Quarterbacks Throwing to the Slot vs. Wide 2023

Our annual look at slot/wide splits in the passing game continues as we shift from pass catchers to pass throwers.

Quarterback slot/wide splits end up being an aggregation of their receivers’ slot/wide splits. This sort of analysis, by definition, requires a targeted pass, so there are no issues with sacks, scrambles, or throwaways – the sorts of things that might cause a quarterback’s performance to diverge from their receivers’ performances. You can sort of go through last week’s tables of wideouts, running backs and tight ends, just check to see who’s at the top and bottom, and have a good idea of what the quarterback table is going to look like. This is exacerbated by the fact that we’re technically using receiving DVOA here rather than passing DVOA, which removes things like harsher penalties for interceptions. With all that in mind, the quarterback table shouldn’t have any real surprises, right?

Unright! Aggregating the data like this revealed a very weird trend and raised some questions I’m not sure we have great answers for – some low ratings for some very good quarterbacks. Trying to answer these questions led to further questions, and that’s always something worth sinking our teeth into.

The following table shows the data for the 36 qualified passers from 2023. Each player’s DYAR, DVOA, and number of targets are shown on passes to receivers both in the slot and split wide. The table is sorted by descending Slot%, which is passes thrown to players who were lined up in the slot as a percentage of passes thrown to players at wide receiver positions (i.e., slot and wide are included, but not receivers at tight end or in the backfield). This includes passes to tight ends and running backs if they lined up in traditional wideout positions.

Weird Wide World

You may remember from the wide receiver edition of this article that passes wide and to the slot were essentially identical in 2023 production – a 0.3% DVOA to the slot and a 0.1% DVOA out wide. If that’s the case, however, then how do we explain some of the terrible numbers out wide?

Jordan Love sees the biggest drop-off from slot to wide performance, falling a full 28.3 percentage points in DVOA when targeting players out wide. Lamar Jackson, your MVP, had a -5.1% DVOA out wide. Patrick Mahomes, the best quarterback in football, was at -9.5%. What’s going on here? Is there a silver bullet we can use to explain everything?

The first thought was that this had to do with wide receiver quality. Kansas City had wide receiver problems all year long, so of course Mahomes’ numbers would look bad when throwing out wide. And the Ravens’ receiving corps wasn’t exactly bouncing either, and the Packers’ receivers were young and inexperienced, so perhaps there was some kind of correlation there. But in 2021, the last time we ran these numbers, Mahomes was throwing to Tyreek Hill out wide and he still clocked in at -0.4%. Something else has to be going on here.

That 2021 number, though, set up another signal flare. 2021 was a year when Mahomes and Hill had specific trouble connecting deep. It was the beginning of the idea that two deep safeties shut down the top quarterbacks in the league, and Mahomes and Hill connected on just two of eight deep shots split wide that season. Maybe, then, what we’re seeing here is a depth of target situation. If the quarterbacks who drop off further in wide DVOA are the ones throwing a healthier dose of wide receiver screens and quick outs and other less valuable targets when going wide, that would explain quite a bit of the problem. But that doesn’t work for everyone. There’s no correlation at all between wide aDOT and wide DVOA, there’s no correlation between percentage of wide receiver screens and DVOA drop-off, and there’s very little correlation (0.17) between change in a quarterback’s aDOT and his DVOA drop-off splitting from slot to wide. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer.

The screen issue does, however, explain at least a couple of our odd results. A full 31% of Mahomes’ wide targets were charted as screens or quick outs, and his 9.0 aDOT on wide passes was lowest in the league. These sorts of passes are very, very rarely successful. The only team in football with a positive DVOA on them was the San Francisco 49ers; they are generally the kinds of passes you give quarterbacks you do not trust to make decisions. To see Mahomes not only first on this list, but first by leaps and bounds, is rather astonishing.

You don’t get very many top 10 lists where the first name has worked his way into the conversation for greatest quarterback of all time, while names 2-7 are various degrees of trash. Nor do you expect a screen-heavy attack, normally associated with a quarterback who needs all the training wheels in the world, to be attached to Mahomes. And yes, this was a clear and obvious adaptation to the fact that Chiefs wide receivers could not be trusted to catch the ball in 2023 – Mahomes’ percentage of screens and quick outs was just 15.4% in 2022, when he could work with the all-hyphen team of JuJu Smith-Schuster and Marques Valdes-Scantling split wide. Mahomes’ DVOA on wide passes in 2022 was a healthy 21.6%, while his DVOA even removing these short passes last season was just -6.2%. Mahomes still had a positive DVOA targeting MVS and Travis Kelce, who was split wide more often last year in an attempt to try to keep the passing game working, but he was in the negatives to both Justin Watson and Rashee Rice on non-screens. Kansas City is hoping Hollywood Brown and Xavier Worthy restore a base level of competence to those outside players, because even Mahomes can only do so much.

Jordan Love doesn’t have the track record Mahomes has to indicate that this is a one-year blip, but he also does face some of the same issues Mahomes dealt with – a surprisingly large number of short, quick routes to his wideouts that didn’t go anywhere. Mahomes got away with it somewhat because Rashee Rice was very good at gaining tons of YAC, but the Packers’ young receiving corps really aren’t those kinds of players. Dontayvian Wicks is a shifty speedy guy, mind you, but he wasn’t getting those wide targets. Instead, we’re talking 16 short passes for Romeo Doubs (-1.7 YAC+) and 13 for Jayden Reed (-0.4 YAC+), and fewer than half of those ended up as a successful play. Filter them out and Love’s DVOA still isn’t overly impressive at 2.4%, but at least then the headline would have been “look what Love did in the slot!” rather than “why was Love negative out wide!”. Love, however, had a second issue – but that requires us to talk about Lamar Jackson first.

