Quarterback Stats That Matter for Fantasy Football

We are pushing into August and further downhill towards the 2024 fantasy season.

With most fantasy drafts approaching these final weeks before the season, we have one last series to run this week before laying out the positional draft plans next week.

This week, we will dive into the stats that matter the most for weekly fantasy output and which have the largest rollover year over year.

Quarterback Fantasy Related Articles:

• Quarterback Tiers
• Quarterback Rankings
• Quarterback Trends
• Red Zone Points vs Expectation: Quarterback
• What We Can Learn From ADP: Quarterback

Highest Correlation to Weekly Fantasy Points Scored For Quarterbacks

We are looking at weekly scoring for quarterbacks over the past 10 years in our top-down sample.

When we are talking about the final line for fantasy output for passers, on a weekly level, it comes down to the impact of touchdown production firsthand (spoiler alert, this will be a common theme all week).

Total touchdowns (passing and rushing scores combined) have by far the highest correlation to total fantasy points, which of course makes a ton of inherent sense.

If you have a lot of touchdowns, you are going to score points.

It is as simple as that.

Chasing touchdowns overall is a tricky thing to do, which is why we see so many different quarterbacks post viable starting weeks in fantasy compared to the other positions.

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Over the timeframe of this sample, the top 12 weekly scorers at quarterback averaged 2.4 passing touchdowns per game while the top six weekly scorers averaged 2.9 passing scores.

The top scorer overall in all of the weeks in the sample has averaged 3.6 passing touchdowns per game.

Over this entire 173-week sample, just four of those QB1 overall scorers threw fewer than two touchdown passes while none of them had zero passing touchdowns.

You just are not going to pace the position in scoring unless you throw at least multiple touchdown passes that given week.

While touchdowns themselves are harder to predict, we can use all of this information to our benefit to make more educated decisions on a weekly level when it comes to setting lineups and playing DFS.

We inherently know that yardage has a direct correlation with touchdown output, so using high-yardage potential outcomes based on matchups or projected game scripts can put us in place to more accurately play for touchdown upside.

When we get outside of passing touchdown-related stats, passing yards are the next influential category that carries a correlation of over 60%, and then we have a dip to the next wave.

Those counting stats of touchdowns and yardage (results of a pass attempt) carry so much more of an influence on scoring than the raw volume of pass attempts, completions, or rate stats such as completion percentage and yards per pass attempt.

Passing touchdown rate is the one efficiency-based metric that matters significantly because that is tied to the influence of touchdowns overall.

Overall passing volume does not have nearly as strong of a correlation to output, nor does a high completion rate or yards per pass attempt.

Even though gamers will always want to chase passing volume, it is not about the raw pass attempts a passer has, it is all about what he does with them.

Something that is often lost in the sauce when chasing volume is how efficiency impacts volume from a top-down stance.

If you are worse with the pass attempts (or rushing attempts and targets) you do have, you are going to create more of them within your offense as opposed to reducing the volume when you have successful reps.

Being Swami of Konami, do not be alarmed that rushing stats here are at the bottom.

Although quarterback rushing is at an all-time high, there are still too many non-runners per week in the field for that production to make strong correlations overall.

Even though quarterbacks accounted for their highest leaguewide rushing attempts in the history of the league, that was still just 16.1% of the total attempts.

This is why we still regularly highlight that we are not close to seeing the apex of where quarterback rushing can still go.

We had four quarterbacks run the ball at least 100 times last season with 14 passers running the ball 50 or more times, but that is still fewer than half of the league accruing rushing volume.

But do not be mistaken…those quarterbacks that do run, matter.

Among all the top 12 weekly scorers in 2023, those players averaged 4.6 rushing points per game.

The top six weekly scorers averaged 5.7 rushing points per game, and the top three scorers averaged 6.0 per game.

When taking a look at the 18 players who led the position in weekly scoring last season, just six of them posted fewer than 3.5 rushing points in that game while 11 of those 18 scored 5.7 rushing points or more in the week in which they paced the position.

After looking at the stats that impact weekly games, let’s move on to the stats that are the stickiest year over year and impact the following season scoring the most.

