510: The Impact Mobile Quarterbacks Have on Their Teammates

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ ZACHERAJJ zacher reson what's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at fandle and at Number five dot com. In this episode five and ten of the Late Round Podcast. So many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. At the start of the off season, I did an episode of the Late Round podcast on the importance of quarterback rushing. We live in a fantasy football world where higher end quarterbacks are finally becoming a little bit more valuable in single quarterback leagues, and it's all because more of the athletic dual threat quarterbacks are becoming really good passers too. They're not just average at throwing the football, they're good, and that combined with rushing production, makes them unicorns. Eventually, we'll have so many of those types of quarterbacks that will be back where we were just a few years ago at the position. If the QB fourteen is a dual threat passer who's cap of QB one numbers, then there's no need to reach for a quarterback in your fantasy draft, and that time may come sooner rather than later. Given this year's draft class. But if you haven't listened to that episode, it's episode four hundred and seventy two. I'd recommend listening to that before this one, even though the two episodes are only loosely related. I then got a mailbag question in March from Kevin. Kevin wrote, Hi, JJ, I'm wondering if rushing quarterbacks are a boon or a burden on the players around them from a fantasy perspective. Do rushing quarterbacks I'm not sure what the right rush attempts per game is to classify a quarterback as such consume a larger than average percent of their offenses fantasy production versus other quarterbacks. Do they cause the overall pie of team fantasy points to shrink or to grow? Thanks? Kevin. It's a really good question. If we're getting amped up about the influx of dual threat passers, and if the NFL is moving in this direction where coordinators are becoming more and more creative with these mobile quarterbacks, what does that mean for the players on those rushing quarterbacks teams. If a running back is playing with a quarterback who can run the ball, well, should we view that as a good thing or a bad thing for the running back. What about wide receivers and tight ends. That's what today's episode is all about. I'll look into the impact that rushing quarterbacks have on the rest of their teams and fantasy football before we get into that. Hey, golf fans, did you know that Fandel has a special free to play games centered around PGA Tour events. Make golf prop picks on the final round of any PGA tournament on CBS for your chance to win a share of five thousand dollars. Prior to the start of the final round, go to the Fandels Sportsbook app and submit answers to all the game's prop questions. Answer the most correctly for a chance to win prizes. Head over to Fandel for the next PGA Tour event and pick some props for the final round. Agent location restrictions apply. No purchase necessary, void where prohibited payouts paid and non wich drawble say credit that expires seven days after receipt. For more information, visitfandle dot com Slash free Games, Slash swing for the Green. Now, as that question from Kevin alluded to, it's hard to really define what a rushing quarterback is. Is it a quarterback who sees forty rush attempts in a season fifty sixty Where do we draw that line rather than define things in a black and white way, rather than say he's a mobile quarterback and he's not one based on a random filter. I approach this by looking at groups of quarterbacks. I looked at every quarterback season since twenty eleven, and I filtered out quarterbacks who ran the ball fifty or more times in the season while also being the team's primary quarterback. From there, I bucketed those players into three groups, quarterbacks who ran the ball fifty to sixty times, quarterbacks who ran sixty one to ninety times, and then the quarterbacks who ran the ball ninety one or more times. Those numbers are a little bit arbitrary, and they're not very symmetrical, but they do give us fairly similar sample sizes. To compare among from the fifty to sixty rush attempts group, we have thirty eight quarterbacks. Of the sixty one to ninety there's thirty four, and of the ninety one or greater there's twenty seven quarterback seasons. Such ninety nine total quarterback seasons. All other quarterback seasons since twenty eleven are in the generic non rushing quarterback group. Now, to make this podcast a little bit easier to understand, I'm going to call the fifty to sixty rush attempt group the moderately high rush attempt group. The sixty one to ninety rush attempt group will be the high rush attempt group, and the over ninety one is the very high rush attempt group. I'm very creative on the Late Round podcast. My goal in bucketing these players was then see if anything happened as we saw more and more rushes taken by a quarterback. What happened at the team level, What happened at the running back, wide receiver, and tight end level. Let's start at the team level. Over this time period, the average number of pass attempts across the league was about five hundred and fifty nine per season. So that includes all teams, which means it includes the teams that these rushing quarterbacks played for. Among the moderately high rush attempt group, which remember they're thirty eight of them, the average pass attempts per quarterback team was five hundred and forty nine, so about ten fewer pass attempts per season. We're seen from the group with moderately high quarterback rush attempts versus a random team, and that number is likely a little bit higher if we were to remove those rushing teams from the sample. The high rush attempts group averaged two fewer pass attempts than that, and then the very high rush attempts group, they averaged just four hundred and eighty nine pass attempts per season. That's about seventy fewer than the league average. Now keep in mind that very high quarterback rush attempt group, the group with quarterbacks who ran the ball more than ninety times in a single season. It's got a lot of duplicate players Lamar Jackson, Cam Newton, Josh Allen. It's represented by a smaller number of players. But even if you think Lamar Jackson's teams are bringing down that pass attempt average, that's not really the case. Only three we have, the twenty seven quarterbacks from the very high rush attempts group ended up having an above average season and pass attempts. If a quarterback is running the ball a lot, chances are his team isn't passing the ball a lot. Shocking I know this translates to pass to rush ratio. As well, not just the raw numbers. The average pass to rush ratio over the last decade in the NFL has been one point three to four. The moderate group is at one point two seven, the high group is also at one point twenty seven, and then the very high group one point zero two. So once again we don't see dramatic differences within these groups until we get a whole lot of rushing volume from quarterbacks. And once