For Jackson, the culprit is a -16.1% DVOA targeting Rashod Bateman out wide, while Zay Flowers and Odell Beckham were both under 1%. This is not a screens and quick outs issue. Instead, Jackson had -36.5% DVOA on go routes to his wide targets, completing just two of 23 targets deep (plus four DPI calls). Baltimore had a DVOA of -40.6% on go routes to wide targets, second worst in the league, and all those failed deep shots is what knocks Jackson down severely in the wide category.

The only team worse? The Green Bay Packers and Jordan Love, at -42.3%. Love attempted 28 go routes to his wide targets, of which only two were completed (plus four DPIs of his own). Only Romeo Doubs managed to hook up with Love on a go route, and Love was 0-for-7 to Christian Watson alone. So Love couldn’t connect on the deep ball, and his receivers couldn’t make plays on sideline deep shots. On every other route, things were fine – a 10.0% DVOA would have Love ranked 13th if you factor out all screens, quick outs and go routes. That’s beginning to get fairly heavy into cherry picking, but at least the problem areas are clear and evident. You can’t fix a problem until you know what it is, and hopefully, the Packers have some ideas on how to get their wide game working in 2024.

Slot Kings

These issues did not follow Jordan Love to the slot, where he was one of three quarterbacks to top 400 DYAR, along with Dak Prescott and Brock Purdy. The go routes in particular were much less of an issue, with Love putting up a 35.6% DVOA throwing down the seam, mostly to Reed and Watson. The Packers seemed to be aware that they had to go to the slot to find their deepest routes. Love and Jackson tied for the league lead with 17 targets on go routes from slot receivers. Love still connected on fewer than half of those shots, but the ones that connected were more than valuable enough to overcome that. Add in plenty of intermediate value, with all five Packers receivers with double-digit slot targets finishing with at least a 14.2% DVOA, and the Packers cooked on their inside routes. This was also the area where the second-half surge was really noticeable, with Love going from a 5.4% DVOA in the first half of the season to a 38.6% DVOA in the second half. Keeping that second half slot performance up while figuring out a way to fix his connection with his receivers out wide will be key for Love and the Packers to meet their full potential in 2024.

Purdy led the league in DVOA at 42.2%; George Kittle, Brandon Aiyuk, Christian McCaffrey and Deebo Samuel (in that order) were four of the 32 players with at least 70 DYAR in the slot. Prescott, who led with 472 DYAR, had three such players – CeeDee Lamb, Brandin Cooks and Jake Ferguson, though Lamb more than doubled either of his teammates.

Down at the very bottom is Kenny Pickett, who actually had a larger DVOA gap than Love, just in the other direction – he went from 0.3% out wide to -31.2% targeting the slot. Everyone not named George Pickens was a negative target for Pickett working inside, so Pittsburgh will be hoping Roman Wilson is a little better option for whichever quarterback they end up settling for. If Pickett does see game action in 2024, he’ll have slightly better options in the slot in DeVonta Smith and Dallas Goedert, though Eagles fans obviously hope they won’t have to see how that goes.

Bryce Young was dead last in DYAR to the slot at -128, while Gardner Minshew’s -17.3% DVOA targeting the slot on 138 attempts is worth highlighting as particularly bad as well. The fact that all three quarterbacks at the bottom here were in the upper third in slot throw percentage wasn’t exactly ideal, either.

Wide Targets

Tua Tagovailoa takes a significant lead on the rest of the field here with 696 DYAR, more than 130 more than anyone else in the league. Brock Purdy completes the double by leading the league with a 30.6% DVOA, but while his huge lead in the slot category makes up for any volume concerns there, the fact that Tagovailoa finished a close second with a DVOA of 23.1% on 74 more passes means we have to give the crown to the lefty in South Beach.

“Throw the ball to the really fast guy” might not be the most creative playcall in Mike McDaniel’s playbook, but Tagovailoa led the league in wide DYAR on go routes and deep posts with both Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle stretching defenses to and beyond the breaking point. Tagovailoa had 618 DYAR and a 30.1% DVOA targeting Hill or Waddle wide; 78 DYAR and a 2.9% DVOA targeting everyone else on the roster. That’s not to throw Tagovailoa under the bus, as taking away a player’s best receivers will affect anyone’s stats. Purdy falls from 30.6% to 4.8% without Brandon Aiyuk and Deebo Samuel, while C.J. Stroud drops from 18.9% to -6.6% without Nico Collins and Tank Dell. But more than most teams at the top of this list, the Dolphins have a clear and obvious strategy that stretches from their pure speed advantage with their outside receivers, and Tagovailoa is good enough to allow Hill and Waddle to maximize their impact.

Bryce Young was the only player to hit negative triple digits in wide DYAR at -141. Bailey Zappe did beat him to the DVOA floor at -27.4%, but a -20.6% mark on 141 extra targets is more than enough for us to declare that Young was the worst to the outside. You would think his aforementioned high percentage of screen passes would be the issue, but that’s really not the case. Young had a -21.3% DVOA on screens and quick outs to wide targets, yes – but he was only at -20.5% on the actually valuable routes left behind. When your normal targets are as ineffective as the worst pass plays in football, your season probably didn’t go particularly well.