Recently, I’ve taken a look at the 2009 receiving statistics of some Cowboys pass-catchers (Roy Williams, Miles Austin, Patrick Crayton, and Jason Witten) broken down by location. Williams, Crayton, and Witten were all significantly better when catching the football over the middle of the field, while Austin’s play stood out when receiving the ball either over the middle or on the left side of the field.
You can see graphs displaying the numbers of each player above. While one might expect receiving statistics to be somewhat inflated in the middle of the field, the degree of inflation seen (particularly for Williams, Crayton, and Witten) is surprising.
Part of their efficiency was due to quarterback Tony Romo. The chart above displays his passer rating over different areas of the field. You can see Romo thrived on passes over the middle between 10 and 20 yards in length. The sample size of passes in that particular area is huge, as it is over the linebackers and in front of the safeties–a very popular place to throw.
Of course, all NFL quarterbacks generally pass with higher efficiency over the middle of the field. So instead of simply claiming that Romo is a better quarterback when passing over the middle, I am interested in uncovering if his success is greater than the expected statistical inflation. That is, it is understood he will have better statistics when throwing to the middle of the field, but should they be as good as what is observed?
To determine if Romo’s success is atypical, I looked up the 2009 statistics of each team’s top quarterback (the one who took the most snaps). It is worth mentioning that these statistics are by no means infallible. For example, Vince Young, David Garrard, and Mark Sanchez all recorded a higher yards-per-attempt over the middle of the field last season than Peyton Manning. Enough said.
Nonetheless, they numbers do provide a general baseline for success, as the “top” quarterbacks are (more or less) near the top of the list.
As you can see, Romo’s 8.83 yards-per-attempt checked in as sixth-best in the NFL. While this is very good, it doesn’t actually confirm my hypothesis. Romo did average less yards in general in 2009 (8.15 per attempt), but so did most other quarterbacks. On the season, Romo’s 8.15 overall yards-per-attempt ranked him at………..to read more CLICK HERE