again, this isn't only due to some players skewing this sample. When teams are running their quarterbacks a lot, that means it's a running play. So it makes logical sense that when a play ends up being a run, it lowers the overall pass to rush ratio. So thus far we've learned nothing that wasn't already obvious. Teams with quarterbacks who run the ball a lot end up seeing low pass rates in low passing volume. The next question we should ask is does this affect the skill players on those quarterbacks teams? And the answer yes, When you're drafting, you should care if the player that you're drafting is attached to a rushing quarterback. Let's look at the moderate group first, on average their team running back fantasy points scored ranking was sixteen point eight, meaning on average, a backfield on a team with a quarterback who ran the ball fifty to sixty times in the season finished sixteenth to seventeenth in the league. That's pretty close to league average because the average is sixteen and a half. But as we move from moderately high quarterback rush attempts to high and very high, that number gets worse. Team running backs in the high group finished almost twentieth. Team running backs in the very high group finished almost nineteenth. So historically, when quarterbacks have hit sixty rush attempts in the season, his running backs haven't been as good in fantasy football. So why is that the case, Well, it's for a couple of reasons. I bring up rushing share and target share on this show all the time because it helps bring context to situations without being influenced by an individual offenses tendencies. A player seeing a high target share in one offense still may not see as many targets as a player with a moderately high target share in another. Looking at shares allows us to see how important positions or individual players were to their individual offenses, and then we can compare more easily. Across offenses. As we've already seen, teams with mobile quarterbacks are generally more run heavy. When teams are more run heavy, players need higher target shairs in order to see more raw volume, which then helps them in fantasy football. There's an idea that gets floated around that mobile quarterbacks don't target their running backs that much out of the backfield, and the data that I'm looking at sort of kind of backset up. Since twenty eleven, the average team running back target share has been nineteen point eight percent, so almost twenty percent a team to targets on average have gone to running backs. Among the moderate group are the quarterbacks who ran the ball fifty to sixty times in the season. The average running back target share was a little under nineteen percent, so lower than the league average. In the high group that number fell zero point three percentage points, so not a whole lot, And then in the very high group that number was seventeen point eight percent, so it was lower. It was exactly two percentage points lower than the league average. The thing is, we already know that as quarterback rushes go up, team passed to rush ratio generally goes down, So these are already run heavy teams, and then on top of that, they're generally not targeting their running backs at a league average rate. That compounds and makes it tough to find top tier running backs from those teams. And then there's the obvious piece to all this, and that's rush share. When quarterbacks are taking a large chunk of rush share for themselves, that leaves less for their running backs. Fortunately, these quarterbacks are in more run heavy offenses, so the running backs are still likely to see decent volume on the ground as long as they maintain a good enough rush share. But running back rush shares do decrease with more quarterback rushing. The moderate group running back rush share average was eighty two percent, the high group seventy nine percent, the very high group seventy three percent. Meanwhile, the league average over the last decade has been about eighty five percent, So you can think of it this way. Teams with quarterbacks who run the ball a lot see smaller rush shares for their running backs. That's totally logical. Fortunately, those teams are also pretty run heavy, so it comes out as a wash versus most other teams. But this all explains why running backs aren't as impactful in fantasy on those teams with mobile quarterbacks, they have smaller target shares, and that's on less passing volume, and they have smaller rush shares too. They may be more efficient at running the football, but this is a great example of why we chase volume in fantasy and not efficiency. When looking at wide receivers and tight ends on the target share front, there's really nothing statistically significant there. We see a slight bump and wide receiver target share among the more mobile quarterbacks, and everything is pretty similar at tight end. So if you're wondering where the running back targets are going in these offenses with rushing quarterbacks, it seems like they're going to the wide receiver position. The problem is because these offenses are less pass heavy, we see that result in worse wide receiver numbers. Among the moderate rushing quarterback group, the average team wide receiver rank and fantasy points scored has been seventeen and a half. Remember sixteen and a half is the league average. When we look at the high group or quarterbacks with sixty one to ninety rush attempts, the wide receiver rank falls the nineteenth and then with quarterbacks who run the ball ninety one or more times that ranking is between twenty first and twenty second. If you take a step back and try to digest these numbers, I think what this really comes down to is an exercise that focuses on projections. It's all completely lone. Teams that have quarterbacks that run the ball a lot, they generally are run heavy teams, and that has a trickle down effect. I always talk about how my projections start at a team level first. This is a perfect example of that. When a team is run heavy, it lowers the probability that the skill players on that team are going to be fantasy relevant. And when a quarterback is taking a larger chunk of his offense away and keeping it for himself, that's going to impact the skill position players on his team. Most people who play fantasy football aren't making projections. I get that. I'm not expecting you to sit down and work hours and hours building out projections. What I do think is beneficial, though, is recognizing how those projections are made and how everything works together. The bottom line is that good fantasy assets can absolutely come from offenses with mobile quarterbacks. It's just that we should also recognize that it's far more of an uphill battle for those skill position players and when we recognize that we still to at least think more rationally about the game of fantasy football. That's gonna do it for today's show. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've get subscribe to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and no forgots, follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. I'll be back later in the week with the Mailbag episode.