Year-Over-Year Correlation Categories for Quarterbacks

When looking at the stats that are the stickiest for quarterbacks year over year, we do not end up with many reliable stats.

Only two statistics here have a 50% correlation to following season output in those areas.

In a complete inverse of what we just talked about, rushing attempts and yardage per season have so much stability because we have more quarterbacks posting low rushing totals than not.

Those small numbers influence that correlation metrics year over year.

But you can spot that the attempts per game drop in terms of stability.

That holds up as rushing attempts increase.

Quarterbacks with more than 4.0 rushing attempts per game have a year-over-year correlation of .3014.

When we make that 6.0 rushes per game, it drops to .1918.

The same is true for the rate of pass attempts per game, which is one of the softest yearly correlations among the per-game metrics that are not touchdown-related.

I will touch on this in a moment, but volume (or lack thereof) is typically tied to inefficiency (or efficiency in limited volume).

This is the first post in this series this week, but I am going to spoil something right away relating to quarterbacks and the other positions.

That is fantasy scoring per game and the season prior has the lowest amount of rollover for quarterbacks than it does at any of the other positions.

I hypothesize that since quarterbacks are the most reliant on touchdown production to carry overall fantasy output, they are impacted the most by the natural variance of actual touchdown output.

You will find throughout the week that touchdown production per game and season is extremely volatile above.

We have seen this play out regularly.

A quarterback massively out-kicks his expected touchdown rate, stacks a ton of passing scores, and then regresses to the mean the following season.

Since the NFL merger in 1970, there have been 164 seasons in which a quarterback has started at least eight games and posted a touchdown rate of 6.0% or higher

Out of those seasons, just 18 of them (pending Brock Purdy and Dak Prescott this season) matched their touchdown rate in the following season while the other passers had an average decline in touchdown rate of -2.5%.

In 2022, three quarterbacks fit this criteria (Patrick Mahomes, Tua Tagovailoa, and Josh Allen). All three had a decrease in touchdown rate this past season.

That said, good and bad fantasy players are typically good or bad fantasy players in the future.

Fantasy points per season and points per game are still some of the more stable metrics in play.

We have already talked about an efficiency-based metric such as the touchdown rate for a passer being unreliable year over year, but nearly anything efficiency-related carries such a low correlation that you should not overly stock them.

Efficiency-based metrics make up five of the bottom six metrics when it comes to stability.

Even things such as EPA per dropback and EPA per play are wholly unstable.

The one efficiency-based metric here that has a high correlation yearly is completion rating.

I have long been a subscriber that accuracy is not something that is learned at the NFL level and is a red flag for prospects that struggle in that department entering the league.

It is great to see that notion reinforced here, but we are also operating within a tighter perimeter of output, which makes it a stickier stat overall.

What I mean by that is we can see a passer’s touchdown rate fluctuate or even drop down below 2.0%, there are limitations as to how low we can reasonably expect completion rating to plummet or excel.

Of the 32 passers in 2023 to make eight or more starts, 30 of them had a completion rate between 60-70%.

Tying into those thoughts, I added the inaccuracy rate of passers this season, and that has one of the better yearly correlations among the efficiency-based stats, finishing behind the completion rate among those stats.

Another small win here among rate stats is that the sack rate for a quarterback is third among the rate stats instability.

While the overall correlation year over year is light, in comparison to other metrics that is another suggestion that sack rate is tied more to a quarterback than his environment.

Some primary takeaways here are:

• Quarterback statistics are volatile. I will not push back on drafting options such as Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, or Jalen Hurts highly based on their resume of high-end production. But through a top-down lens, quarterbacks have the lowest number of statistics that carry significant rollover year over year. That makes it harder to invest highly into the position in 1QB formats (see Mahomes from last season).
• Per-game statistics are more stable than yearly ones.
• Touchdowns (specifically passing touchdowns) matter the most for the quarterback position on a per-game level for fantasy scoring but have low predictability.
• Relying on touchdowns more for scoring output plays a significant role in the number of passers that provide multiple starting-caliber weeks throughout a season compared to the other positions.
• Do not overweigh efficiency spikes in rate stats. Rate stats are more descriptive than predictive.
• Inaccuracy rate and sack rate are tied to the quarterback more than most efficiency-based metrics.