Busting The Myth of Option QB Fragility

Nice research. Very well done.

Very informative: posts like this (in the style of Chris Brown at Smart Football) with lots of statistics and research are really interesting, much more so than most of the diary entries.

It's good to finally get that stigma of spread option QB being more likely to get injured debunked.

#3 category. If so, and the numbers held up, Sheridan could see more playing time than anyone but him wants. I like your work here, I hope you're right and Tate is able to avoid the big hit. If so, this could be a better season than anyone is predicting.

Good job!

As far as Tate is concerned I am more interested in the stick figure quarterback injury rate.

I would like to see a follow-up where you take random year samples (every three years?) so as to debunk the "well that's just one year" argument. To me this analysis makes great sense. The guys who get killed are the stationary pocket passers who can't make the small lateral movements to get away (Level 0 guys). The Level 1 guys are the ones who can sit in the pocket and throw, or when the rush is present, scramble and get the five yards before going out of bounds/sliding/etc. The Level 2 guys analysis makes sense to me in that, as you point out, these guys are "fast" guys who may not be the best passers so that when they have to sit back in the pocket, the "pocket presence" isn't there and they get blindsided. Otherwise, Level 2 guys are slower players forced to play a running style (Chris Leak, Steve Threet, etc).

As an aside, if you wanted to do a study of extreme outliers, I would like to see an analysis of this type with Air Force/Navy QB's vs. Wisconsin/Jeff Tedford/David Cutcliff Qb's.

Great work! Elegant and well written.

Also, it dispelled a feeling of disaster I was carrying around in my head that went something like this: I really think Tate is going to do better than people expect. He has a skill set that RR is going to know how to use. All those slants, rolling pockets, dump offs a la Noel Devine are going to mean a whole near gear for our offense. Of course, he will die and be crushed sometime between game two and game five because he's runnning around and will be killed. Please God, please spare him. But I know he won't be spared because he's going to get McGuffied sooner or later. How can he not?"

Such a public service is worth a big up arrow!

great analysis.

Denard is almost certainly going to end up in the 'running' category, by how he is used. Based on the injury frequency of that category, we may end up using Gardner as a freshman, whether we want to or not.

I would also be interested in the results of adding a few years and a few teams, for more data.

And let's apply what you found with what we've seen. It holds up pretty good.

QBs at UM (after Bo) morphed into TE-sized brutes made to withstand the punishment. And fairly mobile recruits (like Henne) were bulked up to where they became immobile. To survive in the pocket, our system essentially required the QB to become immobile, robbing the team of a great weapon.

Those men took a pounding back there. They had to be huge. And still they could get hurt -- look at Henne's senior season.

Brady and Henson were the exceptions. Mallett was on his way to playing at 6'6" and 260.

Thanks for doing this analysis.

I'm wondering what might account for this seemingly counter-intuitive result. It seems reasonable to assume that 1) Most major injuries come through some sort of hard contact, and 2) QBs in your categories 3 and 2 are involved in more plays with hard contact. Given these assumptions, how does one account for the similarity of injury totals across categories?

My hypothesis is that QBs in your categories 3 and 2 are more "natural" runners, and more physically robust, than those in 1 and 0. Thus, if these same QBs were to just hang out in the pocket, they would be injured at a lower than average rate. Conversely, if you take QBs from cats 0 and 1 and put them in a scrambling/running offense, they would be injured at a higher than average rate. => It still might not bode well to have Tate carrying the ball 15 times a game.

Very interesting and a fun read. My theory on the level 2 injury percentage is that those are guys that run just enough to get themselves into trouble. As a qb, I think you need to either buy into running it full bore and just go for it, or take a safe approach and go down / slide / get out of bounds. When you get caught in the middle, that's when you get hurt. Kind of like playing not to get hurt seems to be the most assured way of getting hurt.

and am not totally suprised with the outcomes. In my mind (and experience playing football) moblie QB's actually seemed to get injured less due in large part to their ability to avoid tackles.

Also, when your feet are planted as a QB and you get hammered by a DL from behind your body takes a tremendous blow. If you think of it in terms of a car collision and imagine a car going at a speed of 60 mph hitting a vehicle at a stop sign there is far greater force exherted on that car than if it was moving in the same direction at 40 miles per hour when the car rearends it.

I think many of these #3 QB's will be getting dragged down from behind and hit from the side as they run which should lessen the impact of those hits IME.

The notion that pocket passers are somehow less vulnerable to injury is belied by the fact that every year, in the college ranks and in the NFL, pure, immobile pocket passers sustain serious, season-ending and career-shortening injuries. My bet is that if you took the time and tallied up all the pocket passers in D1A-level college ball who've gotten seriously injured in the last 10 years, the numbers would be substantial. Knees, shoulders, arms, ankles, skulls, brains, they're all at risk.

Rick Leach played for four full years. An option QB, he ran with the ball for a total of 487 carries over that time, and he played in every game during every season. If he missed any time due to injury, it was not serious enough to keep him out of a single game.

