Friday, November 7, 2008

Thinking In Public: Measuring QB Pressure



So I wanted to try to come up with a way to think about QB pressure in terms of the impact on yardage per passing attempt. The underlying logic being that the more pressure a team is able to put on a quarterback, the more likely his passes are to fall incomplete or worse.



I weighted Hurries and Sacks based on their average net effect on yardage, using SEC stats to find yards per clean pass attempt (i.e., unhurried) and average yards per sack. A major shortcoming of what I have right now is that I have no way to account for the value of interceptions caused by pressure on QBs and no way to measure their impact on yardage (for that matter, fumbles caused by sacks should probably be included). Also, if I had more time, I'd probably only include stats from SEC vs. SEC match-ups since there's so much variability in the quality of out-of-conference opponents.

Again, it's crude but I wanted to get this up before the game tomorrow renders my calculations irrelevant and hopefully generate some discussion. Any suggestions for making this a more accurate reflection of the value and quality of QB pressure?

2 comments:

Steve said...

connor it says i don't have permission to view the spreadsheet.

Connor Tapp said...

Dammit, that's annoying. Do you know how I could embed it?