Quality Starts: Quarterbacks

Photo: USA Today Sports

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 2018 season, the first consideration was to take the No. 12 quarterback for the year (Philip Rivers, 343.1 fantasy points) and dividing his total by 16 for a game average, just like we 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. Once the quarterbacks were sorted by weekly averages, two quarterbacks jumped up on the list – and both from the same team. Ryan Fitzpatrick (203.6 fantasy points in eight games) and Jameis Winston (245.7 points in 11 games) combined for over 449 total fantasy points as the combined quarterbacks for the Buccaneers, and that total (449.3) would have ranked “Tampa Bay QB” as the second-highest fantasy quarterback in the league last year (second only to Patrick Mahomes II at an incredible 484.5 points).

The next question is this: Can we believe that a combination of Winston and Fitzpatrick was fantasy gold last year? Not exactly, which is part of the reason we need to look at the starting lineup each week at quarterback. In three different contests last season, Tampa Bay switched quarterbacks mid-game, and that gave both Fitzpatrick and Winston extra points for the year that no one would have had in a fantasy lineup for that week. For example, Fitzpatrick came in for Winston in Week 4 and racked up over 21 fantasy points in that game. Anyone targeting a lineup decision for a quarterback from the Buccaneers would have chosen Winston for Week 8, and they would have been disappointed by the quarterback change. This is why quarterback starts – and “Quality Starts” – are so important. It does not matter if the combination of Winston and Fitzpatrick had a great game, as most fantasy leagues require one quarterback to be chosen each week – and they get zero credit for any production from the backup. Winston only gets credit for the weeks he was the announced starter, as does Fitzpatrick – and every other starting quarterback each week.

The baseline chosen for quality starts in 2018 is 22.3 fantasy points per game, which was derived by looking at the starts for both Jameis Winston and Mitch Trubisky. Both quarterbacks averaged 22.3 in their respective starts (Winston accumulated 217.2 fantasy points across nine starts, Trubisky had 313.3 points in 14 starts), so that will be the quality line for 2018. This is nearly a full fantasy point higher than just taking the QB12 for the year (Philip Rivers, 343.1 points in 16 starts, 21.4 average), which again speaks to looking at the announced starter criteria. 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 based on weekly average) all fall into a similar range between 21.4-23.7 points per start. 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: 2018 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. As mentioned in the Ryan Fitzpatrick / Jameis Winston example, if Fitzpatrick starts in Week 4 but then Winston comes into that game (and this did happen), Fitzpatrick is subject to the study (in Week 4) and Jameis Winton (in Week 4) 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 game day. 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 54 NFL quarterbacks from 2018. That’s a very important number – only 54 starters. That number is reasonably consistent across the past several years. Table 2 summarizes the total number of different starting quarterbacks across the past seasons:

Table 2: Total Different Starting Quarterbacks - 2012-2018

From Table 2 it becomes apparent that the quarterback position sees 51-56 starters a year, with 2012 (only 47) as more of an anomaly. is something to note. To put the 54, 56, 54, 53, 54, 51 and 47 starters in perspective, consider that 16 teams had the same quarterback start every game last year, with one additional team (New Orleans) resting their starter before the playoffs. All of the playoff teams from last year used no more than two quarterbacks all season, and only Philadelphia and Baltimore used their second quarterback more than two games. The Eagles had injuries to Carson Wentz, but Nick Foles once again was more than adequate as one of the best backups in the NFL in 2018. The Ravens were more of a unique situation as Lamar Jackson was active in all 16 contests and only supplanted Joe Flacco due to an injury and then a winning streak that carried the team into the postseason. Exactly half of the teams used only one starter, while 12 more used two. Two teams (Carolina, San Francisco) needed three different signal callers to get through a rough 2018, while two more franchises (Washington, Buffalo) struggled with four different quarterbacks. The instability at quarterback for all four of these franchises kept all of these teams in third place in all of their respective divisions and a combined 24-40 record (average of 6-10). Do keep all of this in mind for 2019, as the last 6-8 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 3 shows us the breakdown of all 512 starts and how many of each type of start resulted for each:

Table 3: 2018 QB Start Types by Player, Sorted by Total Starts

Let's look through all of that info. First, we see that 231 of 512 starts fall in the middle - Quality Starts - and that only about 20% of all quarterback starts (93) 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 the past two years. 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). Seven 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). Six 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 we first started tracking these numbers. The slight downturn in the Excellent Start criteria the last two seasons (92 and 93, respectively) point towards the increase in the fantasy points needed to meet or exceed that Excellent Start rating (26.8+ in 2017, 27.0+ in 2018) – with last year being the highest level on record since this was tracked across the past 12 seasons. All of this points towards validating the general trend – 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 4:

Table 4: 2007-2018 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 5: 2018 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 Patrick Mahomes II (+10) is at the top of the chart, having a nearly perfect season of 10 excellent starts and zero bad starts. Mahomes outpaced the field by a wide margin, but Matt Ryan (+4) and Ben Roethlisberger (+4) were also strong values for the year, especially Roethlisberger with zero bad starts. Curiously, both Tampa Bay quarterbacks had six total excellent starts but also four bad starts, counteracting most of those great games. Bad starts also greatly hurt Andrew Luck, Deshaun Watson, and Drew Brees, with each of them having bad performances 25% of the time. Only Cam Newton (2) and Aaron Rodgers (2) kept the bad starts to a low enough minimum to put them in the strong starter category for 2018.

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 quarterbacks on the 2019 ADP list.