FanPost

Good Defense or Bad Back(Ups)

Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

With the Seahawks recent resurgence and the many inaccurate throws thrown by opposing quarterbacks, I have trouble deciphering how much to equate to defensive excellence and how much was simply due to back-up quarterback play.

This deciphering is a messy business that forces one to look into all the parts of quarterback debates. What numbers should I look at when deciding the impact of a back-up quarterback, I could look at the opponents, or maybe some advanced quarterback metric would do the trick. I like the simple approach so I took a more holistic approach looking at how efficient the offense was. I could have used DVOA but instead decided to simply look at the drive statistics of teams with back-up quarterbacks vs starting quarterbacks.

Drive stats can go all sorts of different directions, but I'll focus on some from PFR: yards, scores, and turnovers. Yards are bad and all but I want to see how the team is able to move the ball and protect a tiny bit against the fact that some of the scoring drives could be merely due to short fields. Scoring is the most important thing, without scoring the yards and turnovers become pointless. Turnovers are basically the anti-score, and I'm including interceptions as well as fumbles because I expect a team with a "worse" quarterback to find ways to get the ball into their play-makers hands whether through short passing or running (i.e. manage interception risk while increasing fumble risk).

Arizona

There was some talk by opposing fans about how much different the game on Sunday would have been if Palmer was in instead of Lindley, but first let's see how Arizona quarterbacks have done in games against everyone but Seattle:

Drives Not Against Seattle Drives Turnovers Touchdowns Field Goals Points/drive TOs/drive Yards Yards/drive
Palmer 66 6 15 8 2.0 0.09 2081 31.5
Stanton 70 5 10 16 1.7 0.07 2192 31.3
Lindley 5 1 0 1 0.6 0.20 101 20.2

The Cardinals coaching staff trusts Palmer to make more throws and take more risks so he was able to convert more scoring drives into touchdowns rather than field goals, but he also turned the ball over slightly more than Stanton. Stanton and Palmer seem to be pretty similar with: a 10 drive game would see a Palmer led offense score 3 more points than Stanton, basically one field goal turned into a touchdown per game for a team averaging and one or two field goals lost to turnover. All this is to basically to say that there is some drop off between Stanton and Palmer, but not enough for Arizona fans to compare losing Palmer to SF losing Kaepernick or Seattle losing Wilson.

Lindley is a whole other story. He hasn't had that many chances, and his only chances have come against good defenses, Rams and Seahawks, so his numbers are a little misleading but he is probably playing at the level that you would expect a third string quarterback to play.

Eagles

The Eagles situation is quite different than Arizona. Foles had a strong 2013 season, but regressed to the mean to such an extreme level that he led a worse offense than the Sanchez. Fans like to needle Sanchez for some of his performances with the Jets, but the Foles led offense played on a level similar to the Stanton led Cardinals. As such I decided to leave the Seattle game in to show how much better the Sanchez led offense has done:

Drives Turnovers Touchdowns Field Goals Points/drive Turnovers/Drive Yards Yards/drive
Foles 92 18 18 14 1.8 0.20 2938 31.9
Sanchez 94 16 24 16 2.3 0.17 2865 30.5

The Eagles average 12.4 drives per game which means that the offense should score about 6 more points with Sanchez as the QB than Foles. Also, about once every four games, the Foles led offense would expect to have an extra turnover more than the Sanchez led offense. The Eagles have a worse record with Sanchez, but outside of yards, the Sanchez led offense has performed better.

San Francisco

So Kaepernick isn't a back-up quarterback, but the Niners are playing as if they are playing with a back-up QB from the 2013 version of the offense. Some will blame it on line play, others blame a shift in offensive philosophy, but their offense suffered as a result of something:

Drives Turnovers Touchdowns Field Goals Points/drive TOs/drive Yards Yards/drive
2013 Kaep 183 18 39 32 2.0 0.10 5099 27.9
2014 Kaep 160 21 28 23 1.7 0.13 4815 30.1

Turnovers are up, yards/drive are up, and their season is up in flames. Somehow, the heat burnt their scoring numbers to a crispy 1.7 points per drive. It would appear as if the SF offense was being led by a Stanton level QB instead of an adequate Palmer level quarterback. A deeper look at the numbers show that a similar number of scores are ending in touchdowns, roughly 55 percent, but they've seen a drop in the number of drives that are being converted into any type of points at all. This is a little misleading because of some short fields in games like the one against Dallas, but the team shows off their mediocre 2014 scoring numbers.

Against Seattle vs League Worst

It's not enough to see how quarterbacks performed against their starter quality brethren, let's see how dominant the Seahawks were against the quarterbacks they've faced these last 5 games:

Against Seattle Drives Turnovers Touchdowns Field Goals Points/drive TOs/drive Yards Yards/drive
Stanton 10 1 0 1 0.3 0.10 228 22.8
Lindley 13 1 0 2 0.5 0.08 267 20.5
Kaepernick 18 2 1 1 0.6 0.11 422 23.4
Sanchez 13 2 2 0 1.1 0.15 136 10.5
Total 54 6 3 4 0.6 0.11 1053 19.5

It's quite a drop with only a Lindley led offense not suffering a roughly 1 point/drive drop in scoring. The Seahawks haven't been creating that many turnovers, but when opposing teams only get 20 yards/drive, there isn't much time to get turnovers. Sanchez benefited from a basically free touchdown, due to short field, and Lindley benefited from some shorter fields but overall, 0.6 points per drive is insane. For some more perspective, I looked at numbers from offenses that performed the "worst" in their last 5 games:

Worst in last 5 weeks Drives Turnovers Touchdowns Field Goals Points/drive TOs/drive Yards Yards/drive
Bucs 61 12 6 7 1.0 0.20 1178 19.3
Titans 59 10 6 6 1.0 0.17 1516 25.7
Browns 60 11 5 8 1.0 0.18 1371 22.9
Cardinals 55 5 2 11 0.9 0.09 1463 26.6
Average 59 10 5 8 1.0 0.16 1382 23.5

You'll notice that Arizona is in this group because they had the unpleasant task of playing against the Rams in St. Louis and Seattle twice. Their touchdowns became field goals and they dropped from average or below average to terrible. The rest of the Seahawk opponents haven't fared much better though, going from respectable offenses to a level at or far below the worst. All together, the 0.6 points/drive of opponents in the last 5 games is a Ryan fumble away from being half as good as the worst offenses in the NFL.

All of this is to say, back-ups or not, the Seahawks defense has been dominating these last 5 weeks and most of the drop-off is created by the Seahawks. And with that all said, Go Stat Hawks.