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 2019 season, the first consideration was to take the No. 12 quarterback for the year (Jared Goff, 320.2 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, the results were rather remarkable: four quarterbacks outside of the Top 12 season-long rankings all had per-game averages that would have resulted in a Top 12 season had they been the starter all year. Two Week 1 starters, Matthew Stafford and Drew Brees, both missed significant time due to injury, but both quarterbacks were fantasy starting material when healthy. Joining Stafford and Brees were two other passers that earned the starting job later in the year - rookie Daniel Jones and veteran Ryan Tannehill. With four new names for consideration, the Quality Start metric moves up significantly for last season from Goff's 20.0 points per game to Matt Ryan's 22.4, more than an 11% increase in value for a fantasy starting quarterback each week. Clearly using the per-game average is a much better metric for quarterback evaluation. After all, each week fantasy team owners have to decide on who to start, so only available passers are ever considered.

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: 2019 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. While both Daniel Jones and Ryan Fitzpatrick had significant performances as starters, they both came into contests last season off of the bench. In weeks where Eli Manning was the starter (such as Week 1), Manning's per-game effort was considered, but not Jones' numbers. This was more considerable for quarterbacks who came in off of the bench and had strong performances, such as Gardner Minshew in Week 1 last year where the rookie came in off of the bench for an injured Nick Foles and threw for 275 yards and two touchdowns. None of Minshew's numbers counted for Week 1, as Foles drew the start - so only Foles would be subject to this study for Week 1, not Minshew. 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 57 NFL quarterbacks from 2019. That’s a very important number – only 57 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 - 2012-2019

From Table 2 it becomes apparent that the quarterback position sees 51-57 starters a year, with 2012 (only 47) as more of an anomaly. is something to note. To put the 57, 54, 56, 54, 53, 54, 51 and 47 starters in perspective, consider that 13 teams had the same quarterback start every game last year, with three additional teams (Baltimore, Houston, and Minnesota) resting their starter the last week before the playoffs. All of the playoff teams from last year used no more than two quarterbacks all season, and only Tennessee and New Orleans used their second quarterback more than two games. The Titans were able to go on a tear in the second half of the season with Ryan Tannehill as the starter, earning the final playoff spot after closing the year on a 7-3 run after a tough 2-4 start with Marcus Mariota as the starter. New Orleans played exceptionally well with Teddy Bridgewater filling in for the injured Drew Brees, as the Saints went 5-0 with their backup filling in more than adequately until Brees was ready to return. Exactly half of the teams used only one starter (13 teams) or gave their starter Week 17 off (three teams). In all, 14 teams only needed two starters in 2019, but six teams required three - Pittsburgh, Washington, Detroit, Carolina, Denver, and the Jets. The Steelers were able to overcome the setbacks to finish with a respectable 8-8 record, while the Broncos and Jets also played reasonably well to both 7-9 on the year. The Panthers (5-11), Lions (3-12-1), and Washington (3-13) struggled all season, which is fairly typical for teams with instability at this critical position. Do keep all of this in mind for 2020, as the last several 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: 2019 QB Start Types by Player, Sorted by Total Starts

Let's look through all of that info. First, we see that 223 of 512 starts fall in the middle - Quality Starts - and that only about 20% of all quarterback starts (98) 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 three 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). Eight 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). Seven 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 in 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 three seasons (92, 93 and 98, 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 and 28.0+ last year) – with last year being the highest level on record since this was tracked across the past 13 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: 2007-2019 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: