766: Revisiting the Impact of Mobile Quarterbacks

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacheras j je Zacharson. What's up everyone, It's JJ zach Aresen in this episode seven hundred and sixty six of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Two years ago, on almost this exact same date, I did an episode in the impact that mobile quarterbacks have on their teammates and Fantasy football, and with more and more of an emphasis on dual threat quarterbacks and fantasy I thought it would be a good idea to run it back. The question today is simple, how do mobile quarterbacks impact their teammates in fantasy football? If a running back has a mobile quarterback under center, is it a good thing or is it a bad thing for fantasy purposes? What about that wide receiver and tight end? I'll help answer that question today. Now, before getting into things, I just wanted to send one reminder for you guys to check out Lateround dot com. Why you ask because over on lateround dot com you can purchase the completed Late Round Prospect Guide and you can pre order the Late Round Draft Guide. The Prospect Guide is all you need for your rookie drafts. The Draft Guide is everything you need to know for your season long drafts. The Draft Guide is currently nineteen ninety nine to pre order, and when it launches on June thirtieth, that price is going to jump up to twenty four to ninety nine. You can learn more about both guides right now over on Lateround dot com. Now, I'm not going to be approaching this episode exactly as I did the last one. I like to try to look at things from as many different angles as possible. Here's where I'm gonna begin. I look back to twenty eleven and I noted every quarterback who had ten games played while leading his team in pass attempts. That gave me our quarterback population. Essentially, if I'm trying to figure out how mobile quarterbacks impact their teammates, I need that quarterback to have actually played for his team. Right, So essentially, we have all starting quarterbacks since twenty eleven, the quarterbacks who played the most for their team. I then took all of those quarterbacks and I started bucketing them by the number of rush attempts they had during that season, starting at zero rush attempts to nine rush attempts. That's one bucket, then ten to nineteen then twenty to twenty nine and so on. I did that all the way to one hundred and fifty rush attempts. When I reached one p fifty, I just grouped every quarterback together who had one hundred and fifty or more rush attempts, and for the record, there were four of them, or four seasons where a quarterback had one hundred and fifty or more rush attempts. Next, I wanted to see general team trends based on those buckets. I was curious to see how team pass attempts now team pass rates changed from one bucket to the next. Teams with quarterbacks who ran the ball very few times, will say twenty or fewer times, they ended up ranking about thirteenth and pass attempts during that season on average, and they were about thirteenth and pass rate two, meaning they were above average in those categories. Their teams threw the ball more than the average team, And that makes sense intuitively. If fewer rush attempts are going to the quarterback, then those players are probably being converted into pass attempts or at least some of those plays. So as you moved down from group to group, pass attempt rank and pass rate rank decreased. For example, in the group of quarterbacks who ran the ball just twenty to twenty nine times in a given season, their average pass attempt rank was twelve point eight. Their pass rate rank was thirteenth, again above average numbers. For the group where the quarterback ran the ball fifty to fifty nine times, so thirty more times across the season versus the previous group, those rankings dropped to about eighteenth, meaning they were more run heavy on average than the ordinary team. Once I saw these clear trends from group to group, I also noticed something else. There were pretty distinct thresholds where particular drops in pass attempts and pass rates occurred. For example, teams with quarterbacks who ran the ball zero to thirty nine times across the season, they had much higher pass rates than the rest of the groups. But teams with quarterbacks who ran the ball eighty or more times there was another drop in pass rate and pass attempts with that group. That's when I decided it might be easiest for this podcast to make broader buckets so I can communicate these ideas a little bit easier. Rather than looking at each of these quarterbacks and groups of ten, I decided to look at three distinct groups, the non runners, the semi runners, and the definite Runners. The non Runners consisted of teams with quarterbacks and that zero to thirty nine rush attempt bucket, so their quarterbacks had zero attempts all the way through thirty nine. The semi Runners consisted of all teams with quarterbacks who ran the ball forty to seventy nine times in the season. And then the definite Runners consisted of teams with quarterbacks who ran the ball eighty plus times in the season. They were definitely mobile quarterbacks. So this gave us three groups that had very different passing profiles. It'll make it easier to follow on the podcast now, just so you know, the non Runners had an average pass attempt rank of thirteen point seven, meaning of all the teams with quarterbacks who ran the ball thirty nine or fewer times since twenty eleven, their pass attempt rank in a given season was thirteen point seven. The average would be sixteen point five since