QBR and the black QB

[Mischling3rdDegree]

ESPN has this statistic they call "Total Quarterback Rating" which is a much more complex version of the overly simplistic traditional passer rating. You can read about it at http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/6833215/explaining-statistics-total-quarterback-rating and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_quarterback_rating . The short version is that it's a better measure of QB performance for much the same reasons that in baseball WHIP is a better measurement of pitcher performance than W-L record. ESPN is not the first site to come up with an advanced statistic to replace passer rating, but they are the most mainstream.

QBR ranges from 0 to 100, with 50 representing an average performance. 90+ is supposed to be impossible over a full season, and even an 80+ season is very rare (only been done seven times and three of those were Peyton Manning).

So here are the 2013 standings through 1/4th of the season.

The red line marks Tim Tebow's lifetime average: 33.4.

 

[davidholly]

ESPN's total QBR is a joke dude. The real problem with the NFL passer rating is it gives the same weight to a TD pass when you're down by 35 points that it does to a TD pass when you're up by 3 points. ESPN's QBR is not the solution though.

 

[Mischling3rdDegree]

The real problem with the traditional passer rating is that:
- it rewards TD passes too much
- it doesn't penalize interceptions enough
- a 7-yard completion on 3rd and 5 is worth the same as a 7-yard completion on 3rd and 15

Out of fairness, here is the QBR table for 2012. Feel free to speculate about the dropoff.

 

[davidholly]

Cold Hard Football Facts has some good studies about traditional passer rating.
http://www.coldhardfootballfacts.com/stats/2013/5/PRD/

We call it the Mother of All Stats because it has an incredible Correlation to Victory and to championship success, as we’ve reported in many outlets, including in a 2012 presentation at NFL Films: 26 of 73 NFL champs since 1940 finished No. 1 in Passer Rating Differential (36%); 44 finished in the Top 3 in PRD (6%) and 69 finished in the Top 10 (95%).

I think traditional passer rating really is an underrated stat.

 

[Riddlewire]

QBR is a fraud. I have debunked it once before.
It was invented for the sole purpose of enhancing the "apparent" performance of any type of quarterback ESPN chooses. It's a black box system that relies on judgement calls by a shadow committee who doesn't have to answer any questions about their data. ESPN also can (and does) change the formula whenever they damn well please.

Football statisitcs will always be a terrible source of data to draw conclusions about player abilities because not enough of the right types of stats are kept and reported. And I suspect this will only get worse in the future as the media (with the full cooperation of the NFL itself) will continue to erode the value of statistical data by changing the way they are calculated. Example: Altering the yardage totals for quarterbacks by subtracting sack yardage from passing yards. College is slightly better, but the NCAA just this year has thrown out their old stats reporting website in favor of a new (awful) one which makes compiling data much more difficult. I still intend to calculate the FBS QBE rankings this year, but it will be a massive undertaking.

 

[Mischling3rdDegree]

Cold Hard Football Facts has some good studies about traditional passer rating.
http://www.coldhardfootballfacts.com/stats/2013/5/PRD/

That page talks about passer rating differential; of course it's going to have a good correlation with victory since it's a proxy for score differential. But we just want to measure QB performances here.

 

[Mischling3rdDegree]

QBR is a fraud. I have debunked it once before.
It was invented for the sole purpose of enhancing the "apparent" performance of any type of quarterback ESPN chooses. It's a black box system that relies on judgement calls by a shadow committee who doesn't have to answer any questions about their data. ESPN also can (and does) change the formula whenever they damn well please.

I agree with your concerns about QBR being a secret proprietary formula. But if they're trying to enhance perceptions of a certain type of QB, they better change the formula again, because right now it says that black QBs range from average to bad.

It also says that Tebow, while well below average, still deserves a spot in the NFL, probably as the Jacsonville starter, but at least as a backup somewhere.

 

[davidholly]

Here's the thing about the QBR formula. ESPN outright admits that some of the variables in the formula are entirely subjective. In other words they don't need to alter the formula to make quotablacks look good, they just have to alter the subjective variables. Hell for all we know there is no formula at all, they're just pulling subjective numbers from their asses entirely.