|
Drinen rambles about something having to do with:
Daunte Culpepper
Introduction to these player comments
Do mobile QBs hold their fantasy value as well as pocket passers do? I think most people tend to be just a tad uneasy with players who don't get their points the conventional way, and running QBs are certainly guilty of that. But is this uneasiness justified? Apparently not. I looked at all above-the-baseline QBs from 1970 to 2000 who played 8 or more games the next year. For each QB, I computed the percentage of his fantasy points that came from rushing. I then sorted the list and cut it in half. In other words, now I've got two equal-sized groups of QBs: the "mobile QBs" and the "stationary QBs." How did the two groups do the next year?
What explains this? I immediately thought of one possibility. Mobility is generally related to age. Young QBs are typically more mobile than old QBs. Young QBs also tend to hold value better than old QBs. Maybe that's all there is to it. To check, I broke the data set into old QBs (29 and over) and young QBs (28 and under) and re-ran the study for each group. For both the old and the young groups, mobile QBs held value better (just a little better) than stationary QBs. In other words, fast young QBs held value better than slow young QBs and fast old QBs held value better than slow old QBs. Both of these results were a little weaker than the overall result was, so part of it may be due to age. But that's not all of it. My guess (and this is just a guess) is that mobile QBs hold value better because their more versatile skill sets allow them to compensate more easily for the shortcomings of the rest of the offense. The loss of a couple of key offensive linemen or a key receiver would seem to be more of a problem for someone like Kurt Warner than it would be for a more mobile guy like Daunte Culpepper, who has the ability to manufacture an extra second or two if necessary. Another key question here is whether mobile QBs are more likely to get injured than slow-footed QBs are. It's not clear which way this one will go. After all, mobility and agility can be used to run into hits (think: Culpepper barrelling into a linebacker), but they can also be used to escape hits (think: Culpepper slipping out of bounds on a play where Warner would have been creamed). This issue isn't addressed by the above study because that study uses fantasy points per game as its measure of effectiveness. So we'd better look into this. I took the same set of QBs as before, but I removed the restriction on games played the next year. The results: The mobile QBs missed an average of 2.4 games the next year. The stationary QBs missed an average of 2.4 games the next year. Interesting. If you break this one down by age, though, you do start to see just a little bit of difference.
|