Rewind: The Pocket Passer Trap

JJ Zachariason (0:00)

Hey guys, like I said in the episode from earlier this week on utilizing front office decision making, I'm taking a long weekend to relax and recharge after a wild couple of months with the draft. So instead of the typical perspectives episode, you're about to listen to an episode that I did last year on what I call the Pocket Passer Trap. It's a good one to listen to before we get going with our season-long research, because yes, season-long fantasy football is about to be here. I appreciate you listening, I'll be back in your ears next week.

Almost exactly a year ago, I published an episode of the podcast called The Rise of the Early Round Quarterback. Years and years ago, when I first started in the fantasy football industry, quarterbacks ratings selected really early in drafts. But based on supply and demand and predictability, it didn't make much sense. A late-round quarterback approach was much more approachable. So I wrote about it. I published the Late-Round Quarterback eBook in 2012, and I've been brain-vomiting fantasy takes ever since. We've been through a journey over the years. In that 2014-2015 timeframe, drafting a quarterback early was legitimately worthless. When looking at top 18 quarterbacks by ADP in 2015, for example, the correlation between where those quarterbacks were drafted and the number of fantasy points per game that they actually scored was zero.

QB2s were getting you just as many points as QB1s. We were terrible at predicting performance. That all changed in 2020 And the reason it changed in my eyes is because of Lamar Jackson. Look, I've missed on a lot of things in fantasy football through the years. That's part of this gig. But the single take that I'm most proud of relates to this topic. After Jackson's monster MVP season in 2019, I wrote an article on whether or not he broke the late-round quarterback strategy. Yes, he was a late-round quarterback himself that year. But it was obvious that people were catching on. They were realizing the importance of mobility at the position in fantasy football. So I wrote about it. And at the end of that article, I wrote the following. You know, the truth is the question about the late-round quarterback strategy in fantasy football this year shouldn't really revolve around Lamar Jackson. It shouldn't be about whether or not you're willing to take Jackson to top 25 or the top 30 Instead, our focus should be on the fact that the fantasy football world has gotten smarter. Historically, fantasy managers didn't put a premium on quarterback rushing production. They ignored what's been dubbed the Konami Code of Fantasy Football. We don't see that anymore. The consensus top 7 quarterbacks this year are all players who bring that extra juice with their legs. So no, Lamar Jackson isn't what could break the idea of drafting quarterbacks late in fantasy football. You are. As the fantasy football world gets sharper, the late-round quarterback strategy may slowly morph into the middle-round quarterback strategy. Now, I bring this up every once in a while on the show because it's such a good example of why average draft position analysis is so important. You can be ahead of the game when you spot these macro trends. Not everything needs to be player analysis focused. We've definitely seen a change in the position since that time frame. When looking at the correlation between preseason expectation and postseason result over the last four seasons, it's night and day compared to what we saw in 2012, 2013, 2014 That's because the best quarterbacks in fantasy football are now running the ball and passing the ball well. You see, before, when friend of the show Rich Rebar wrote about the Konami Code in fantasy football, the cheat code that is quarterback rushing, quarterbacks didn't have this unicorn ability of being great rushers and passers. We saw these one-off spike seasons, but in today's game, it's Lamar Jackson, it's Josh Allen, it's Jalen Hertz. These guys are posting good rushing numbers and good passing numbers. And when you get that combination, it becomes much easier to predict which quarterbacks are going to be good entering a given season. Now, I go through a lot of this in this year's Late-Round Draft Guide, but something else that I talk about that's related to this is what I call the pocket passer trap. And that's what we're going to dig into today. So here's where we're at with the quarterback landscape. Elite quarterbacks have separated themselves not really from the standpoint that they're giving your fantasy teams a bigger points per game edge, but they're more predictable. The players who are giving you that edge, the ones separating themselves from the rest of the position, they're the guys who were drafting early. Because rushing numbers are a lot more predictive than passing ones, and the market is putting the right premium on rushing quarterbacks. But not every early or middle round quarterback is mobile. Some of them are pocket passers, and that presents a problem that's not talked about nearly enough. When a more immobile quarterback has a big season, he's doing so because he has a big season through the air, right? And if he's scoring a lot of fantasy points, then he's likely throwing for a lot of touchdowns. On a weekly basis since 2011, the R squared between fantasy points per game and passing yards has been about 42%. That's 62% when looking at passing touchdowns the fantasy points scored. Meaning passing touchdowns correlate a lot stronger to fantasy output than yardage does on a weekly basis. Which makes sense because one passing touchdown equals 100 passing yards in most leagues. Touchdowns can be kind of random though. Like not totally random, but kind of random. If a team decides to run in at the goal line, then that quarterback won't benefit from that team's touchdown. But if they get stuffed and they run a play action pass in the very next play for a score, all of a sudden that quarterback has four fantasy points. That one yard touchdown is technically worth more than a hundred yards passing, because you're getting points for that one yard as well. That leads to variance with pocket passing quarterbacks. Touchdown rate is the easiest metric to go to with this kind of thing. Touchdown rate is just touchdowns divided by attempts. The league average since 2011 has been 4.4%. And since 2011, we've had 67 quarterback seasons where the quarterback had 20 or more fantasy points per game. Of those 67, 27 did it while failing to hit 50 rush attempts. So they were super immobile quarterbacks. They weren't running the ball that much. And of those 27, their average touchdown rates were 6.4%. That's 2 percentage points higher than the league average. Getting to that number is not easy. Being in the 6.4% touchdown rate range, that's no easy task. In fact, only 7 quarterbacks over the last 13 years have gotten to that touchdown rate more than once in a season with 300 or more pass attempts. Those quarterbacks are basically all hall of fame quarterbacks. So what does that alone tell us? Well, it tells us that if you're going to draft a pocket passer with a higher end pick in fantasy, you're going to need variance on your side at least a little bit. You'll at least need it on your side a lot more than you would with a mobile quarterback, because those mobile quarterbacks are scoring points with their legs too. Let me break this down even further. I looked at ADP data via fantasydata.com since 2014 I then split quarterbacks into buckets. You've got the QB1 to the QB3 by ADP, the QB4 to the QB6 and so on. And I only included quarterbacks who then went on to play eight or more games in the season. I then took those quarterback groupings and I wanted to see how well they scored in points per game. So, the QB1 to the QB3 bucket, we've had 27 of them since 2014 play eight or more games in the season. And of those 27, over 96% of them, so 26 of the 27, scored 16 or more points per game. This is standard points, so 4 points per touchdown pass, 1 point per 25 yards. 70% of them scored 18 or more points, 52% of them scored 20 or more points. You get the idea.