Week 6 Quick Reads: A History of Mac Joneses

Mac Jones of the New England Patriots has a very strange career path.

Jones was good as a rookie, very productive compared to other rookie quarterbacks. He ended the year with 6.1% passing DVOA, 13th that year among qualifying quarterbacks. By DYAR, Jones had the 10th-best passing season for any rookie in our database, back to 1981.

Jones struggled significantly in his second year. His pass DVOA fell to -10.1%, which ranked 26th among qualifying quarterbacks. Many of us blamed problems with the New England organization, including the hiring of defensive-minded Matt Patricia to run the offense, and we assumed that Jones would bounce back somewhat in his third season.

He has not. Instead, he is worse. Jones is close to being benched at this point, except that the Patriots don’t have anything realistic to replace him with. Jones ranks 28th among qualifying quarterbacks with -21.5% passing DVOA through Week 6. That’s only because he was reasonable and near average for the first three games. In the last three games, Jones has a passing DVOA of -53.8%.

How common is this kind of career path? It’s very, very rare. So rare that I found only one other quarterback with a similar path, and a few players at other positions. I went looking for players who were above average by DVOA as rookies, below average in their second seasons, and then even worse in their third seasons. They need to qualify for our rankings in all three years (200 passes, 100 runs, 50 targets for WR, and 25 targets for TE).

There are not many of them.

When I brought up this idea on Twitter/X yesterday, there were a number of responses asking about certain quarterbacks people thought were similar. Just to go through some of those:

• Rick Mirer did indeed get worse in his third season, but he was never above average. Mirer had -16.3% pass DVOA as a rookie, -12.3% in Year 2, and then -21.2% in Year 3.
• Josh Freeman‘s great year was his second season, not his first. He was very, very bad as a rookie in 2009, then ranked eighth in pass DVOA in his second season of 2010 before his performance collapsed again in Year 3.
• Kerry Collins had a similar career trajectory to Freeman – terrible in Year 1, great in Year 2, terrible again after that – except unlike Freeman he was able to resuscitate his career in New York starting in 1999.
• Baker Mayfield did decline substantially from his rookie year (8.1%) to his second year (-9.8%) but rebounded with 5.1% DVOA in 2020, his third season, before he declined again in 2021 and was even worse in 2022.

There is one quarterback who had a career trajectory like Mac Jones, though. There was a very different explanation. Here are the (skill) players I found with a Mac Jones-like trajectory in Years 1-3.

Quarterback: Robert Griffin III

Remember how good Griffin was as a rookie? I’m looking here just at passing numbers, but Griffin finished seventh in pass DVOA (and fourth in VOA, without opponent adjustments) for the 2012 Redskins. Then he got hurt. Then he got more hurt. And then his career imploded. Griffin had -13.1% pass DVOA in Year 2. He had a horrendous -34.2% pass DVOA in Year 3, even worse than Mac Jones this season. Then he missed 2015, started a few games for Cleveland, and was a backup in Baltimore for a bit. He never came close to that rookie performance ever again.

Running Back: Jerome Bettis

Not quite the same because Bettis was slightly better in Year 3 than Year 2, but otherwise similar. Bettis was fantastic as Offensive Rookie of the Year for the 1993 Rams. He finished the season No. 3 in run DVOA, trailing only Emmitt Smith and Gary Brown of the Oilers. Then everything went kablooey. Bettis went from 4.7 yards per carry to 3.2 yards per carry in 1994 with -17.6% DVOA. He had -15.1% DVOA, pretty similar, after the Rams moved to St. Louis. So they traded him to Pittsburgh… and Bettis bounced back in a huge way, leading the NFL in rushing value in 1996 and having a great career that ended with that 2005 Super Bowl title.

Running Back: Antonio Gibson

Another strange one because Gibson has gotten progressively worse running the ball and progressively better as a receiver. As a rookie, Gibson ranked sixth in run DVOA but 44th in receiving DVOA among qualifying running backs. In 2021, he was 38th running and 29th receiving. Last year, he was 41st rushing, but 13th receiving. It’s early, but so far this year, Gibson has his worst run DVOA yet at -46.7% and another positive receiving DVOA at 4.4%.

Wide Receiver: Michael Clayton

Clayton was fantstic as a rookie, ranking third in DYAR and eighth in DVOA among wide receivers with 1,196 receiving yards in 2004. He dealt with some injuries the next year, but still played 14 games… and his abilities completely vanished. He had just 375 receiving yards and was 83rd among qualifying wideouts with -18.7% DVOA. Then in 2006, he had a few more targets but even fewer yards, just 360, and a slightly lower DVOA, -19.4%. Clayton spent three more years with the Bucs but was never above-average as a receiver again, then was a scrub with the Giants for a couple years.

Wide Receiver: Anthony Miller

Maybe the best comp for Jones at another position. Like Jones, Miller was always supposed to be a high-floor, low-ceiling slot guy who turned out to have a lower floor than anyone anticipated. As a rookie, he was 46th with 3.9% DVOA. In Year 2, he had more targets and yards but fewer touchdowns and fell to -7.6% DVOA which ranked 59th. In Year 3, he plummeted to -36.4% DVOA which ranked 85th even though he had the highest catch rate of his career. He bounced to a couple teams in 2021, barely played, and hasn’t appeared in a regular-season game since. He’s on the Colts practice squad right now.

Wide Receiver: Darius Slayton

Unlike Jones and Miller, a low-round draft pick, but a demonstration that there’s some hope with this career path. Slayton surprised as a rookie with 9.6% receiving DVOA, which ranked 25th, and eight touchdowns. He had basically the same number of yards in Year 2 but with more targets and fewer touchdowns. He ended up with -13.6% DVOA, which ranked 77th. Then in 2021, his performance collapsed, with just a 45% catch rate, 339 receiving yards, and -36.2% DVOA, which ranked 92nd among 93 qualifying receivers. But, Slayton rebounded in Year 4, last season, finishing a surprising 16th in receiving DVOA at 13.5%. He’s back to negative this year, but you can blame his quarterback for a lot of that, and he certainly looked good with four catches for 69 yards last night. Nice.

Tight End: John Carlson

Carlson ranked eighth in DVOA as a rookie in 2008. That season ranks sixth all-time in rookie tight end DYAR. The next year, Carlson went from five touchdowns to seven but had fewer yards, a lower catch rate, and a lower DVOA at -5.1%. Then in Year 3, he was awful, with just 318 yards and -34.8% DVOA which ranked 44th among qualifying tight ends. Carlson missed 2011 after a major concussion in the 2010 playoffs. He signed a five-year, $25-million contract with Minnesota in 2012 and played two years there with negative receiving DVOA, then finished up his career with -20.0% reeicing DVOA for Arizona in 2014. He never again came close to the efficiency he showed as a rookie.

There are three other tight ends who don’t quite match up with Jones. They were very good as rookies but collapsed in Year 2, so they were essentially very bad in both Year 2 and Year 3: Martellus Bennett, Mychal Rivera, and Ian Thomas. Bennett, of course, bounced back to have a fine career, and Thomas is still around.

On to the results from Week 6…

Updated with Monday Night Football on Tuesday at 9:50am EDT.