Which Quarterback Is Best On Defense? — A Study
One of the most persistent narratives of the current NFL season has been shoddy quarterback play, exemplified by perennial benchwarmers like Tom Savage and Brock Osweiler, but exacerbated by high-profile injuries and the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick.
But instead of sulking in the tepid offensive performances this year’s starters are producing, let’s focus on the positive, the bright side, the silver lining of the dust cloud produced by Jacoby Brissett’s body as he’s suplexed into the dirt for the ninth time this quarter. This season, we’ve been treated to an abundance of defensive quarterback play.
A quarterback forced into defense mid-play is a surefire indicator that something has gone horribly wrong. It is also one of the most enchanting occurrences in all of professional sports. I present Jared Goff, who in a Week 7 matchup against the Cardinals, executed a textbook defensive maneuver that would make any coordinator proud:
This is an especially silly football play for a number of reasons, but my favorite thing about it is that it sort of works — Goff doesn’t get credited with the tackle, but he manages to trip up Arizona’s Deone Bucannon. After tossing a pick, Goff (to a minor extent) absolves himself of his Cardinal sin.
When a quarterback takes down his interceptor, he completes a miniature redemption arc, one hidden in a play that, as a whole, will almost certainly be categorized as his mistake. It is a fleeting, oft-forgotten fragment of poetic justice, and I live for that shit.
So in a season plagued by lackluster offensive performances from QBs, I decided to analyze them by their defensive ones. After all, franchise passers are the ones who can handle crises, who remain calm and composed when things go wrong. Everyone knows to tap Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers for a fourth-quarter comeback. What quarterback do you want on your team when a) the ball is suddenly going the other way and b) it’s very likely his fault?
But how to measure a quarterback’s defensive prowess? Introducing the Quarterback Revenge Rate (QRR), a Very Real And True™ statistic that measures how likely a quarterback is to tackle the defender who has just intercepted him.
Easily calculated by dividing a passer’s recorded tackles by his interceptions, Revenge Rate attempts to quantify vital QB intangibles that were previously inaccessible. With enough extrapolation and skipped STAT 101 classes, QRR offers answers to questions like “how personally does a quarterback take his mistakes?” or perhaps, “who’s more likely to retaliate when they’re picked, Jay Cutler or Tom Brady?”
A disclaimer: the metric doesn’t account for plays where the offense commits a turnover by any means other than the quarterback throwing an interception — say a running back fumbling, and the QB completing the tackle — and it doesn’t account for the Joe Webb Effect, which I’ll get to.
It’s an obvious limitation, but only until NFL scouts provide me with enough resources to conduct thorough defensive QB analysis, or until I can figure out how to make PFR search every recorded NFL play for “interception” AND “QB credited with tackle”, whichever comes first.
This chart maps every active quarterback with a non-zero QB Revenge Rate, with a few exceptions. I’m sure the first thing you’ve noticed is the absence of America’s sweetheart and Vikings legend, Joe Webb. In his seven-year career, Joe Webb has thrown five interceptions and racked up four tackles, resulting in a truly hilarious QRR of 80.0. Can you imagine an NFL quarterback that brought down his interceptor 80 percent of the time? I would pay for a Red Zone-esque channel that only broadcasted his interceptions, just so I never missed a single one. He would probably start for the Jets.
But fortunately, I don’t have to completely re-adjust the scales of this graph for Joe Webb, because all four of those tackles came from his role in special teams. Joe Webb was not credited with a tackle in any of the balls he gifted to the secondary, making his actual QRR a goose egg. Forsooth, Joe Webb.
Other noteworthy absentees, like Carson Wentz or Dak Prescott, can easily be attributed to their relative inexperience — both young quarterbacks have yet to complete a tackle in their burgeoning careers. Some missing persons are more puzzling though. Take Kirk Cousins, who in fifty-five games of professional football has thrown forty-seven picks, without ever recording a tackle. It’s like he doesn’t even care. To whatever front office Kirk ends up with next season, please cite this piece when you leverage it in your contract negotiations.
Now that we’ve reviewed the attendance sheet, let’s examine some of the league’s best when it comes to an unquenchable thirst for revenge. You might expect the top of the revenge leaderboard to be populated by mostly second- or third-string quarterbacks, and you’d be right: their revenge numbers are inflated by a small sample size of games and their general proclivity to being bad at football. The top three spots on this chart — T.J. Yates, Thaddeus Lewis, and the recently signed Josh Johnson — have started eighteen NFL games combined.
But I think there’s another underlying variable that this terrible troika shares, a commonality that explains why it’s these three, and not other quarterbacks of similar ineptitude. Comparable QBs like Luke McCown and Chad Henne have uninspiring Revenge Rates to match their actual football stats, and this chart doesn’t even include the benchwarmers that have thrown just as many picks as Yates or Glennon, but without ever making a tackle.
I like to think that latent factor might simply be that those three nobodies — Yates, Lewis, and Johnson — truly are more desperate to achieve retribution. Quarterbacks aren’t just the least equipped player to make the tackle on an interception return—they’re explicitly trained not to. The kings of Revenge Rate ignored that rule because they had to redeem themselves. They needed to prove they’re more than just a backup.
