I do not want him to succeed if Rosen doesn’t beat him out by game 4 I’m going to be pissed. Fits isn’t going to win a championship here he’s to old and erratic. If we’re going to build this right than we need to go Rosen and if he sucks we draft one next year.

Futz was always a stopgap not an answer and he will hurt us by winning 5-6 and than getting hurt or going into his typical nosedive.

Maybe all the positive articles are to light a smoke stack under Rosen’s ***

 

Yeah lol. That article was written after game 2 of last season. Fitz had a tremendous start last season with 8 TD's to 1 INT in his first two games with ratings of 156.2 and 144.4. But that was with only 61 passing attempts and you really need 150+ for any kind of reliability.

The article asks "What's next for Ryan Fitzpatrick". Well.. what came next was 6 games over which he threw more INT's than TD's with a combined 80.62 rating when the league average was 92.9. Total passing attempts for those 6 games was 185. First two games obviously count, but Fitz is a backup QB and we're in trouble if he's our starter come next season. Guy does have some exciting games though.

 

Yeah he's a cool dude no doubt. But you said the article talked about who Fitz is and "why he's been so successful in the NFL". It's that second part – the part that deals with QB ability – that I was referencing. Fitz is NOT a successful NFL QB unless mediocre is considered successful. So if you just want to talk about who he is as a person that's fine, but let's not somehow suggest he's a good NFL QB while doing so.

 

There have been several notable QBs that have blossomed late in their careers and still gotten their teams to the Superbowl. Rich Gannon was considered over the hill. The one that Fitz reminds me of is Chris Chandler, 8 different teams over 17 years. Took Atlanta to the SB with a regular season record of 14-2. He looked unstoppable. If Rosen doesn't start a game this season and we make it to the playoffs behind Fitz, how can anybody complain? Rosen will be a better player for it next season.

 

Anyone that plays for even a few years in the NFL can say they've achieved success from a personal standpoint and Fitz has done quite a bit more than that so I agree he's had success from a personal perspective. But playing on 8 teams because you can't manage to lead ANY team to a winning record (every team Fitz has started for he's had a losing record as a starter except for Houston where he ended up 6-6) is more a sign of failure not success.

As far as the probability we'll make the playoffs or not, however low that is of course I'll hope we catch lightning in a bottle and make a highly improbable run. Stuff happens in sports. Leicester City had 5000:1 odds to win the Premier League in 2015-2016 but won it.. I still remember Rulon Gardener winning the gold medal in the 2000 Olympics defeating one of the most dominant champions ever in any sport: Aleksandr Karelin. Hell, just days ago Ruiz beat Joshua which was totally unexpected (nowhere near as unlikely odds-wise as the first two examples, but still..). So stuff happens and I hope it happens to us too.

But.. back to realism.. here are the odds of winning 10 or more games IF you assume we are an X-win team on average:
X=4: 0.16%
X=5: 0.98%
X=6: 3.74%
X=7: 10.43%
X=8: 22.72%
X=9: 40.50%
X=10: 60.93%

and that's just to get into the playoffs. I guess if we see evidence we're more of a 7 or 8 win team rather than 6 or below I'll start to consider it more seriously. Personally.. I care more about seeing evidence we have a good coach this season than actual wins. But yeah, I also hope we'll be one of those highly unexpected success stories in sports.

 

He's successful in that he's stayed relevant in the league for a number of years. Success isn't only measured by wins and losses or incredible stats.

 

Its a possibility that probably wont happen though. You dont go from being average every year, he has one season Id consider above average in what now 13 years, to being amazing.

If he was 27....yeah maybe Id think he could develop into that guy. Hes never shown the ability to put together a consistently hot season. I see no reason he will now at his age.

Im 99% sure he probably looked just as good in other camps too. Its just kind of who he is to me personally and Im fairly generous towards players ability to succeed usually.

 

In that sense he's like a Jay Cutler where you get from him a bimodal distribution of games. It's feast or famine. He'll singlehandely win you games, and he'll also singlehandedly lose them.

If you're stuck with a QB who plays roughly average like Fitzpatrick, what you'd rather have is an Alex Smith, game manager type, who plays at that level much more consistently and thereby allows the rest of the team to win a greater percentage of games.

 

What that's really a measure of is how poorly a team stands to play in the present-day NFL with a quarterback who's significantly below average. That allows the average QBs like Fitzpatrick to have lengthy careers, usually for multiple teams.

 

No, dude. It's because there simply aren't that many elite QBs. I don't know why people seem to think that there is there all these elite QBs out there to be had.

Nonetheless, that's a completely different argument. Bottom line is, the guy has had a long career in the NFL, largely as a starting QB. He is successful. He's not AS successful as other better QBs, but he has been successful.

 

Yeah, regardless of perception, I've never seen a bimodal distribution of stats like passer rating for any QB that's played a long time. To get a bimodal distribution the QB would either have to have 2 vastly separate phases of his career or play in 2 vastly different environments. Otherwise, every player will mostly play around his average.

