Quarterback’s Performance Fantasy Impact on Teammates

For my first post of 2019, I am examining the performance of QB play on the other offensive positions. My goal is to provide the first steps in coming up with the ‘shitty QB’ factor I frequently mention in other posts. My hypothesis is: bad QB play has a cascading effect on other offensive positions. My initial thoughts, before analysis is done are:

* Bad QB play impacts every position negatively

* Most models rank positions independently of each other and we need to think about how the QB might perform when making roster decisions

* I’d avoid most players on teams with a bad QB

Now for the fun part! Let’s see what we can find.

For the dataset in this analysis, I am looking at every QB that had the most passing attempts in a game, and removing any position players that only received one or fewer targets/carries each game. I am trying to remove some of the fringe cases and 3rd-4th string guys in the data.

I am going to have two main visualizations in this post. The first is below and will show the distribution of points scored by RB, TE, WR for each category of QB play. For TE and WR, the worse the QB play, the higher the peak lower the average points amount. Meaning most points scored are lower, on a per game basis. RB is the lone exception where the ranges all look pretty similar except a more significant upside with better-performing QBs.

The second figure (below) contains information about the average points per category of QB with error bars that are one standard deviation. Remember, our groups are bad (0–10), average (10–15), good (15–20), and elite(20+). Nothing here really jumps out except the appearance of little impact to RB average points between our different classifications of QB. If we revisit my initial thoughts, this finding ruins one of them. The impact on TE and WR can’t be ignored, especially when it comes to drafting someone. This harkens back to Demaryius Thomas’s 2017 where his QB’s weren’t elite, and his overall stats suffered.

For the last bit of analysis on this post, I put together a transition matrix for QB points in 2019 to attempt to try and understand how QBs perform from game to game. Last year, when a QB performed ‘elite,’ they had a 45% chance to repeat that performance in the next game. The most interesting item to note, when a QB performed ‘Bad,’ the second highest probability, was ‘Good.’ In DFS, this could pose an opportunity to buy average on a QB who played bad. One thing to note, the highest likelihood for ‘Bad’ is ‘Bad.’

For the first post on this topic, I am going to let the analysis ends here. This is also my first post on our site’s blog (not using Medium), so I have a few issues to sort through with that. In conclusion, going into next year, I am going to look at valuations of WR and TE side by side with the estimate of the QB because there is a correlation between the two.

Originally published at gridironai.com.