NextGen Stats 2022 Season Review: Quarterbacks

January 11, 2023

Antonio Losada provides key fantasy football updates for quarterbacks, using Next Gen data to help fantasy owners make the best lineup and waiver wire decisions.

Time's up! The 2022 fantasy season is done and gone for good. Whether you play in a redraft league or are part of a dynasty format, the days of sitting at the edge of your couch and biting your nails are over. We have a tough eight-month desert to walk through ahead of us, but hey, the real NFL players are this close to kickoff and we will still enjoy football for another month and change, so you better get to it while it lasts! With the numbers in place and the games finished, it's time to wrap up the series and take a final look at who was who during this 2022 season.

To gain the biggest edge in your fantasy football league, it's necessary to understand how to apply the advanced statistics being used in sports nowadays. Back in the day, it was all about wins and losses, passing yards, and touchdowns scored. It's not that those stats are now worthless, they just don't offer enough information to savvy analysts. While football is still in its infancy compared to baseball in terms of analytics, the evolution the sport has seen lately in those terms is notable.

Each week, I'll be tackling NFL's Next Gen Stats, bringing you data from the previous week's games with notable takeaways you should consider when assessing fantasy players for the upcoming week. In case you're new to the series, or Next Gen Stats altogether, I recommend you read our NGS-primer. Now, let's get to the data!

2022 Best and Worst Quarterbacks - Next Gen Stats

The season, at least for us fantasy nuts, is finally over. That is nothing good for our enjoyment of the fantasy game, but it is a time of calm and peace to enjoy the real NFL playoffs that we're also invested in. With all of the regular season numbers now in place, it is time to wrap up the Next Gen Stats series position by position.

Today, I will go through the quarterback position and provide a final update on how the league's passers have done in the different metrics we've already tackled during the season. I will only show a small number of names for each category, present its correlation with the fantasy points averaged by the player, then skip gory details and instead provide a new "combined" leaderboard at the end of the column.

As we'll be discussing quarterbacks and their passing stats, I will reduce the fantasy points per game averages to just those related to passing. That means I have removed the rushing/receiving fantasy points the qualifying quarterbacks have logged during the season. I've called this "new" metric paFP/G, which is to say passing Fantasy Points per Game. I have included the full fantasy points average (passing, receiving, and rushing stats included, labeled simply FP/G) for context. So let's dive in!

Note: The cutoff to qualify is set at 135 pass attempts.

Time to Throw

Correlation with Passing Fantasy Points: minus-33%

Leaders and Trailers:

Completed/Intended Air Yards & Air Yards Differential

Correlation with Passing Fantasy Points:  minus-5% / minus-18% / 27%

Leaders and Trailers:

Aggressiveness

Correlation with Passing Fantasy Points: minus-33%

Leaders and Trailers:

Attempts & Yards & Y/A

Correlation with Fantasy Points: 78% / 86% / 46%

Leaders and Trailers:

Completion Percentage & xCOMP & COMP Above Expectation

Correlation with Fantasy Points:  59% / 41% / 36%

Leaders and Trailers:

Combined Next Gen Stats Leaderboard

To build this leaderboard, I used every metric that is part of the NGS site and put everything together in a combined score I labeled "NGS" in the following table. The calculation of each player's NGS score is simple. I calculated where each player ranked for each metric and then multiplied that rank for the correlation between that metric and my paFP/G metric. Players ranked higher (closer to one) in each category will have lower scores for those categories. In the end, I added up each player's scores from all of the categories, getting a single NGS score.

The lower the NGS, the better the player for fantasy as each category was already weighted given its correlation with the paFP/G metric. Here are the results:

NGS Leaderboard Notes:

Just as a reminder, we're looking at the correlation between all NGS stats and passing fantasy points per game, exclusively.

That is why the likes of Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson, and Justin Fields have all knocked down the board to varying degrees compared to pure throwers like Kirk Cousins or Tom Brady.

There was not really a real competition between no. 1 Patrick Mahomes and no. 2 Joe Burrow at the top of the leaderboard, let alone between those top two NGS performers and the rest of the QB cohort.

No. 3 Geno Smith solidified his season and completed an extraordinary campaign that, for most people watching, came a little bit out of the blue. No need to mention that the man he replaced in Seattle, Russell Wilson, is coming off the 20th-best season in the NFL when it comes to NGS numbers this season. Not quite bright, that was.

Matthew Stafford led the league last year with around three points of distance between him and no. 2 Joe Burrow. The Bengals QB has now back-to-back second-place finishes with Pat Mahomes taking over the no. 1 spot as Stafford missed time and was just the 25th-best QB of the 2022 season in NGS terms.

Mahomes earned the no. 1 spot without ranking outside of the top 30 in any NGS category with his lowest rank being the 29th-best position in TT. He only had another rank outside of the top 25 (AYT) while all other marks in the rest of the categories ranked inside the top 25 of each category.

Mahomes ranked inside the top five in seven different categories this season (including paFP/G) compared to Burrow's six top five ranks. They finished as the no. 1 and no. 2 players in the paFPPG and touchdowns categories. They shared the top five ranks in four different cats (ATT, YDS, TD, paFPPG).

Josh Allen and Tua Tagovailoa are the only two quarterbacks with at least one rank (each had three) inside the bottom five of a category and still getting to the top 10 best QBs in terms of NGS statistics. They had those low-rank marks in the same categories: CAY, IAY, and AYT. Tua was the only one bottoming out in one category, though, ranking dead last in CAY.

The correlation between paFP/G and the NGS scores is at minus 91% this season. It was minus 93% last year and minus 83% two years ago. Can't really ask for a stronger relationship between two variables.

The small difference (9%) not making it quite a perfect 100% reliable relationship is found in the following cases:

• • Top Three NGS players: Mahomes, Burrow, Smith
  • Top Three paFP/G players: Mahomes, Burrow, Allen
  • Bottom Three NGS players: Watson, Rush, Flacco
  • Bottom Three paFP/G players: Pickett, Trubisky, Rush

Cooper Rush finished the season with the lowest-ranked averages in NGS stats, with seven different stats having him inside the bottom five. He made up for that with a top three finish in TT, though.

When it comes to all-struggling players, though, it was Joe Flacco with six bottom five finishes and outside of the top 15 of each and every category found in NGS leaderboards (one top 16 finish in CAY, two top 17 in TT and LCAD).

Of the 14 QBs to finish with a positive CPOE, only 11 also finished with double-digit paFP/G figures through the season. The three that didn't were Mitch Trubisky, Sam Darnold, and Jacoby Brissett. In their favor, though, is the fact that only Brissett (369) attempted more than 180 passes (Trubisky) among those three with Darnold (140) barely qualifying.

The top 10 players in fantasy points per game also made it to the top 10 NGS scoring ranks, albeit in a slightly different order.

The biggest discrepancy was that of Geno Smith, posting the ninth-highest paFP/G of the season compared to a top three NGS score. From the opposite perspective, Tua Tagovailoa scored the fourth-most paFP/G although he ranked eighth in the NGS overall leaderboard.

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