Week 2 Quick Reads

by Vincent Verhei

It all started with an innocent little tweet. Following yet another epic Chargers loss last Monday night, Derrik Klassen of Bleacher Report (and our newest Film Room contributor) noted that Philip Rivers "lives in a perpetual state of down a score with less than two minutes left." Being a skeptic, I did a quick check on Pro Football Reference and found the numbers proved Klassen correct. Since taking over as the Chargers' starting quarterback in 2006, Rivers had thrown 214 passes down by one score in the final two minutes of a game, 54 more than any other player in the same timespan.

Things kind of snowballed from there. Many people simply retweeted my research. Others suggested some different methodologies that might make the numbers more meaningful over the long term. Regardless, there was enough interest that we considered running a special longer piece on the numbers and what they meant. We ultimately decided not to crowd the site on what was already a busy week, and kept the idea in our back pocket for the next epic Chargers loss.

To the surprise of nobody who has been paying attention to the Chargers for any length of time, we did not have to wait long. Just six days after watching an apparent game-tying field goal waived off on a late timeout call and a second attempt blocked, the Chargers missed a potential game-winner after Miami mysteriously called timeout and ensured them a chance to try the kick in the first place. So we pulled the story idea out of our pocket, headed back to PFR, and went to work.

The Game Play Finder at PFR goes back to the 1994 season, so that's where we began our study. When we saw Brett Favre among the leaders, we went into our own numbers and added his last-two-minute, down-one-score passing stats from his first seasons as a starter in 1992 and 1993. (No, we did not bother checking what happened on his four passes with Atlanta in 1991.) Since those numbers were taken from our database, they do not include clock-killing spikes, while all other numbers in this essay do. That hardly matters, however, because the final results were not very close. Rivers really has been playing in a desperate two-minute drill more than anyone else. Rivers has thrown 228 regular-season passes in his career after the two-minute warning in the fourth quarter, down by eight points or less. That's 33 more than Favre's 195. Joe Flacco and Peyton Manning are next in line with 175 each. No other quarterback in the last 24 years has even three-quarters of Rivers' total.

When reading numbers below, please note that opponent adjustments are not included in DYAR until after Week 4.

All told, 3.81 percent (the "Clutch%" column in the table) of Rivers' career passes have come in the last two minutes of the game, needing one score to tie or take the lead. That's actually not the highest ratio in the table, trailing former Jets/Dolphins quarterback Chad Pennington (4.41 percent) and former Lions/Dolphins/Falcons starter Joey Harrington (3.82 percent). Rivers is in turn trailed by Flacco and Rich Gannon (though this does not include the early years of Gannon's career, which goes all the way back to 1987). Flacco's Super Bowl ring aside, this is basically a group of good-but-not-great players. Contrast that list to the names at the other end of this category -- Drew Brees, Peyton Manning, Donovan McNabb, Kerry Collins, and Favre. There's little question that the latter group is superior to the former, suggesting that great quarterbacks often perform well enough to avoid the need for late-game heroics.

The leaders and trailers in quote-unquote clutch performance are fascinating. The NFL's passer rating is certainly a flawed statistic, especially when analyzing players from different eras, but it's a simple way to capture which players accumulate completions, yards, and touchdowns while avoiding interceptions, at least at the extremes. And in this situation, no player had a higher passer rating than Tony Romo (94.5), who always got too much blame for Dallas losses and not enough credit for wins. Next we have Ben Roethlisberger, Eli Manning, Matthew Stafford, and Steve McNair, four more passers with reputations for late-game heroics.

On the other hand, the worst passer rating here goes to Jon Kitna (37.5), with Ryan Fitzpatrick and Joey Harrington next in line. That's three good nominees for the "How did that guy last so long in the NFL?" all-stars. Pennington is fourth-worst -- it's unfortunate that a player who found himself in the clutch so often played so badly in those scenarios. You could say the same for the fifth-worst player, Flacco. It's the names who just missed the bottom five that are most stunning though -- Peyton Manning (?!), and then Rivers. This is probably the only category you will ever find Eli ranking among the leaders, and Peyton among the trailers.

For a closer look at what's going on in the NFL, here's a look at the same table, limited to active players.

Sometimes it can be tricky determining who's retired and who's not. This table assumes that Tony Romo will stay in the TV booth, while Robert Griffin will get another shot somewhere. Admittedly, this is an intentional case of selection bias -- I wanted Griffin in the table because he leads all active players with 4.38 percent of his career passes coming down one score in the final minutes. Kirk Cousins, Nick Foles, and Shaun Hill also have higher such rates than Rivers. Meanwhile, look at the active quarterbacks with the lowest rates in the metric: Brees, Eli Manning, Brady, Alex Smith, and Aaron Rodgers. Again we see that good quarterbacks rarely find themselves needing a score at the end of a game.

By passer rating, the best active quarterback has been Andrew Luck (107.5, with no interceptions), followed by Cam Newton (he hasn't thrown an interception either), Ben Roethlisberger, Russell Wilson, and Eli Manning. (Remember this includes passing stats only, and avoids the scrambling ability of Luck, Newton, and Wilson.) The worst? Chad Henne at 34.8. (You might think that this is why the Jaguars are sticking with Blake Bortles, but Bortles has been even worse -- 16-of-40, 165 yards, no touchdowns, five interceptions, 13.0 passer rating.) The rest of the bottom five is rounded out by Fitzpatrick, Smith, Mark Sanchez, and Flacco.

A few notes on some well-known quarterbacks who failed to make either table:

• With 41 attempts, Derek Carr barely missed the active player leaderboard, but he has been tremendous in that situation. He has completed 26 passes for 275 yards with six touchdowns, two interceptions, and a passer rating of 102.1.

• You won't find Colin Kaepernick in these numbers, because in nearly 1,700 NFL passes, only 36 -- 2.13 percent -- have come down a score in the final two minutes. He has completed 19 of them for 220 yards, with one touchdown, one interception, and a passer rating of 69.2. Marcus Mariota has also gone 19-of-36 in the clutch, despite throwing only 889 passes (Clutch rate: 4.05 percent). Mariota's 19 completions gained 251 yards with one touchdown, with two interceptions and a 61.2 passer rating.

• Tim Tebow only threw 361 passes in his career, but 29 of them (8.03 percent) came in clutch situations. It's easier to rack up game-winning drives when you're playing from behind every week. Tebow completed 12 of those passes for 156 yards, with one touchdown, one interception, and a 56.1 passer rating.

• Kurt Warner almost never needed a late score. Only 1.74 percent of his 4,070 career passes came down a score in the final minutes. Which is a good thing, because his performance in those situations was dire: 37-of-71, 464 yards, no touchdowns, four interceptions, 49.3 passer rating.

• Steve Young's career started in the 1980s, but he still threw more than 2,000 passes after 1994. Only three of them came in two-minute drill scenarios. He completed all three of them for 57 yards and a touchdown, a perfect 158.3 passer rating.