Recently a number of our signature statistics became available as part of the PFF Premium package, and just this week we added a few more: Elusive Rating, Breakaway Percentage, and Slot Performance. You will frequently find us referring to these numbers in our articles, and we know it can be a lot to keep track of.
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Because of that, at the end of each week this season we'll review one of our Signature Stats, tell you why we have it and what numbers go into it. Finally, we’ll let you know which players are or aren’t doing well in the category to that point in time.
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We begin our Signature Stats Snapshot series by taking a look into Accuracy Percentage.
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What is it?
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Accuracy Percentage is a number we have put together to improve on the common Completion Percentage statistic. Completion Percentage is simply completions divided by attempts, and it is frequently used as support in showing how accurate a quarterback is. The problems being that not every pass thrown is intended to be completed, and not every incomplete pass is the quarterback’s fault.
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The easiest example of this is a spiked pass. It counts as a pass attempt, but should obviously play no role in explaining a quarterback’s accuracy. Therefore, in Accuracy Percentage, we subtract spiked passes from the total attempts.
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The next statistic we use is passes that are thrown away. These are passes where the quarterback is likely under pressure and wants to avoid a sack or a turnover by tossing the ball out of bounds. While it can be argued whether or not the decision to throw it away was a good one, it’s irrelevant as it pertains to accuracy. We just want to know how the quarterback did in getting the ball to his intended receiver. Because these passes also lack an intended receiver, they are subtracted from attempts as well.
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The final number that is taken into account is dropped passes. On these, the quarterback did what he needed to do, but the receiver didn’t complete the play. Historically, only the quarterback would be downgraded on the stat sheet for this despite it not being his fault. Here we are trying to right a wrong, and we count dropped passes as “completions” for the purposes of the Accuracy Percentage formula because the quarterback accurately got the ball to his receiver.
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While it’s not perfect because it doesn’t account for the difficulty of the throw, it is still a big step in the right direction to showing how accurate quarterbacks are on their throws.
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Put into Practice
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As an example, let’s take a look at Matt Ryan in his losing effort to the Bears last week. He had 31 completions in 47 attempts for a completion percentage of 66.0. Of the 33 qualifying quarterbacks, Ryan ranked 12th. However, in accuracy percentage he ranked third. Of his 47 pass attempts, two of them were thrown away and one of them was a spike. This left 44 passes that Matt Ryan threw that he intended on completing.
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This still left 13 passes that Ryan had hoped would be complete but ultimately hit the ground. Of those 13, five were drops: one each by Roddy White, Julio Jones and Michael Turner, and two by Jason Snelling. We treat all five of those passes as a positive for Ryan because he did what he needed to in getting the ball to the receiver. Therefore, for this formula we treat those five as accurately thrown balls, so Matt Ryan was accurate on 38 of his 44 throws for an Accuracy Percentage of 81.8 percent.
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Follow Nathan on Twitter: @PFF_NateJahnke and check out our main Twitter feed too: @ProFootbalFocus
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