Quality Starts: Quarterbacks - Footballguys

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There are some fantasy football players that believe that the lineup you pick can lose you a game just as much as it can win a contest. Having a player that can give you a consistent performance week after week should be considered more valuable than a player who goes off every third week and then takes two weeks off between those fantastic performances. Consistency has a value, and it does not take much of a leap to understand that players that you can rely on for solid games when you need them (such as in your postseason) are a huge advantage.

Baseball has a term called "Quality Starts" for pitchers, which is a statistic that represents how often a starting pitcher will put up a good (not great, just good) performance in a given game. The bar is set neither high nor low (six innings pitched, three earned runs or fewer) so as to gauge a decent performance. The theory behind it is that if your pitcher gives you a Quality Start, your team has a fighting chance to win a given game.

So now we need to translate this to football. What is quality for each position? How do we define a "Quality Start" for quarterbacks or running backs or any other position? Looking back at the 2017 season, at first, I considered taking the No. 12 quarterback for the year (Jared Goff, Derek Carr, 307.4 fantasy points) and dividing his total by 16 for a game average, just like I have used as a baseline in previous years. This approach was flawed, because it might be overlooking some quarterbacks who had a better per-game performance but missed playing time due to injury. As luck would have it, sorting the quarterbacks by weekly performance average also put Goff at QB12, while also including two elite options (Deshaun Watson and Aaron Rodgers) who missed action due to injuries. Both methods led to Goff, so there was no disputing the decision to use his numbers at QB12 as the baseline for the 2017 season. While some of these decisions (targeting QB12 based on two different ranking methods) may seem a bit arbitrary, many second-tier quarterbacks (QB6 to QB17) all fall into a similar range between 19-22 points per start, and a similar range of quarterbacks (QB7-13) exists when you rank them by total points for the season (between 328.8 and 307.4 points). The best reason of all to use the average of these two methods for 2017 is because of those two elite quarterbacks that missed time due to injuries. If we do not consider the average method, both Rodgers' and Watson's strong numbers are not even considered, so a blended average is definitely the best option. Lastly, overall we are targeting QB12 as a bare minimum of quality, as the 12th quarterback should be the worst starter in your fantasy league.

So now we move on to the next question - one of quantifying the quality. At what point do we decide whether or not a quarterback has given us a quality performance? Here is where it gets a bit murky, but looking at the distribution of quarterback performances by starters over the season and it becomes evident that the using the 12th-quarterback average and adding or subtracting a percentage gives us a good range for a QB Quality Start.

Using the QB Quality Start range, we can also define a bad performance or an excellent performance as either falling below or exceeding the Quality Start range. Table 1 gives us the fantasy points that it takes to fall in each of the three areas:

Table 1: 2017 QB Quality Start and Fantasy Point Ranges

We have one more issue in this study, and that is we need to sift through all the quarterbacks and only look at quarterbacks that started an NFL game. That means if Tom Savage started Week 1 last year and gets benched at halftime (and this did happen), Savage is subject to the study (in Week 1) and Deshaun Watson (in Week 1) is not. That's an important distinction, as several quarterbacks have had great games in relief yet they should not get counted, simply because no one would have started them on their fantasy roster that week with them expected to do nothing but hold a clipboard on gameday. Before we decide on a fantasy lineup, we usually only know the starters for each week, not who might come in if there is an injury.

Pouring over the games week by week, we find 512 starting-quarterback games spread across 56 NFL quarterbacks from 2017. That’s a very important number – only 56 starters. I would dare say that it was a remarkable number because the number in previous years had usually been in the mid-to-upper 50s and sometimes over 60. The total number of starters for 2016 was 54, and in 2015 it was 53, similar to 2014 (54) and 2013 (51) - and even fewer in 2012 with just 47 starting quarterbacks, so this trend is something to note. To put the 56, 54, 53, 54, 51 and 47 starters in perspective, consider that 12 teams had the same quarterback start every game last year, with a few other teams resting their starter before the playoffs (Kansas City, Pittsburgh and the LA Rams). All of the playoff teams from last year used no more than two quarterbacks all season, and none of them had their primary starter miss more than three games. Last season slightly broke the rule of the previous three seasons that not even half of the NFL teams needed to use more than one starting quarterback throughout the entire regular season, but it was very close in 2017. No team needed four quarterbacks to take snaps last year, while only four teams needed three - San Francisco, Arizona, Denver, and Houston. The instability at quarterback for all four of these franchises kept all of these teams in their divisional cellars, with the 49ers and Cardinals sharing the bottom spots in the NFC West. Do keep all of this in mind for 2018, as the last five or six seasons have been unusually healthy years for the quarterback position. This is either a trend in protecting the quarterback more in the NFL or better health by the players overall.

