Week 10 Quick Reads: Triangular QB Types

Now including Monday Night Football.

This week, for our introduction, I want to get into something Vincent Verhei used to do back at the old site. A couple of times per year, he would look at all the quarterbacks using what he called “triangular plotting.”

The idea is as follows: we look at each player’s sack rate, interception rate, and touchdown rate compared to the league average. Then we look at which aspect of the quarterback’s game stands out the most. We plot the average of these stats on X and Y axes, and then we get three groups of quarterbacks:

• • Gunslingers, where the biggest standout stat is interception rate;

• • Sack-Tackers, where the biggest standout stat is sack rate;

• • Game Managers, where the biggest standout stat is touchdown rate.

Note that this charting isn’t based on how good each quarterback is playing. This is much more about the quarterback’s style. For example, this year both Daniel Jones and Lamar Jackson qualify as “game managers” because neither the interception rates nor the sack rates particularly stand out. Obviously, Jackson is playing much better than Jones!

In the chart below, I’ve got the top 36 quarterbacks of this season by pass attempts, not including Monday Night Football. The players in purple are the Sack-Takers, the players in red are the Game Managers, and the players in blue are the Gunslingers. The size of the dot is determined by Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt, which is (mostly) a good way to rank quarterback performance without getting into trying to chart negative numbers with DVOA and DYAR. (I say “mostly” because Anthony Richardson has a surprisingly high ANY/A this year, so his dot is going to be a lot bigger than you expect!)