Here are the distributions of 2018-adjusted passer ratings for Cutler and Fitzpatrick. As you can see they're unimodal even though the distributions have different levels of platykurtosis/leptokurtosis (meaning how "flat" or "pointy" the peaks are):

 

You never saw the video of that last year? It was one of the funniest press conferences I've ever watched and his "We just have to stay humble" line had be dying. Dude is hard not to like.

 

Not to pick on you or anything, but those are hilarious sentences.

One at a time: to say it's a "possibility that probably won't happen" is a form of redundancy as funny as saying 90% of the time it will definitely occur lol (which is the same as saying 90% of the time it will occur). To be clear, "probably" means there IS a possibility it can occur but that you are quantifying the frequency of occurrence. So no need to say there's a possibility of a probability.

The second sentence is like saying there's a probability of a probability lol. In that case you multiply the probabilities to get the overall probability. So if there's a 90% probability it will occur 80% of the time you multiply 0.9*0.8 = 0.72 = 72% it will occur.

Anyway.. like I said no big deal but that was hilarious stuff.

 

Four 400+ yard games in seven starts show what he's capable of. That's elite territory. A good OC calling plays and receivers stepping up could keep that kind of a streak going. Not saying it will but it could. I'm a glass 3/4 full kind of guy.

 

@cbrad (Sorry meant to quote)

The sentence makes perfect sense if you are using the words like a regular human would.

A possibility implies something that could happen versus something that could not. Following?

The unlikely part modifies the original possibility. Saying that while it is possible, yes, the actual liklihood is extremely small and not something you should be ganging your hat on.

Im unsure what youre failing to grasp about English or why its funny. Not to pick on you...but you just made the statisticians equivalent of a fart joke.

 

No, even in English vernacular what I said is true. Saying "it's a possibility it probably won't happen" is the same thing as saying "it probably won't happen". In fact your whole post was arguing precisely that it "probably won't happen".

 

If you would, do that for Alex Smith, just for a comparison.

 

The problem is that he plays a high risk, high reward style. If he were to shave off about a yard and a half from his average yards per attempt, and if that would result in decreasing his interception rate about 50%, he would then be among the best quarterbacks in the league.

 

Well that is true too. There is certainly a dearth of elite quarterbacks.

 

Great, thank you. I think what I should've said was that Cutler and Fitzpatrick give you flatter distributions with the about the same average as Smith's, meaning that they're giving you a greater rate of both "winning" games and "losing" games, whereas Smith is giving you a more consistently average game. All three play at about the same level on average, but Cutler and Fitzpatrick are your gunslingers, whereas Smith is your game manager.

 

It's a bad trait to have because, yes, turnovers are so strongly correlated with winning in the NFL.

Take Tannehill in 2016 for example. Through the first five games he averaged roughly 8.3 yards per attempt, which is fairly high (especially for him), with an average passer rating of about 81. The team was 1-4, largely because his interception rate was about 5% per game.

Take the next eight games that season. The team was 7-1, and his average passer rating was 102.6. Has average yards per attempt decreased to about 7.7, which is about average in the league, but so did his interception rate -- down from about 5% per game to about 1.9%.

So he played more conservatively, and the team did much better. When your quarterback's passer rating is nearly 103 as opposed to 81, your team has a tremendously higher chance of winning, and that was accomplished by reining him in, not by making him more aggressive.

 

There's a tradeoff here though. For example, INT% has a -0.414 correlation with win% across NFL history but TD% has a 0.571 correlation with win% so increasing TD% is more important than decreasing INT%. And if both increase similarly for a given QB for higher risk plays, then that QB should have more higher risk plays. That's only looking at 2 stats of course.. just pointing out there's a tradeoff. Ultimately, one should compare summary stats like passer rating in "higher risk" vs. "lower risk" situations to see which approach is better for a given QB (those stats aren't readily available but you'd hope each NFL team keeps track of that!.. not sure they do).

 

Tannehill's deep passing percentages were really bad last year, near the bottom of the league actually:
https://www.thephinsider.com/2019/3...-ryan-tannehill-on-deep-ball-accuracy-in-2018



As far as 3rd and long you can look at splits, both for a QB and for the league:
https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/T/TannRy00/splits/2018/
https://www.pro-football-reference.com/years/2018/splits.htm#all_yds_split_splits

to estimate how good a QB has been in different situations. Now, on 3rd and 10+ you see the number of passing attempts is really low (for Tannehill in 2018 it was only 26 attempts), so you have to take a weighted average across many years. For those interested in the calculations, take the difference between a QB's passer rating in that year (for let's say 3rd and 10+) and league average passer rating for that same condition, then multiply it by the number of passing attempts. Do that for all years and sum those numbers. Now, divide that sum by the total number of attempts. That gives you the "weighted average".