Other indisputable conclusions from rock-solid data analysis:
- Hot damn, look at Matt Cassel! In his twelve-year NFL career, he started 81 games, gifted 81 balls to the secondary, and brought down eight defenders, resulting in a stellar Revenge Rate of 9.88. He is The Great Redeemer, an interminable predator that will stop at nothing until his quarry is decimated. If you are intrepid enough to intercept the flaccid ball Matt Cassel just put up for grabs, prepare to also catch 228 pounds of raw journeyman QB.
- Jay Cutler has a higher Revenge Rate (7.24) and more tackles (11) than Tom Brady, Philip Rivers, Cam Newton, and Ben Roethlisberger. Jay Cutler doesn’t just care — he cares too much.
- Speaking of Cam Newton, the quarterback who is arguably built most like a defensive player, has a Revenge Rate of 6.74, just below the league average of 7.3.
- Andrew Luck’s 11th-best QRR of 8.82 does seem to corroborate the claim that he’s one of the hardest-hitting quarterbacks in the NFL, an assertion based entirely on Luck serving up one of the most well-known quarterback hits in recent memory:
The gridiron sabermetrics discussed here are all well and good (read: weird and bad), but we still haven’t discussed the best defensive play a quarterback can make.
Last Sunday, Case Keenum played the best game of his life. Facing a porous Redskins defense, the Minnesota quarterback posted career-highs across the board, throwing for 304 yards, four touchdowns, and a quarterback rating of 117. It was a historical performance, but not for any of the reasons I just listed.
No, Case Keenum made a play that cemented him in the annals of NFL history, a play that, in all likelihood, was almost immediately forgotten by those watching at FedEx Field that day, and a play that, since 1993, only three other NFL quarterbacks have ever accomplished. Case Keenum forced a fumble.
With this play, Keenum joins the hallowed ranks of quarterbacks who have boasted such an achievement, a veritable who’s-who of defensive-minded QBs. Let us humbly acknowledge these feats of defensive quarterback play.
Facing the Buffalo Bills at MetLife, Geno Smith takes the snap from his own eleven yard line. Dropping back, the Jets second-round draft pick suddenly realizes the ball has been filled with recluse spiders, and strategically disposes of it by throwing the ball to Bills defender and famous arachnophobe, Aaron Williams. This is the only explanation for the kind of pass Smith attempts.
Ten minutes of football have been played and it is Geno’s third interception of the game. Something tucked away in his subconscious, previously latent and insidious, suddenly snaps. Nobody intercepts Geno Smith three times in ten minutes and gets away with it. The vaunted West Virginia product delivers a devastating blow to Williams, forcing him to fumble out-of-bounds at the Jets one yard line and heroically saving a pick-six.
The next play, fabled Buffalo gunslinger Kyle Orton completes a one-yard touchdown pass. Orton goes on to have a career day (238 yards, 4 TDs), and the Jets lose 43–23.
September 14th, 2008. The Seattle Seahawks take Qwest field for a heated rivalry matchup against the San Francisco 49ers and their quarterback, future Saskatchewan Roughrider J.T. O’Sullivan. First and 10 on their own 23, O’Sullivan hands the ball off to Frank Gore, who fumbles. Seattle’s Marcus Trufant recovers the ball, runs a few yards, and is stopped dead in his tracks by none other than J.T. O’Sullivan, a name that strikes fear into the hearts of defenders and Niners fans alike.
O’Sullivan forces the fumble, it’s recovered by another Seattle defender, Craig Terrill, who runs it ten yards back for a Seahawks touchdown.
Later that same 2008 season, the Seahawks are locked in another key divisional matchup, or at least one that would be key if Seattle wasn’t 2–8. To lead them on an eventual 4–12 campaign that would make Geno Smith proud, the Seahawks tap Seneca Wallace to replace the injured Matt Hasselbeck. Down by two scores with less than two minutes in regulation, and attempting to salvage some dignity from an almost certain Arizona victory, Wallace launches a deep ball right into the waiting arms of Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie.
I have scoured the NFL’s video archives to find footage of this third and final quarterback forced fumble, but to no avail. I can only assume an intern found the wretched film and promptly tossed it into the coal furnace Jerry Jones uses to power Cowboys Stadium. Our only window into this play is the box score, which reveals that Rodgers-Cromartie reeled off a forty-four yard INT return before being tackled by quarterback Seneca Wallace, fumbling the football, and then recovering his own fumble. I like to think Seneca absolutely pulverized the two-time Pro-Bowler. I’m almost glad I couldn’t find the game tape. It’s more fun that way.
You’ll notice this quartet of forced fumbles share a subtle yet inextricable commonality: even though the quarterback forced the fumble, it essentially didn’t matter. The ball carrier’s team pretty much scored that same play, or the one immediately after. There has not been a recorded single fumble forced by the quarterback that resulted in a positive outcome for that QB’s team.
The word recorded is crucial there, because there is an unrecorded QB-forced fumble, nullified by another bizarre phenomenon that’s permeated this NFL season. This quarterback threw a pick, ran down his interceptor, and forced him to fumble through the end zone, resulting in a touchback for the quarterback’s team.
Only a true defensive juggernaut could pull off such a play, and any self-respecting team that wants to alleviate the NFL from its dearth of quality quarterbacking would be wise to sign him immediately. The most effective QB defensive play of all time belongs to Colin Kaepernick.