Table 2 shows us the breakdown of all 512 starts and how many of each type of start resulted for each:

Table 2: 2017 QB Start Types By Player Sorted By Total Starts

Let's look through all of that info. First, we see that 219 of 512 starts fall in the middle - Quality Starts - and that only about 20% of all quarterback starts (92) are considered Excellent Starts. Over the years, the results have been mixed, partly due to quarterback healthiness but also due to the change in the NFL towards more productive quarterbacking. The 2016 results were very similar to 2015 (101 vs. 99 Excellent Starts, and 255 vs 246 Quality Starts), but both numbers went down last year. Between 2008 and 2009, the threshold for an Excellent Start score jumped over 10% (20.1 and above in 2008, 22.5 and above in 2009). That resulted in fewer Excellent Starts in 2009 and 2010 and highlighted the importance of elite quarterback play in fantasy leagues. More quarterbacks started to perform well in 2011, upping the number of Excellent Starts significantly (150 in 2011, only 127 in 2010). Six years ago saw another quantum leap in fantasy quarterback production, pushing the Excellent Start threshold up once again by almost two more points per week (24.4 and above in 2012, 22.6 in 2011), which dropped the number of Excellent Starts again (126 in 2012, 150 in 2013). Five seasons ago in 2013, it was an exact match to 2012, but the pass-happy NFL has raised the bar again in 2014 by almost another fantasy point. The bar rose again in 2015 to 26.8 or more fantasy points - another 1.5 point climb, and over 30% higher than 2007 and 2008. The two previous seasons were similar, with a small dip in the Excellent Start line from 2016 to 2015 (26.2+, down slightly from 26.8+) but still significantly higher than when I first started tracking these numbers. The slight downturn in the Excellent Start criteria last season (25.7+ points) still denotes that the NFL is clearly still a pass-happy league, and the elite passers are worth their weight in gold.

A summary of these trends is provided in Table 3:

Table 3: 2007-2017 Excellent and Quality QB Starts

Now, to dig deeper, let's look at the numbers distributed in two different ways. First, let's define a valuable starting quarterback in this system. We want a quarterback that will win more fantasy games than lose them, so we want either "Quality" or "Excellent" starts. Using a simple formula of scoring each type of start, we can define the value of a given starting NFL quarterback. Here is the formula:

STARTING FANTASY QB VALUE = EXCELLENT STARTS - BAD STARTS

We can afford to overlook the "Quality Starts" category because they neither win games nor lose them on average - they are just average quarterback performances. We only really care about how often he helps our team vs. how often he hurts it. Giving a "-1" value to bad starts and "+1" to excellent ones does this for us.

On with the results, sorted by value:

Table 4: 2017 QB Start Types Sorted By Value

This is a lot of information, but some names leap out at us. It should come as no surprise that Russell Wilson (+6) is at the top of the chart, but he is joined by two younger options in Carson Wentz (+4) and Deshaun Watson (+4). Both quarterbacks are coming off of injuries, but it is clear that Watson should be an early target in drafts given zero bad starts in six games as a starter. Alex Smith (+2) is another name to consider, as he is the only other quarterback above +1 in Net Value. If his ADP is low, he will definitely be a strong draft target as either a top end QB2 or a portion of a committee approach at the position.

Lastly, let's sift through all the numbers and get right to the heart of the matter with the final table. Here, the results are sorted by value for the top-24 quarterbacks on the 2018 ADP list.