there are thirty two teams in the league, so these teams had above average pass attempt numbers. The semi Runners ranked seventeen point three in pass attempts. The Definite runners, the guys who ran the ball a ton their teams ranked twenty four point five. None of this should be super surprising, though, because we know that teams with mobile quarterbacks are generally more run heavy. What might be surprising is what that then means for the personnel on those teams in fantasy football. Let's look at wide receivers and tight ends first. And for the record, all the data that I'll be talking about today is PPR related, but there's an obvious correlation here with wide receivers and tight ends. Teams with more pass attempts would have more targets. Teams with more targets would then have a better chance, more than likely of scoring fantasy points through the air, and that's what we generally see. The team wide receivers from the non runner group had an average rank of fourteen point five and fantasy point scored. Meaning of all the teams that had a non runner at quarterback, a guy who was mostly a pocket passer, these teams had a quarterback with fewer than forty rush attempts across the season, those teams usually saw their wide receivers score more fantasy points than the average team in football. I'm gonna be talking about team scorers throughout this podcast. I understand that within that team a player could have like a thirty percent target chair or something, and he could still be good for fantasy purposes. But we're finding trends first, that's what's most important. Now. For the semi runner teams, the wide receivers ranked seventeen point six, so they were slightly below average. And then for the definite runner teams, the average wide receiver rank was twenty they ranked twentieth, So the more mobile the quarterback, the fewer points of wide receiver was scoring or a team of wide receivers. What's interesting is that the numbers weren't as dramatic a tight end. In fact, the best tight end rank came from the semi runner group. The non runners had an average tight end rank of sixteen point two and fantasy points scored. The semi runners were at fifteen point five, so they we're scoring more points in the league average. And then the definite runners tight ends they had an average rank and fantasy points scored of eighteen point three, so things were a lot tighter. Some may be wondering why that's the case, and my thinking behind that is that if you have a mobile quarterback, you may have less of a need for a tight end to stand on the line to help the block because you feel more comfortable with the quarterback under pressure. If your quarterback's a statue, you might need all the blocking help that you can get. So overall, wide receivers tend to be impacted more than tight ends with mobile quarterbacks. The more mobile the quarterback, the more rush attempts the quarterback is taking, the fewer fantasy points those positions scored. It's exaggerated more a wide receiver than a tight end. Now, running back is even more interesting, in my opinion, because a lot of people don't seem to think that it matters that much that a mobile quarterback might even help a running back because that running back becomes more efficient. But historically, mobile quarterbacks have not been good for running backs. In Fantasy five, if you look at our non runner quarterback teams, their running backs had an average Fantasy points scored rank of fourteen point nine, so once again, these teams were above average at scoring fantasy points compared to a normal team in the league. The semi runners had a running back point scored rank of sixteen point six. They were about average. The definite runners had one of nineteen point eight. This data definitely points to running backs not performing as well with mobile quarterbacks. But why why is that happening. Wouldn't you assume a mobile quarterback is opening up running lanes for these running backs, allowing them to thrive. Yeah, that's true. Running backs can be more efficient in these offenses, but they're also number one, scoring fewer touchdowns overall because the mobile quarterback takes more of those touchdowns. And then number two, and this one's really important, they're seeing a lower target share in their offense. Mobile quarterbacks don't check down to running backs as much. Maybe it's because they can just take off and run with the ball themselves, but team target chairs at running back are definitely lower with more mobility at quarterback. For instance, non running quarterback teams have seen an average running back target share rank of fourteen point four since twenty eleven. That jumps up to a rank of eighteen point one with the semi runners, and then it's twenty one with the definite runners. Twenty first, we've had forty four different quarterback seasons within our definite runner sample, so forty four times we've seen a team's lead quarterback hit eighty or more rush attempts. As you'd imagine, there's a lot of repeats in that sample. Players like Lamar Jackson have done this multiple times. So of those forty four instances, we only have fifteen unique quarterbacks, so the sample size is not massive. But it's not like we're looking at just one or two quarterbacks here. It's not like one or two of these guys just have this certain tendency to not throw the ball to the running back and they're skewing this data completely. Okay, now get this, of those forty four seasons, we had six where the team ranked in the top ten and running back target share. So of those seasons where the quarterback ran the