With Tannehill, that weighted average difference between his passer rating on 3rd and 10+ and league average is a whopping -23.89 passer rating points per year!!! Just peruse through those links for different years and you see this crap: Tannehill's 3rd and 10+ ratings average around 50 while league average is mid 70's. Seriously.. you do NOT trust a QB on 3rd and 10+ when he averages 23.89 passer rating points BELOW league average.

So I totally disagree on Tannehill.

The comparable statistic for Fitzpatrick is a weighted average of +1.09 passer rating points on 3rd and 10+ so I don't see anything wrong with him playing the way he does on those downs, though if you look year by year you see massive variation. So yes "situational" is correct, but Tannehill was a massive liability on 3rd and 10+ and not the type of QB you can trust in those situations with even more risk.

 

I suspect the issue with Tannehill was that situations in which the opposing team knew he had to pass (3rd and 10+ for example) weren't what the doctor ordered when combined with his poor awareness and evasion of the pass rush.

 

I am willing to bet that there were more things at play than simply reigning him in. If you're behind a lot, then you're throwing deep more often, into defenses that are waiting for the deep ball. My issue with the deep ball was more that we often didn't use it early enough to be effective.

 

There is another issue with interceptions.

Roughly half of all NFL interceptions occur when the passing team has less than a 20% chance of winning the game. Which means the cause and effect arrow isn’t always Interceptions -> Losing. About half the time Losing -> Interceptions. Xavien Howard last year got a lot of his interceptions when the opposing team was in desperation mode, which probably one of the reasons he wasn’t heralded much by the national press because many of his INTs weren’t “game changing”.
Also teams with 80%+ chance of winning throw INTs at a much lower rate than normal. Which again turns the normal narrative of Avoiding Turnovers -> Winning, because it can be shown that Winning -> Avoiding turnovers.

Anecdotally this makes sense because teams in a winning position can avoid risks and teams in a losing position have to take more risks. It also is reflected by cbrad showing scoring TDs is more predictive of winning than throwing INTs is of losing

 

I understand the concept, but for Tannehill in 2016 it was precisely the opposite. During the first five games, when his overall interception rate was 4.5%, his overall TD rate was 3.8%. By contrast, during the next eight games, when his overall interception rate dropped to 2.1%, his overall TD rate jumped to 5.6%.

So by playing more conservatively (again his yards per attempt dropped from 8.2 to 7.4, which is significant), he was able to play much better in the areas of both turnovers and TDs.

I suspect that had something to do with the deep passing figures for Tannehill you posted earlier. There is no reason why someone so poor at deep passing (as well as evading the pass rush) should be playing a high risk, high reward game. Obviously that kind of QB is going to improve when he is reined in.

Let's take a look at Fitzpatrick in this way. In his last five years of games, in games in which he had at least 10 pass attempts, his average yards per pass attempt is 7.38. In the games during that period in which his YPA was below 7.38, his TD rate was 3.7%, and his INT rate was 3.9%. His teams were 10-18 in those games. In the games during that period in which his YPA was above 7.38, his TD rate was 6.5%, and his INT rate was 2.5%. His teams were 14-11 in those games.

So in direct contrast to Tannehill, it behooves a team to have Fitzpatrick play more aggressively, which supports cbrad's concept of a trade off, as well as what KeyFin said about Fitzpatrick, above.

 

That's good stuff. I suspect you'd find something similar with sacks, which is another reason why sacks can be partially attributed to quarterbacks. If you can't get your team down the field to score, obviously you're more likely to end up in a position in which your probability of winning the game is relatively low, which then lets the opposing pass rush tee off on your offensive line, knowing you have to pass in an attempt to increase your win probability. With a quarterback who can score more, you're less likely to be in that situation.

 

Awesome thread and discussion everyone!

I agree with Key in that we should let the best QB play.

[Rose-colored glasses on] As for Fitzpatrick, I think it's possible that even at this stage of his career he can still tweak his play style for the better. I love his aggressiveness. However, if he can throttle it back some in certain situations I think he will be better for it. I am hoping this coaching staff can reign him in. He has enough talent to get it done, but he needs to play within the system and let others help too. It's when he tries to do too much that he gets himself in trouble, IMO.

 

Intuitively I agree, but let me just throw a wrench (actually 2 wrenches) into that argument.

The correlation between Y/A and win% for Tannehill is 0.3545 while it's 0.3129 for Fitzpatrick. In other words, it's to be expected that as Y/A increases win% increases so whatever happened with Tannehill in those first 5 games is an anomaly relative to his career. And unless the following 8 games were the only time he was told to "play more conservatively", then something is off with the logic.

The other problem is that it's not a priori clear that "playing more aggressively" leads to higher Y/A. We don't have stats for how "risky" plays are so it's not clear that Fitz was playing more aggressively during his wins. Besides, if that were the case he should have adapted to always play more aggressively in which case you'd still see the correlation between Y/A with win% but with a higher average Y/A.

So like I said, intuitively I agree Tannehill is better playing more conservatively, but I'm not sure Y/A can be used to make this argument.