Prop God’s NFL Playbook: Week 12
Prop God
Week 11. The New York Jets vs the Indianapolis Colts. With 46 seconds left, after taking a one-point lead, the Colts are forced to kick the ball back to Aaron Rodgers We know how this story is supposed to go. Rodgers quickly and efficiently slices up the defense, putting the Jets in field goal position for a walkoff win. With the Jets’ luck, they might have missed the kick, but they never got the opportunity to do so. Instead, Rodgers took two sacks in three plays and the game was over. The Jets are 2-5 in one-score games this season, routinely failing in the moments Rodgers is supposed to deliver. Late-game heroics are far from all the team is lacking, though. They’re 22nd in overall DVOA and 19th in offensive DVOA. How much of the struggle is on the shoulders of the 40-year-old quarterback?
Is Aaron Rodgers Playing Well?
Rodgers can’t be blamed if he’s playing well, so is he? Most Jets fans would probably say something like “fine” and shrug. This is as dysfunctional an organization as we’ve seen in a long time so it’s difficult to pretend like that’s not happening and focus solely on the football being played, but let’s try to do exactly that. And as it turns out, that’s also hard to do! Rodgers’ play this season is full of contradictory data points that tell a complicated story, ultimately leading us to the conclusion that … he’s playing fine? *Shrugs*
Let’s start with the holy grail of quarterback play: accuracy. Rodgers is fourth in accuracy rate (from StatsHub, the source of all the coming data) but it’s easy to be accurate when you’re not throwing the ball downfield. He’s 34th of 39 qualified quarterbacks in average depth of target. Sure enough, he’s only 22nd in adjusted completion percentage. However, he deserves to be higher on this list. No quarterback has had more of his passes dropped (tied with Joe Burrow at 18), and only Mason Rudolph and Anthony Richardson have higher drop rates.
Here’s where things get even more confusing. Rodgers, who’s tied for the league lead in dropped passes, is only 18th in dropped air yards. The 18 drops have combined for just 56 air yards, a miniscule 3.1-yard average depth of target. This isn’t coincidental – despite the low average depth of target overall, Rodgers is throwing into tight coverage 35.0% of the time, only trailing Jameis Winston, Jacoby Brissett, Bryce Young, Drake Maye, and Cooper Rush, guys who don’t exactly have Davante Adams and Garrett Wilson running routes for them. Plus, a low average depth of target suggests that he’s trying to get rid of the ball quickly because he doesn’t trust his offensive line, right? Well Rodgers is 31st in pressure rate (meaning he’s not getting pressured) despite having the eighth-highest average time to throw. So what the heck is going on?
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