ball a whole lot, only six of those seasons saw a top ten target share rate at running back. Two of those seasons was Cam Newton throwing the ball to Christian McCaffrey, who's one of the best pass catching running backs that we've ever seen. One of them was Daniel Jones last year throwing it to Saquon Barkley, who's another good pass catcher and who played on a team with literally nothing at wide receiver and tight end. One was Trod Taylor in twenty seventeen. That team had Lashaw McCoy. You know who the number two player and receptions was on that team. Lashaw McCoy was number one, Charles Clay was number two. You go example by example, And the reason these individual seasons seemed to buck the trend was because there were obvious reasons for them to buck the trend. The fact is, the vast majority of these quarterbacks aren't giving their running backs a juicy target shair, and as the rushing volume increases at quarterback, the target shair decreases at running back. You can look at this another way too. Among the teams with non runners at quarterback, thirty eight percent of them ended up top ten and fantasy points scored at running back. That drops to thirty one percent among the semi runners, and then it's just thirteen point six percent for the definite runners. Literally, all three positions in fantasy football tend to score fewer fantasy points with mobile quarterbacks. Again, these are just general trends. I'm not even talking about individual players. But individual players will score more fantasy points when their team in general is scoring more fantasy points. And it's because these mobile quarterbacks are gobbling up more of their offense for themselves. Now, like I said, I haven't done this study in a couple of years. Maybe things are changing. Maybe the last two seasons have seen dramatically different numbers. I mean, after all, look at Philadelphia AJ Brown, DeVante Smith, Dallas Goddard. They were all very good in twenty twenty two. Not only that, though, but these mobile quarterbacks are becoming better passers Josh Allen Jalen Hurts able to actually sustain production through the air and on the ground. These quarterbacks are doing more than the quarterbacks who ran the ball a lot in like twenty fourteen. So let's take a look at a smaller sample size, which is the last two years. Let's look at this exact same data. What's very obvious with this new data is that running back has still been pretty rough. Within the group of teams with definite running quarterbacks. Over the last two years, the running backs as a team have ranked almost twenty first in Fantasy points scored. Their target share rank is almost twenty second. So arguably the running back position has gotten worse for these mobile quarterbacks. At wide receiver, the non rushing quarterback teams average a wide receiver points ranking of fourteen point five, again well above average. The next group was seventeen point one, and the definite runners was eighteen point six, so the number might not be as dramatic, but the trend still exists. The more mobile the quarterback, the fewer fantasy points these wide receivers are scoring. What's interesting about this data, though, is that a higher percentage of teams with definite running quarterbacks had team wide receivers ranking the top ten and fantasy points scored. Now, small sample size alert, for sure, but of the ten quarterbacks with eighty or more rush attempts over the last two seasons, four of them had wide receivers ranked in the top ten as a team and wide receiver fantasy scoring. That's a forty percent rate, and that rate was the highest of any of the subsets, which is kind of crazy to me. Even when there's a small sample in the same exact trend exists. At tight end, we've got a smaller gap in overall ranking as we did before. We didn't see as dramatic numbers at tight end, but the definite runner group still had the lowest tight end scoring rank on average. However, these teams with high volume rushers at quarterback, they finished with top ten tight end fantasy scorers at just as high of a rate as the other two groups. So to put this all another way, because I know it's kind of hard to follow, over the last two years, we've seen this interesting separation. The averages all look pretty similar, but it's because there are haves and have nots within that definite runner group. But then you look at the quarterbacks who are in that group. The quarterbacks who have been running the ball eighty plus times a season over the last two years. Lamar Jackson, Jalen Hurts, and Josh Allen, those are three of them. And then there's Daniel Jones, Justin Fields, Kyler Murray, and Marcus Mariota. Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, and Kyler Murray are the three quarterbacks who've given us team wide receiver rankings in the top ten and fantasy points scored over the last two years. The rest have largely been complete trash within that department. They've ranked on average twenty seventh in wide receiver points scored. Now, at first, when I was analyzing this, I thought to myself, within this small sample, we may be seeing that a select number of quarterbacks are doing so much now for an offense. They're running the ball a ton, but they're also being so efficient through the air. So this data, this mobile quarterback data, just doesn't apply to them. That was my initial thought, But then I took another step back. The guys who have bucked this trend of the last two years are Alan Hurts and Murray. Like I just said, what are those quarterbacks have in common? Stefan Diggs, DeVante Smith, and A. J. Brown DeAndre