% / 11% / 31%
Leaders and Trailers:
Aggressiveness
Correlation with Passing Fantasy Points: minus-25%
Leaders and Trailers:
Attempts & Yards & Y/A
Correlation with Fantasy Points: 76% / 85% / 75%
Leaders and Trailers:
Completion Percentage & xCOMP & COMP Above Expectation
Correlation with Fantasy Points: 66% / 40% / 59%
Leaders and Trailers:
Combined Next Gen Stats Leaderboard
To build this leaderboard, I used every metric that is part of the NGS site and put everything together in a combined score I labeled "NGS" in the following table. The calculation of each player's NGS score is simple. I calculated where each player ranked for each metric and then multiplied that rank for the correlation between that metric and my paFP/G metric. Players ranked higher (closer to one) in each category will have lower scores for those categories. In the end, I added up each player's scores from all of the categories getting a single NGS score.
The lower the NGS, the better the player for fantasy as each category was already weighted given its correlation with the paFP/G metric. Here are the results:
NGS Leaderboard Notes:
- Just as a reminder, we're looking at the correlation between all NGS stats and passing fantasy points per game. That is why the likes of Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson, and Josh Allen are all knocked down the board to varying degrees compared to pure-throwers like Matthew Stafford or Tom Brady.
- The battle at the top of the NGS leaderboard was fierce between no. 1 Stafford and no. 2 Joe Burrow. They finished just around three points separated from each other and a healthy 11+ points from third-place-holder Dak Prescott. It was a clear victory for Deshaun Watson last season, but not so much this year.
- While Stafford reached the top putting up top-five NGS marks in nine different categories, Burrow did that in only four of them but always ranked either first or second in them.
- No other quarterback outside of Stafford was good for more than six top-five finishes in all NGS cats.
- The ones with those marks: Russell Wilson and Justin Herbert.
- The correlation between paFP/G and the NGS scores is at minus-93 percent, even higher than last season's 83%, which was already a really strong relationship overall.
- That small difference is why the NGS leaderboard doesn't entirely align with the paFP/G one.
- Top-3 NGS players: Stafford, Burrow, Prescott
- Top-3 paFP/G players: Brady, Stafford, Prescott
- Bottom-3 NGS players: Glennon, Huntley, Darnold
- Bottom-3 paFP/G players: Glennon, Huntley, Fields
- Mike Glennon was an absolute disaster, having the most lowest-ranked averages in NGS stats with 38 finishes there and two more as the 37th-worst qualified QB. Jesus.
- The second-most bottom-two finishes (either 38th or 37th) belong to Zach Wilson and Jared Goff, both tied at three each.
- Although rookie Justin Fields got the third-lowest NGS score, the truth is that he avoided falling in the lowest-two positions in any category while posting three top-three finishes (AYTS, CAY, and IAY).
- All QBs with a positive mark in the CPOE (+/-) leaderboard finished with double-digit paFP/G averages.
- All top-six quarterbacks in CPOE (2.2+) put up at least 15 FPPG this season.
- Things change looking at them from a fantasy-point perspective. Of the top-12 QB in paFP/G, only seven posted positive CPOE marks in 2021 compared to five who fell in the negative realm.
- Every top-10 player in the CPOE leaderboard avoided finishing at the bottom of all other NGS cats.
- On the other hand, only two bottom-10 QBs in that category got to finish inside the top-five of other cats while avoiding bottom-two finishes elsewhere: Dalton (xCOMP) and Lawrence (INT).
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