Quote:
Originally Posted by PAChiefsGuy
Did Bortles also run for over 1200 yds and have 7 rushing TDs in a season? You can't compare Lamar to other QBs based purely on passing because of the dual threat he is.
He's a good QB. I don't think he is as great as many make him out to be but he certainly isn't as bad as many on here are making him out to be. He won the MVP award and got voted #1 player last year for a reason
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The point is that citing TDs thrown doesn't accomplish anything.
To date there's been no evidence that red zone performance is a repeatable skill. When it's been analyzed over any meaningful sample size, it typically just dillutes into a sample size error.
40% of Lamar Jackson's red zone attempts last season were thrown for TDs. That's IMPOSSIBLY high. That's like those guys that come up in September in baseball and hit 30% of their fly-balls for homers. Those guys invariably regress the following season to a typical 17% sort of figure.
League-wide, 23% of the red zone passes thrown were for touchdowns. Go ahead and give Jackson 25% as a normalized figure after accounting for regression and you're looking at 15 red zone TDs instead of 24.
So a 'realistic' projection of TD passes for Jackson, even in a year like he had last year, is more along the lines of 26-27 touchdowns. Still a fine year, but to cite the TD passes he threw is to give him credit for a 'skill' that simply doesn't exist. Perhaps not surprisingly, Jackson's TD/Pass rate in the red zone OUTSIDE of 2019? Exactly 25%.
Don't cite that stat - it doesn't mean anything. There's no year over year predictive value to red zone TD stats. Even quarterbacks w/ great red zone tools (Mahomes, for instance) show MASSIVE variance in year to year TD numbers inside the 20. Mahomes threw a mere 11 in 56 red zone attempts last season (19%) after throwing 35 in 96 attempts the season prior (36%).
They wash out as static over any meaningful sample size.