Hopkins. This then led me down a completely new path. With all this mobile quarterback stuff. What we've seen is that mobile quarterbacks tend to be a bad thing for all positions in fantasy football at a very very high level. They're not good for wide receivers and tight ends, probably because of passing volume. And even though running backs might be more efficient, they're losing touchdown equity and they're generally seeing lower target chairs when the quarterback is running the ball more and those lower target chairs are on lower passing volume. It's not a good combination. But then we still see the Eagles do what they did in twenty twenty two with their wide receivers or what Josh Allen's been able to do with the Bills. And then it hit me. If you look at those teams, you notice that one, maybe two positional groups are thriving, but one of them is not. The Eagles and the Bills in particular are great examples of this. The Eagles got great fantasy production from their wide receivers in twenty twenty two. They ranked sixth in the league and points scored at the position. Now, Dallas Goddard was good because he saw a huge target shair. He was also injured, though, and that team actually ranked nineteenth and tight end point scored. And then as for the team's running backs, I mean, Miles Sanders was fine, but the whole group ranked twenty fourth and fantasy point scored at the position. So one positional group looked really good for the Eagles, the other ones didn't look as good. And it was the exact same deal for Buffalo. Buffalo wideouts ranked fifth and fantasy points scored last year, but their running backs were twenty seventh, their tight ends were twenty sixth. It's almost like these mobile quarterbacks are still taking a chunk of their offenses fantasy points even if one positional group is thriving, and that's exactly what the data shows. Let's shift our focus back to all of our data since twenty eleven, and let's go back to our groups of non rushing quarterback teams, semi rushing quarterback teams, and definite rushing quarterback teams. When looking at the non rushing quarterback teams since twenty eleven, twenty nine percent of them were able to give us two positional group rankings in the top ten and fantasy point scored. So a team with a quarterback who ran the ball fewer than forty times, they had two of a running back, wide receiver, a tight end positional group finishing in the top ten and fantasy point scored. It could have been wide receivers in running backs. It could have been wide receivers and tight ends. It could have been running backs and tight ends. They had two positional groups ranking in the top ten. As I just noted, the Bills and Eagles failed to do that in twenty twenty two. They only had one positional group. So next is the semi runner group. They had more than one positional group in the top ten at a nineteen percent rate, so that rate is now dropping. It dropped by about ten percent. Now, let's go to the definite rusher group. That group of quarterbacks had more than one top ten positional group in fantasy point scored at a two point three percent rate, And there we have it. You see, there's not this specific formula that you have to use here that if you're staring down a player on a team with a mobile quarterback during your draft, then you have to fade that player. Trends definitely tell us they won't perform as well. They're gonna have a tougher time scoring fantasy points because their environment is not as good. But there's a lot more to it. You obviously have to look at the player himself first and foremost. I'll always tell you to do that. If he's talented, if he's good, then he has a chance to capture a large enough share of his offense he can overcome his team situation. But if you're bullish in a certain positional group in an offense with a high volume rushing quarterback, chances are, if you're right about that prediction, both of the other positions on that team are likely to struggle. Maybe not an individual player, because like I said, a player can capture a larger target share or a larger share of his offense. But you're absolutely gonna need that for that player in order for him to thrive. Again, we've seen forty four seasons since twenty eleven where a quarterback ran the ball eighty or more times. Of those forty four seasons, just one of them featured a quarterback with multiple positional groups finishing in the top ten and Fantasy point scored. And guess what that came from Kyler Murray in twenty twenty one. That season, Cardinals running backs were ninth in Fantasy point scored. They barely got in the top ten. And guess what they're wide receivers were also ninth. The bottom line here, you guys, is that mobile quarterbacks take away plays from an offense. When that quarterback decides to run or where there's a play designed for him to run, all of the other dudes in that offense aren't touching the ball, and there's a finite number of plays that a team's going to run in a given game. A team can't run one hundred plus plays over and over again. There's not enough time. So if some of those plays are going solely to the quarterback, then those plays aren't benefiting his teammates from a fantasy perspective. It's really that simple of a concept, but it's still a concept that you can exploit during your fantasy drafts. That's it for today's show, though thanks to all of you for listening. If you've yet subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't fit to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening to everyone. Talk to you later in the week with the Mailbag Show.