Week 1 Quick Reads: Tua’s Big Day

NOTE: Updated with Monday Night Football at 11am EDT.

Welcome to Quick Reads! For readers who are new to my work and my stats, this is a weekly column where I will talk about the best and worst performances of the week according to my DYAR stats. That’s Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement, the “total” stat compared to DVOA as a “rate” stat. If this all sounds new to you, you can still go back and check out my DVOA explainer article from the preseason.

We give the numbers for all the quarterbacks who played a decent number of snaps. Then we give the top 5 running backs (both total and rushing only) and the bottom running back (same), followed by the top 5 wide receivers and tight ends and then the bottom wide receiver or tight end. Our numbers don’t separate a player from his teammates, so of course, it’s possible that a poor DYAR performance could be related to the players around you. Maybe your receivers dropped a lot of passes (Kadarius Toney, white courtesy phone) or perhaps your quarterback targeted you very badly on a lot of inaccurate passes. These numbers represent a player’s value but are not completely divorced from context.

In the past, this piece appeared on Tuesday morning. This year, I’ll be writing it on Monday afternoon. Come back Tuesday morning for the tables to be updated with Monday Night Football results. (Writing it Monday also means I won’t have comments for every player, just the stuff I find most interesting.)

Another important note about my stats: I do not include opponent adjustments until after Week 4 of the season. Opponent adjustments are an important part of Quick Reads, especially when we get to the end of the season, but early on we don’t have those adjustments. We still don’t know how good or bad these defenses are going to be for the entire year.

That opponent adjustment thing is important when we talk about the biggest quarterback performance of Week 1, which belonged to Tua Tagovailoa of the Miami Dolphins. 

You may have seen it somewhere that Tagovailoa’s 466 passing yards were the fourth-highest total for any quarterback in Week 1 ever. He trails only Norm Van Brocklin (with an insane 554 yards against the New York Yanks way back in 1951), Tom Brady (511 vs. Miami in 2011) and Dan Marino (473 yards vs. New England in 1994).

Tagovailoa’s game was not quite as impressive by DYAR, in part because he had to throw 45 passes to get to that huge yardage total. Historically, Tagovailoa doesn’t even make the top 10 Week 1 games by a quarterback since 1981. However, part of why Tagovailoa doesn’t make the list is that it is a list that includes opponent adjustments. If we look at every game since 1981 without opponent adjustments – which is how games would have looked in Quick Reads if I had been doing this every year since 1981 – then Tagovailoa ranks ninth since 1981. He ranks sixth if we only look at passing performance, because a couple of blown snaps knock him down a little bit.

Here’s a look at the top dozen Week 1 games since 1981 by YAR (in other words, without opponent adjustments):

As you can see, we had an even better game… just a year ago! But of course, you kind of expected Patrick Mahomes to go off on the Arizona Cardinals.  Phil Simms’ 1984 game is the one that ends up with the most DYAR once oponent adjustments are factored in, as the Eagles ranked 15th in pass defense that season. (Most of these opponents were worse than that.)

Missing from this list are those games with the huge historical yardage totals. Dan Marino’s 1994 game against the Patriots had 193 YAR (he threw a pick and took two sacks) while Brady’s 2011 game with 517 yards was worth 218 YAR.

Does this big Week 1 promise a big year for Tua? Not necessarily. Three of these quarterbacks led the NFL in DYAR in the given year, and most of them were Top 10. But Ryan Fitzpatrick finished the year 15th and Brian Griese was just 20th.

Of course, a big Week 1 may not guarantee big things, but the Mike McDaniel scheme and the presence of Tyreek Hill and Jayden Waddle probably help promise a big year for Tua.

Daniel Jones of the Giants had a Week 1 about as bad as Tua Tagovailoa‘s Week 1 was good. In fact, Jones appears higher on the list of worst Week 1 games. Jones took seven sacks, threw two interceptions, and fumbled the ball twice. He passed for just 104 yards. Here’s a list of the worst Week 1 games by YAR since 1981:

Only three of the quarterbacks on this list rebounded to post at least a positive passing DYAR for the season. The best was probably Mark Malone, who ended up 14th in pass DYAR for the 1986 season, his  career-best rank. Dalton finished 24th in 2017, and Plummer finished 24th in 2006.