Steve Smith and Dennis Franklin would probably be in the Dual Threat category (not sure how effective Franklin was as a passer...), and both sustained game- and/or season-ending injuries running the ball.

Jim Harbaugh would probably fit in the Level 1 Mobile QB category, and he had his arm broken going for a loose football behind the line of scrimmage, IIRC. in 1979, although he had good wheels, John Wangler was a pure pocket passer. In the Gator Bowl, he was sacked (and cheap-shotted) in the backfield by Lawrence Taylor, and his knee was torn up on the play.

Football is a violent collision sport. There is simply no way to absolutely prevent injuries in general from occurring, nor is there a way to predict with any reliability whether a certain player or position is going to be injured or not.

still doesnt make me feel good about tate forcier possibility of going a whole yr uninjured

While injuries can happen in any play, the really worrisome hits on QBs are the blindside hits, esp. while standing in the pocket. These blindside shots occur most often with QBs who don't have a good sense of when pressure is coming from their backside. If you go back and review 1997, Brian Griese had an uncanny knack that year of sensing pressure when it was close to him, and he used his feet plenty to escape and buy more time. I think Henne had comparatively little ability to sense somebody closing in on him, and rarely used his feet to escape from trouble.

It was nice to read a diary that was well-written and had an idea supported with research. Thanks for taking the time to add something that I found valuable and well worth reading.

I remember suggesting that someone should look at the statistical likelihood of a running QB getting injured. I theorized that there would be no difference in injury rates, and a lot, and lots of people disagreed because OMGDennisDixon. BTW, you should email Brian with your results, because he is one of those people that concluded that "of course" running QBs get injured more often than pocket QBs.

So, naturally, I loved this diary (and yes, partly because I'm an "I told you so" dick). Good job, here's a point.

To solidify this conclusion even more, one could go back 3-5 years and see if the data still leads to the same conclusion. I imagine it will, but there will be naysayers who need more data to be convinced.

Your topic was well-chosen and the research makes good sense. Excellent post--thank you.

...but don't the arbitrary break points go a long way toward defining the analysis? If you combined the 0's and 1's you get an injury rate of 22.7% and combining the 2's and 3's you get an injury rate of 32% and your conclusions completely change (and combining the 2's and 3's to get comparable sample sizes probably makes sense here given the arbitrary nature of the cut points).

Considering the sample sizes of the 2's and 3's, I'm not sure you can really draw any conclusions from this. Moving two injuries from the 2 group to the 3 group would cause their injury percents to be very similar. What happens to the data if you make small changes to the cut points (instead of 1/2,1/3,1/5 maybe make them 1/3,1/4,1/5 or something).

The data makes sense to me. What would be cool would be to compare this data to injury rates of running backs, because these mobile Qb's are a combo of Qb and running back so looking at both sides would be a better representation of the spectrum

Thank you for your analysis!

qSilver brought up a great point, though, in that the conclusions would change if Juice Williams et al. were in the same group as Pat White.

Also keep in mind that our pre-supposed running rate of Tate Forcier will likely be in that second group, since throwing accuracy, not elusiveness or footspeed is Forcier's 'weapon of choice.'

I don't want to knock you too much (no paralipsis) because I have a huge admiration for the work you've already put into this, but I'd like to see one more stat:

Tackled-to-injury ratio.

My thinking is that QBs who systemically run more often will, it follows, end up being on the business end of a tackle much more often. If a guy who gets tackled 35 times a game is less likely to miss time with injuries than a guy who gets tackled, say, 5 times a game, then we can rule out tackles as the primary cause of injury.

Therefore, we could surmise that the true enemy of QB health is not 'contact-made' (the basic premise behind the believe that mobile QBs are placed in greater danger) but 'type-of-contact.'

In other words, whether 'tis better to be brought down by a linebacker than sacked by a broken pocket, or leveled while standing in for a throw, or...(you know what's coming).

Our hypothesis should be that Pocket/systematically immobile QBs end up taking the 'wrong' kind of contact more often than scrambling/dual-threat QBs, or that the more time spent in the pocket, the greater the likelihood of injury. That will tell us, truly, if it's better to have linebackers, defensive backs, deathbackers, Schembacklers, or even chasing linemen hauling down your quarterback than leaving him squared to the chest pads of a group of beefy piledrivers (yes, it is coming).

Also, also, type of injury should be taken into account, and may help our case (which, ultimately, is to justify RR's system against claims that having your QB running around is a sure-fire way to lose QBs).

Because if there's any justification for loosing the opponents' defenders against our quarterback in space, as opposed to leaving him in the pocket and avoiding tackles at all costs, is that a player running toward expected contact is more likely to avoid an injury than a guy tasked with standing in until the following happens (it comes)

you thought about this and shit.

Good job.

Rick Leach loves you.

now, something else to think about (perhaps if I'm bored one day I will do my own diary regarding this topic): the myth that spread offenses do not do as well in cold weather.

Thanks for doing that.