11-28-2021, 11:31 PM
(11-28-2021, 09:46 PM)Shake n Blake Wrote: Yeah he was bad today, but generally speaking he revived his career in Tennessee and played great for the most part.
I'd love to see a study on good QBs with a good run game vs bad. Particularly interesting would be good QBs who went from having a great run game to a poor one.
Ben built a HOF resume with a great run game. Since the Steelers started leaning on him more over the past decade, he hasn't achieved much. Some empty calorie numbers, I guess.
Of course, I guess that's delving more into team success rather than isolating pass success.
[color=var(--darkreader-inline-color)]There is a summary at the very bottom of this post if you'd like to skip to the answer. To begin, I am using nflfastR and the programming language R to gather and analyze all of my data. nflfastR is a library of play-by-play data from 1999-current and R is a programming language used for statistical analysis. I am running my regressions using the data pack add-on within Excel. I gathered a dataset that contained every game and every pass attempt for the following QBs...[/color]
Matt Ryan
Tony Romo
Matt Stafford
Peyton Manning
Tom Brady
Drew Brees
Ben Roethlisberger
Russell Wilson
Kirk Cousins
Dak Prescott
Patrick Mahomes
I have this data grouped by QB, Season, Week so it gives per game data. Next, I gathered every teams rushing data from 2010-current and grouped it the same way, so we have per game rushing metrics going all the way back to 2010. Finally, I added a column onto my passing numbers and assigned the rushing metrics to each game so we could have all of the applicable rushing and passing data together.
The total column is the total passing attempts for that QB in the game. Next, I ran a few regressions to find the relationship between a few metrics to see if there is any correlation. I am going to post the results below for the metrics that I tested. Here is what we have...
YPC (Yards per carry) to Passer Rating - Very weak relationship. Over the course of our dataset, only 1% of the variation in a QBs passer rating can be explained by YPC.
YPC to YPA (Yards per attempt) - Very weak relationship. Again, over the entirety of our dataset, only 1% of the variation in a QBs passer rating can be explained by YPC.
Rush Attempts to Rating - Weak relationship. Roughly 6% of the variation in a QBs passer rating can be attributed to rush attempts.
Rush Attempts to YPA - Same as relationship to rating. Weak relationship, 6% of variation.
Total Rushing Yardage to Rating - Weak relationship. Only 5% of the variation in a QBs rating can be explained by total rushing yardage.
Total Rushing Yardage to YPA - Weak relationship. Only 4% of the variation in YPA can be explained by total rushing yardage.
I find it interesting that the total rushing attempts and rushing yardage have a stronger relationship than YPC. One explanation I have for this is that it could just be late game rushing attempts that are salting the game away in a victory where the QB had a good game. In total, the answer appears to still be no, a strong running game doesn't seem to have an effect on a QBs performance. The running game and passing game remain independent. For every game where the QB had a good game passing and the team did well running, there is a game where the QB had a good game passing and the team did horribly running the ball. If you want me to compare other metrics or provide numbers in a different way, let me know and I will put it together. I thought about creating a thread but this isn't Bengals related, so I didn't want to clog the board. [/size][/color]
TL;DR - No, running game success doesn't correlate to passing game success.
