A quick and dirty look at how the New York Jets quarterbacks have performed against the league averages since the merger.

Just how do New York Jets (NYJ) quarterbacks (QBs) perform as compared to the average QB in the league? Since the start of the season, we've been down on Geno Smith, and for good reason. From this "QB controversy", a lot of discussions were borne here at Gang Green Nation (GGN). Many of us have wondered aloud why is it the NYJ cannot ever seem to have a competent QB. About a month ago, I had the idea to try and see just how true that belief is.

I must admit, when I started putting the numbers together for this, I had some ulterior motives. I envisioned a hilarious graph demonstrating Jets ineptitude at QB that would do the talking for me. As with many hypotheses though, the data did not nearly show what I thought it would.

DATA

The methodology involved here is rather simple. I simply took the statistics year by year from NFL.com's own statistics banks. I had two major requirements - the first being a simple cut of starting from the AFL-NFL merger in 1970. The second cut was more arbitrary, where I required that in order for me to include the QB's performance in my dataset, the QB must have thrown at least 100 attempts in that season. These were taken by hand; in retrospect, I should have just written a Python-based web scraper, but that's neither here nor there. My point in telling you this is that there is a (small) window of error here, although I've gone through and am reasonably sure the data set is good enough for us to draw some conclusions on.

One of the first questions here that I had was regarding the QB Rating stat that NFL.com provides. In case you weren't aware of this, the NFL actually has had several methods for calculating QB rating over its history (here's some history on it). So I had to confirm that the QB ratings that NFL.com was displaying was actually the rating based on the current method not the QB rating formula of the time. To do this, I did a quick sanity check on several players from 1970-1973 and 1980-1985 using the current formula. The current formula matched what NFL.com listed as the QB rating, confirming that even for the "older" players, the NFL was using the current metric.

The only tricky part that really remained was making sure that teams that I had listed as AFC teams were actually AFC teams. For example, making sure that I had the Seahawks in the NFC for that one season in 1976 (before they went back in 2002), and having Tampa Bay as in the AFC in that same year.

DISCUSSION

right-click > "view image" for big

Above, is the results of that data. In red diamonds, I have plotted the arithmetic average (not the median) of the AFC teams, and in blue diamonds, I have plotted the arithmetic average of the NFC teams. These include the NYJ QBs. I have also plotted, through various markers, the more prominent NYJ QBs by name, and everyone else under the "other" marker. You will notice some years where more than one NYJ QB in the season. Again, remember the cutoff was a minimum of 100 passing attempts. Injuries, and just plain bad QB years (sound familiar?) will result in more than one NYJ-related data point on the plot.

One thing that the discerning reader may notice is the jump around 1978-1979. For the younger football fans, you may not be familiar with the so-called "dead ball era" (roughly 1966 - 1977) which has the majority of the greatest defenses in NFL history. It's important to realize that "pass interference" meant something very different before 1978. Before then, you could bump a receiver anywhere on the field, thanks to DBs like Mel Blount, that all changed. Another huge change in 1978 was that the offensive line (OL) was allowed to use their open hands and extend their arms. Prior to that, an OL had to use their fists (and had to keep them close in) to block a guy. Both these rules lead to a huge opening up of the passing game.

Now, let's talk about the NYJ QBs. I was pleasantly surprised that the QB I grew up watching, Ken O'Brien, is arguably the best QB we've ever had. During his career, he was consistently at or above league average of the time (often times considerably better). Chad Pennington can brag similar successes (for at least the seasons he was healthy enough to throw 100 passes). Unfortunately, aside from that, we've had very little success at the position, and we've been considerably worse than average in recent decades.

And that's the thing that really colors our perceptions, I think. We've had many random QBs see significant play time since ~1992. The major names of course are Vinny Testaverde, Chad Pennington, and Mark Sanchez, but look at all those "other" QBs who largely dominate our memories. More damningly, look at Mark Sanchez, who didn't even give us a near average performance in his time in New York. The fact is, when we look at this, it seems clear that we've had a tradition of failure at the position since the 90s, barring a brief era of success with Chad Pennington and the occasional good year by Vinny Testaverde.

Let's go one layer deeper though. Just plotting how our QBs do against an arithmetic average is not telling us the whole story. What if a year just had a wide distribution of QB ratings? That would mean that a "better than average" (or worse than average) performance doesn't mean a whole lot. That is why I provide the following table to you, GGN reader. Below, I also provide the max/min performances, along with the standard deviation, and how our QBs ranked.

Originally, I was going to go ahead as if QB rating is normally behaved. That may or may not be the best assumption, but given central limit theorem, I think this is a good approximation for an internet fan board. That said, I've pulled a few histograms randomly and they don't look as normal as I'd have liked, so I think the data will have to stand on its own. That, and SB Nation informs me that this article is already over 1700 words, so perhaps that's an exercise for another investigation.

WHAT TO DO?

While our failure at the position is nowhere near as drastic as I'd thought, we still have had tremendous struggles for a long, long time. We've had a few occasional flashes but we've largely struggled at QB. Yes, we've had a few good performances by QBs, but since Ken O'Brien, Chad Pennington is the only QB who performed consistently above average. Too bad he was made of glass.

Most of us agree something must be done; however, I am not convinced that just getting a new (or veteran) QB will change much. There's a systematic problem that goes beyond just a QB. It is clear by looking at this data that it is not localized to a head coach, it's not localized to a offensive gameplan, it's not even localized to a scout. There's something fundamentally wrong with this organization's ability to have a consistently good passing game.

What is that problem? I've been recently saying it's the ownership failing to put together a good front office. I'm no longer even convinced of that anymore. What can possibly be done to save this team from the consistent failures we've seen at this position for so long? We can argue over who we want drafted all we want (take Prescott!), but I think one thing is clear here:

The problem goes beyond who is playing QB of the team. We should ask ourselves instead - what is wrong with this organization that we've had such consistent failures at quarterback?